Playing horse roulette

What started as a day of maybe a little rest, some cleaning out of the tack shed and some light horse training - not running around a field trying to catch the first horse we could and encountering a late-night rescue mission at the mini farm in the guest house we stay in. But there you go.

The gypsy workers, now reduced to two after a few got the boot for laziness, asked us to help with some things so before we knew it we were in the back of the horse cart taking the superfluous horses back to the others in the paddock. As always, everything is more complicated and confusing because the gypsies are involved, and our still amateur attempts at Romanian dialect don't make the situation any better.

Saw a horse with an extremely inflamed hoof with the herd so decided to take that back to the house the next day. I was already fed up with catching horses, having just gotten the two that we could hold after having no idea which ones H wanted us to train up. "Three little grey ones" he says. There were at least a dozen grey/white horses and another dozen actual grey ones. We figured we couldn't get much more wrong in terms of psycho-ness - the ones we were trying to find were probably the most untrained of the lot, bar the colts etc.

So we got a pretty dapple grey and another white/grey mare, and that was it. Fuck it. If we got the wrong ones, it was H's fault for not giving us proper instruction. "I'll give you the brands of the horses you need to catch" he says. After what seemed like an eternity of excavation to my lower reproductive organs in the back of the horse cart (I'm never having children), we finally made it home.

We were a little itchy for some riding, so we slowly washed and brushed the two newbies (one we'd named Palinka, the name of a hideous spirit otherwise known as Rakiyo), they seemed fine so we gave some attention to the untrained young'un we've nicknamed Coffee cos we also don't know its name, threw saddles on all of them (Coffee for the first time) and went for a quick ride around the village. Well, E and I rode and L led Coffee. One step at a time. Palinka was good to ride, a little jumpy and unsure of herself but that's the kind of steed I like, bit of a challenge.

Another successful dinner served and we were off to the guest house. We went to feed the dogs as the gypsies often forget the little'uns across the road, came to Peggy's part of town and she was nowhere to be seen. Unusual for a dog to be absent at dinner time, so after calling her a while we heard some scratching and followed the sound to a head poking out from a pile of timber. No barks, no whimpers - what a trooper. So, under the light of E's camera and with apt help from L, we managed to remove her collar and she freed herself. Poor thing, when we gave her water she didn't stop drinking for 10 minutes. Must've been trapped there a while.