Just got a call from my good friend Georgette. Georgette and I have taken a couple of trips together and are still friends, actually we had a lot of fun.......!!! LOL But we don't keep in touch very good and it's been months since we've talked. I guess she read the blog about the parade, which pushed her into calling, because she wants to participate.
I asked her if she was bringing her own donkey. She has one of ours named Sugar and Jacque (not sure how it's spelled) Anyway her trailer isn't ready to go on a trip, so we started figuring out which one of ours would be good. Since she is responsible for us having Quilla and he is pretty mellow, he got the nod. A friend of hers had Quilla as a horse companion and the horse died. He had not had any care for 9 years and was horribly overweight. So Georgette intervened to have us take him.
This is what his legs looked like when he came in from fly and sun damage. The hair follicles have been so damaged they no longer produce hair, so his legs have bare places, that have to be wrapped most of the year. It's a battle every year to keep his legs from looking like this again.
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| This is Leddy going out for a practice and Quilla watching intently |
But we plan on wrapping legs with green polo wraps, so he'll look just fine. He's our "Marshmallow Man", very mellow, very expressive eyes, and uses his ears to communicate. Of course we haven't discussed this change in plans with him, but I'm sure he'll do just fine. Georgette plans on coming out maybe next week, to get involved and make sure Quilla is on board for adventure.
Had some good friends Willie and Frances from Alaska out today to visit. They usually visit every winter, when they escape Alaska winter to the "lower 48". They said the day after they left Fairbanks the middle of January the temperature dropped to -45..............that's 45 below to those that have never experienced temperatures that low. John was stationed at Eielson, AFB, in the Fairbanks area for 4 years and the winters do take some getting use to. At the time we didn't think anything about it, you dress appropriately and hope your car doesn't quit on the side of the road. We went out sledding down to about -20, but usually stayed indoors if it was colder than that.
The military can really be cruel sometimes. In January every year they would bring guys to Eielson for cold weather training from Puerto Rico........no kidding.....!!! We could always spot those guys around the base, they issued them cold weather gear, and they'd have all of it on, they looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy. One year one of them got sucked up into one of the hugh snow blower trucks. The opening in the front was about 6 feet high and had a grinding shaft going around to pick up the snow and blow it to the side of the road. The guy was overdressed walking in the road and probably never even heard the truck........!!!!
They use to load up bananas by the plane load and would drive a truck thru base housing handing out bananas to whoever wanted them. That was quite a treat, because at that time, buying a banana in the store in January didn't happen and if it did, they were very expensive. The base would load the planes when they went back with salmon and king crab legs if they had them.... We really enjoyed Alaska, it was before the pipeline went thru in the 70's and it was still pretty wild and woolly. We took my parents up there in 1990 and it had changed so much, most of the roads and places we knew, no longer existed and they had 4 lane highways.........Quite a change...!!
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