Cleaning Tack and Packing

I quit after one round of the walk to load the car with the Berean meal. Diane and Joan were put to work helping with that task. I needed to leave early as I still needed to buy the  800 zip lock gallon size bags for the cotton candy and 500 more popcorn bags to take to the Horse Fair.  We had an amazing day at the Berean office. Not just 1 or 2 amazing things happened but I'm not going to share it here, if you would like to read about our amazing day there click HERE.
Once home from there the skirt came off and the warm sweat pants came on and it was time to head outside into the cold.  We had a couple coming today from Oregon to check out Gideon so he needed to be brought inside and groomed up except the gate was frozen shut again.  It took about 10 minutes of using hot water to get the gate to open. Gideon had some dried clumps of mud on his hind leg and since we now have hot water available I thought that would be an easy clean up. WRONG!  Gideon was taken to the indoor arena and tied while I tried to shut the big doors but they were frozen to the ground. That took about a half hour of work and I was only able to get them half closed. Then came the hose problem. The first hose I tried was too short. We had 2 hoses in our bathtub down at the house so those were brought up and hooked up to the short hose but both of them leaked. I ended up flooding the front of the stall barn while trying to get the hoses to work. I finally gave up and just put Gideon in a stall. Karin arrived about then so we tried to use rags with buckets of hot water but that didn't work out well either. We finally just decided to show him as is and went to work cleaning tack.
When Emily and her husband Clint arrived we had finished 4 saddles and just had 2 more to go. Gideon had been  put in a stall to wait.

 Gideon was led into the indoor arena and Emily worked with him a bit. 

 She then let him go so she could see his movement.

She worked with him with the tarp then let him go to see what he would do. He was curious and had to check everything out. Gideon really is a good boy. While they were working with Gideon Karin got the rest of the tack cleaned then she and I finished packing the trailers. Below is the front and the back of Gideon's registration papers as I forgot to bring them up to the barn:

 Emily and Clint stayed until after 4:30. I had been outside since 1:00 pm and was pretty frozen. Mark had just gotten home from work and he was willing to eat Berean leftovers for dinner tonight while I huddled over the electric heater trying to warm up frozen fingers and toes. As soon as Karin gets off work tomorrow we will head down to Springfield to start decorating the stalls. The big truck is packed with a ladder, step stool, tools and all the material.  The hay guy is going to meet us tomorrow with 18 bales of straw and 20 bales of hay. We wont leave the fairgrounds until the stalls are set up ready for the horses and hopefully the stalls all decorated.