Good Morning

Sleep gently roused by soft pre-dawn light seeping around the window shades
Tap-cat rubbing his face on my hand hanging over the side of the bed
My husband caressing the other side of me, warmly snugged under the covers
The alarm, my telephone, plays reveille and we giggle as I turn it off
Pedro-dog gets up, knowing that he can go out soon, comes and rests his chin on the bed
Looking hopefully into my eyes as I pat his head
The sun has not yet gained the horizon, but it will soon.
Outside my window, some deer down by the pond,
my eye drawn there by the intent look of the horses in the pasture
standing at attention, their focus on the deer
At least it's not coyotes this morning

A bad thing that could have been a lot worse, and a bad thing that is just bad.

The just bad thing - something that I don't know how to fix is broken in out hot water system.

The other thing was scary, but did not result in any injury. Skip decided that the hill we were going up was so steep that he should stop. The moment he chose to stop was at the point that he had stepped over a 2" diameter branch with one foreleg. When he tried to bring that leg back, it caught on the branch. So he hopped about sideways on this steep hill on three legs until he got free of it, but by then he was sliding down the hill. So he turned to get facing down, took a few baby bucks into the trees and finally allowed me to stop him. By which time my left food had come out of the stirrup, and my saddle had slid far enough back to be tight against the breastplate. It kind of reminded me of the beginning of the book "the horse whisperer", only minus the ice and the semi. (FWIIW, I really did not like that book at all) I am not too surprised that he was easily calmed after, or that I stayed on. But that there was no injury to Skips legs. The moral here is that when presented with Very Steep hills, Kick On, don't be a whimp about it.