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Well Hello there! I just got on and am fixing to go back and catch up so I don't know what's going on with everybody, but I thought I'd let you all know that I made it back from the clinic in one piece. It was really great. I met lots of interesting people and horses and I learned a LOT. The snow I was afraid of on Friday night didn't come until Saturday night and it had dried up off the roads by Sunday morning when I had to pull the trailer. We really dodged a bullet there. It was still too warm while the bulk of the front was coming through so it all fell as rain. It didn't hurt my feelings one bit.

The lecture part was good. I had seen most of it before since I had already bought the DVDs but it was better in person. Since the weather was bad, I found what I thought was a nice low-priced motel on the Internet and intended to get there early enough to check it out. But even though I took a half day off, I ended up running late because in addition to packing, I had to get hay out for the horses and decided at the last minute to have Tennessee's feet x-rayed in case they needed to see them. I'll be late to my own funeral I guess. Well, it was late and raining cats and dogs after the lecture so I just had to go with it. Luckily for me my sister-in-law's brother and his girlfriend had signed up for the clinic too, although I didn't know it until I got there, because the motel turned out to be a dump and not some place I'd feel real comfortable about staying by myself. But it was cheap and at least the bed was clean so it turned out ok, but I sure was glad to have somebody there going to and from the rooms.

The hands-on part of the clinic was really good too. You could do as much or as little as you wanted. They had a good set up in that they had a video camera and projection screen so that if you couldn't get close enough to see the actual foot being worked on, you could see it on the projection screen. The mix of students was really good too. There were at least 3 or 4 vets there, so hearing their opinions was really interesting, plus they were reading and discussing everybody's x-rays, in addition to shooting a few new ones. Also, there were at least a dozen professional farriers there and hearing their comments about difficult hoof care cases they'd been involved with was really informative too. I picked up a really good tip on the best way to get rid of a really stubborn case of thrush that I've had in Tennessee's frogs. They all said to use mastitis medicine. It's an antibiotic solution that is normally used to infuse directly into cow's teats, but they said to apply it directly in the bad areas of the frog. One farrier also said he'd had good results with topical application of procaine penicillin for the same purpose. Cool stuff! I went and bought some of the mastitis medicine at lunch today.

At the beginning of each day, there was a short lecture/slide presentation that illustrated the main points that were to be demonstrated later on, then we broke up into groups according to interest. Of course the professional farriers did all the work on the difficult lameness cases like navicular, founder and such, but there were plenty of normal-hoofed horses for the average owner-type people like me to work on. The main man, the Master Farrier stuck with the difficult stuff but he did the initial evaluations of all the horses and was very good about answering any question that anybody had, no matter how trivial. There were two other guys with him who stayed with the other groups and supervised, so us newbies didn't mess any horses up. Believe me, they were nice to have around to answer questions and give pointers on stuff like the best ways to handle the tools, how best to stand and how to set up your landmarks on the sole of the hoof so you knew how much to take off. Nobody wanted to mess up somebody else's horse! A different person did each hoof, that way everybody got some experience.

I took Tennessee and Ellie on Sunday and I was very proud of them. Tennessee was so relaxed and cooperative, even though there were lots of people and horses in a fairly confined space. We were working in the isles of a fairly large dressage/hunter-jumper oriented boarding barn so we added probably 30 people and 5 or 6 horses per day to the normal comings and goings of all the regular horses and people. But Ellie was the little star because she behaved better than a lot of the older horses. She led through all that hubbub like a seasoned horse and stood quite nicely when we were working on her feet. She fidgeted a little when were working on her front feet and called for Tennessee a time or two (he was tied back at the trailer) but stood quietly while we worked on her back feet. What more could you ask of a 10 month old filly? She really seemed to enjoy all the attention she was getting (because she's just so darned cute and no I'm not prejudiced at all) and racked up quite a few treats from some of the regular boarders. There were horses coming and going and wheelbarrows full of stuff going by and she just seemed to take it all in like it was normal. I think it was a very good experience for her and me too.