Riding with friends - what fun!

Tamela on E-Z and me on wild-child Xena.

Pastor Melvin taking his 2 1/2 y.o. niece Elaina (from Chicago) for a little ride on E-Z.

Well folks, I am happy to announce that God has answered my prayers and sent us some wonderful new friends - all the way from Idaho! They are the Assoc. Pastors at our church in Richmond that is a new church plant. We've only known them for about a month, but we've become great friends already and I can tell we're going to have loads of fun together. Hopefully they're ready for likes of us, because we've gone without close (nearby) friends for so long that we have to make up for several years of lost friend-time! Suddenly VA feels more like home, even though we still believe most eastern VA natives to be just friendly-looking snobs. (Please excuse my frankness, but it's totally true. We've lived here for 7 years and have come to know what the people are really like.) As you can imagine, we're thrilled beyond measure to have such wonderful friends in Melvin and Tamela Adams. As a bonus, they love horses and have been coming over to ride with us some, and graciously put up with our stubborn old equines. Anyway, I know I'm posting lots of horse pictures these days, but I'll try to get on a different subject soon. As a side note, we haven't been able to ride Jake lately since he's been quite lame the last 3 days. We think he sprained his back leg and it's got swelling from his ankle clear up to his hock area. I hope he gets better soon! He can hardly put any weight on it at all and limps around pitifully. Would anyone kindly come volunteer to kiss his owwy-boo boo?