09-09-08

Today was a nice day, the weather was a bit cooler and lots got accomplished.

The auction rescue is currently at $1737, with a pending pledge of $1500. Assuming the pledge arrives this Thursday, we have made it! Any additional funds donated will be used for the care (vet, farrier, feed, etc) of the rescued horses. Thank you so much everyone who has made this months auction rescue a reality. We, and the horses that will be rescued this Sunday, are eternally grateful to your kindness. The total funds donated and pledged so far towards this auction rescue are an amazing $5737.

Nook's potential adopter came out to meet him for the first time today. She fell in love with him, and as soon as her application is processed she will be adopting him. He will stay here until he is weaned, but she will be visiting him and getting him halter trained.

After Nook's new mommy left, it was off to the rip roaring huge metropolitan of Oroville. Interestingly enough, Oroville is the home of the last 'wild' Native American a few years ago. Maybe it's not a huge town after all.

We have been contemplating our water situation for the long term, and what can be done if there is a drought again next year. In case of a wild fire, we also need a good on-site fire fighting source of water, unfortunately moving 80 horses out the path of a fast moving fire is not always an option.

Our tentative goal, unless someone can suggest a better alternative, is to acquire over 100,000 gallons worth of water storage, fill it up with rain water (we have a seasonal creak that flows fast and furious during rain storms, but then dries up) and have good horse water for all summer, and depending on total storage, some irrigation. This is a huge project that requires major planning. The first hurdle was a pump, upon investigation a transfer pump that can move over 11,000 gallons an hour is only $500. The next big feat is finding water storage tanks. 15,000 tanks are unfortunately about $14,000 new. Not really feasible since to get our 100,000 gallons of storage would take $93,000. That's seems like an incredible amount of money to us.

So, our goal is to find a source of unwanted, donatable tanks. Our local olive orchard recently retired some of their tanks, and working towards the big goal, Jason visited them for thoughts and ideas. They do have old almost-unwanted tanks, but the manager of the Oroville facility informed us that corporate headquarters back east would probably want some payment for them vs just donating them. So, we are going to see what we can do. They are 8,000 gallon tanks, so 13 of them would work out very nicely.

We got a call today from a local second hand store that someone had donated some horse items to them. They didn't have a clue on how to price it, or what to do with it, or if they would even sell, so they donated it to us. A nice box full of mostly blankets, with some rope halters and leads thrown in. Thank you "the Attic" we really appreciate it!

Then it was off to get the trailer welded. The latch on the back has been used so much it was ready for repair. Don't worry, there was no danger of the door flying open while driving down the road. A few minutes, a few dollars, and it was done.

We had a visitor walk here today. Ann Marie got dropped off at the top of the hill, she trudged on down and went to work on Sierra. Sierra is doing really good and even gave a friendly nicker to Tawnee when Tawnee was heading down to the barn this morning. She is starting to realize that some people are nice after all.

We have completely updated our Mya page. At the Animal Planet filming of Mya one of NER's staff was asked to take pictures. Well, that staff is no longer partnering with us in horse rescue, and she recently demanded that we remove the photo's she took from our website. They have been up there for almost a year, so her timing is odd, but it's hard to figure people out sometimes. While we didn't have to, we try to be peace makers with all but the KB's and people that hurt animals and other people, and so we removed the photo's she used her finger to push the button for and updated Mya's page. It's actually a better, more educational and fun page now, including video! Take a visit, click here.

We have an amazing program that very well could help horses in need out a lot without costing you a penny. This program is called the SHARES program and is hosted by Food Maxx, Lucky's, Save Mart and Smart Foods. If you do your grocery shopping at any of these places and would like to donate 3% of what you spend on food towards helping horses, let us know and we will send you a card as soon as we get them. They'll be sending us 250 cards, and if everyone spends only $50 a week on food, that will be $1,500 a month! It doesn't cost you a penny, and your food budget can help feed the horses.

Speaking about free ways to help and if everyone does a little, what a difference it will make. Goodsearch toolbar is handy, quick, painless and easy. So far we have raised $7.36, but if you use Goodsearch (and Goodshop) too, it won't cost you anything, and it'll help out. We wanted to put this in the blog because of the easy to use toolbar, which includes a pop-up blocker. Click here! This is all powered by Yahoo, so you know you can trust it. Thank you everyone for making Sunday's auction rescue a soon to be reality! We will sleep better at night knowing that we will have the financial backing to be able to rescue all the horses our facility can handle this month. Hopefully, the KB's head home with empty trailers and empty wallets due because they have to drive around looking for horses instead of just swooping in and taking a bunch.