Progression to normal

Sorry for the lapse in updates, I have been a little down and have been really busy.  I had convinced myself I was doing serious damage to my knee again by walking, that I was grinding my bones again and would need surgery to fix it.  When I went to the doc yesterday he told me to stop stressing about it.  Whatever is happening is fine, even if I am grinding some bone-on-bone it wouldn't be unexpected because I have so little cartilage.  It won't be an issue, however, because the issues I was having with it before surgery was a result of the accident and typical walking won't cause an issue.  He also told me I am pushing myself too hard which is causing the knee pain I am having, basically am giving myself tendonitis and I should take it easy.  The input was helpful as it has made me relax a bit though I am now only going to push myself harder since I know I am not actually hurting myself (well, more anyway lol).

I have been successful in riding though!  I am riding every 2 to 3 days and am getting a good amount of muscle back.  The first several rides I couldn't trot as I had no right leg to hold on with.  Finally this past weekend I did some trotting and as long as I ride without stirrups I am doing just fine.  Trotting with stirrups is uncomfortable/painful and I don't have the strength to trot for more than a minute or two at a time but it is progress!  And when I went on a trail ride, well on the 3 mile loop of road, I even cantered.  Wahoo!  That progress has really lifted my spirits.

In other news the winter sacrifice pasture is going to be awesome.  How awesome?  More than double the area it was last year!  And I am making it with Electrobraid instead of piecing it together with fencing we already have.  We have cleared out a huge group of trees, 5 trunks out of a single tree stump, that was mostly dead and made a huge swath of land unusable.  In doing so, it has opened the land tremendously which is now allowing us to double the space we had planned for the winter pasture expansion.  Want a pic?  Not doable right now but here is a layout with my crappy drawing.

Not the best, and certainly not to scale but that is what you get from 10 minutes of effort lol.  The squares in yellow are the buildings, appropriately labeled.  The green is my pastures, however I should have made them brown because the amount of grass in them is virtually nonexistent thanks to the drought.  The original pasture started about 6 feet away from the arena and went straight back from the shop.  We then added the Electrobraid in May of last year and then last summer we added the pasture that extended around the shop to the back of the arena.  The old sacrifice area last year was small due to lack of fencing and cleared area, it really was just two little fence lines connecting my barn and arena and then barn to Electrobraid pasture.  With more resources it shall be much bigger!

Now why does the new sacrifice area look so oddly shaped you ask?  Because I didn't draw the bazillon trees/shrubs/brush that I have to cut through to make it even this big.  What I will be enclosing is at least just shrubs and brush that can be walked through and is pretty clean of trash left behind in the 1950's-1980's.  The eventual goal is to surround the arena with pasture but there is a lot of clearing that needs done between now and then.  The goal is to finish the sacrifice pasture this weekend and be able to not give them breakfast hay for at least a week, maybe two.  Maybe I will even break out my camera to celebrate!