I went to the super market yesterday.  It is my most unfavorite job.  It seems to me to be the biggest waste of time.  You put the stuff in the cart, take it out and put it on the counter, put it back in the cart, take it out and put it in your car/truck, get home take it back out of the truck and carry it into the kitchen, take it out of the bags and put it away.  Only to do it again in a week or two if you are lucky.  It’s like when you just wash the floor and your husband walks in with grass, mud, whatever.  You just want it to stay clean for a little while.  Well if he goes to reach for something to eat I want to yell “Don’t touch that!!!”  I don’t want to shop for a while.

So yesterday when I was at the Deli counter I was watching the man slicing the Swiss Cheese I had asked for.  I told him (to save time) he didn’t have to put paper between the slices.  Well he would cut four or five slices and perfectly stack them, then go back and do that again.  Hello!  I need 1 lb. of cheese and I’m already on Social Security I don’t have that much time left.  Well he just kept slicing and stacking.  Each time he put another stack on the scale he would line them all up perfectly.  Another, older woman than me, came along and watched him restacking the cheese.  She looked at me and I rolled my eyes, she just shook her head.  We both watched him repeat this process for the entire pound of cheese.  Alternating rolling our eyes and shaking our heads.  He obviously was very attentive to his job.

So last night, while I was being attentive to the job of cleaning the stalls, I thought about patterns that I do.  What stall I start with, how I clean each stall, how each horses uses their stalls and pastures differently.

Did you ever notice that, or am I just crazy.  Okay, don’t answer that.  I have this one horse who will walk his stall in a counter clock wise pattern, while another one will only walk his stall clock wise.  Then there are others that will do a sweeping pattern back and forth with their heads to the isle way.

Some of them have a certain way of eating their grain in a bucket.  They will eat on one side and slide more grain over to that side, but not just dive into the other side.  But don’t mess with their bucket.  If you shake it and bring all the grain to the middle, you get that look like “why did you do that?  I just had it the way I wanted it.”  Then there is how they eat their hay.  How they separate it, and eat in their own special way.  Then I have one horse that will take his hay and put it in his grain bucket to eat it.

When I walk two horses into the barn together they have their preferred sides.  I remember this with the team horses when I was a teenager.  How ever they were put in the shafts is how they had to be stalled and led.  When leading Zoey and Friday, Zoey always wants to be on Fridays left.  No matter where they are in the pasture when they get to the gate Zoey will always come along Fridays left side.  Copper and Lou, the same thing.  Copper wants to be on Lou’s right side.  I thought this might have something to do with Copper’s aging eye sight, but Zoey doesn’t have old eyes.  Thinking back, when Magic lost her left eye I thought that she would like a horse on her blind side to protect the side she couldn’t see.  Actually she wanted the other horse on her sighted side.  I guess she wanted to know what that horse was up to.

Okay so you know that God sends me the crazies, but really, did you ever really look at the patterns your horses do?  Or, for that matter, patterns you do?  I just think way too much when I clean stalls.