Skip to main content

The Pony

My friend Melissa was perusing our Flickr photos (you know she's a good friend if she peruses your photos without prompting) and came across this photo.


2007-06-03 Rachel Riding Horse 012


She sent me this question.

Why did you have a horse in your back yard??!!!??? Are you that far out in the country that he stumbled upon your property? LOL!

So I thought I'd let the world know. Here was my response.

Turns out, a few weeks after moving into our house there was a pony in our back yard. It was kind of weird, so we posted signs for a missing pony. No one called and we eventually decided that it must have been something they gave to all the new homeowners in the community (we were one of the first houses completed on our street).

After a few months went by, the pony was great. He was eating the weeds in the back yard and Erin and I got to enjoy periodic pony rides.

At this point it was obvious none of our other neighbors were getting ponies of their own. We first thought "suckers"! We then decided that we couldn't give our beautiful white pony up, and named her Tinkerbell. She was just too dear to our hearts.

We decided that the winters were a bit harsh here in VA, and after the first winter of dragging the pony up and down the steps to keep her warm in the basement she needed another home. So we put up the shed in our back yard.

She's become so much a part of our family we barely mention her, like we don't talk about our poodle Rika much. Rachel loves to take a ride every now and again.

Well, it's either that or that our awesome next door neighbors had a traveling petting zoo come to their place for their kids' birthday party, and with the group were ponies. So they invited us over and Rachel loved the rides.

Take your pick, I prefer the first, slightly embellished, version.

Peace,

+Tom

Comments

Anonymous said…
I saw those pictures too, and just assumed you went to a petting zoo at someone's house.

Are you HOA fees more since you have a traveling pony? :)
Tom said…
Man, maybe the pony is why my HOA fees are $300 a month.
Anonymous said…
Must be a s l o w blogging week, LOL!!!!

-Missa (one who perues your photos)

Popular posts from this blog

Using an Array of Objects in C++

 I've been programming for years (over 35 at this point, which is crazy  to think about). My career right now is much more Software Architecture, and much less Software Developer, but I still get some time to write out GraphQL APIs in TypeScript, Vue 3 UIs, GitLab pipelines, and just generally making "big" decisions and helping make them a reality. It's nice every now and then to come across different articles and ideas that get me to remember life in college when I was using C++. Who would have thought C++ was the "hot new thing" right now (though I suppose it's more like Rust and Go, both great languages as well). One of the things I find frustrating with most technical posts is where they focus on the "how do I build an app" and not so much on "how do I do this one slightly useful thing". I figured I'd throw one together what was front of mind, using user attributes for permissions (i.e., Attribute Based Access Control - ABAC) ...

Red-Gate SQL Compare

Every now and then I come across a program that becomes so ingrained in my daily work that I hardly know how I'd get by without it.  I'll probably break down a couple over the next few days, but for database work, I have never found anything as good as Red Gate's SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare .  Essentially these tools let you compare two SQL Server databases (all objects, users, permissions, functions, diagrams, anything) and update changes to whichever database you want.  This is amazingly useful for deploying database changes to a test or production environment (do it to production with ridiculous care, even though it will generate a SQL Script for you and run all updates in one transaction), and making sure everything is synchronized. For releases we can just generate the compare script, confirm that the changes match the updates we want to go out, and store it all in one place with the release details.  This is true for both the structure and the d...

Kids Activities

I find myself often in a situation where it's some morning, I have the kids for the afternoon, and I'm not sure what to do with them. We could go to a movie, or play Legos, but living near Washington, DC, I want the kids to love the museums as much as I do, or to see what else is going on. This Sunday, while my wife was travelling, I took the kids to the Chocolate Festival in Old Town Fairfax. I didn't even know there wad an Old Town Fairfax, much less a chocolate festival. It was okay overall, but the best was seeing any type of chocolate you could imagine, and letting the kids pick something for themselves and their teacher. For finding cheap or free stuff going on nearby with the kids, I have to say About.com has consistently been the best. I tried si.edu (the Smithsonian Website) which is also good, but a little hard to navigate, partly because they have so much going on. At About I did a search of what to do with my kids this weekend, and a bunch of items came ...