It’s official – my wife and I are now business owners. The final paperwork came back from the state a couple of days ago, and “Stillhaven Farms”:http://stillhavenfarms.com is an official equine business in the state of Indiana. It’s kind of weird being owners of a small corporation and holding share of stock, but it’s kind of cool at the same time.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time getting the website domain registered and set up, email set up under the domain, and other webmaster-y kinds of things. We’re also continuing to work outside to develop the property for taking clients so that Liz can start to teach lessons. It’s a lot of work, but sometimes it’s actually a nice break from sitting at a desk all day long. We’ve been putting up arena fence and are now in the stage of painting the silly thing.

Last evening was spent hanging a gate for a draft paddock – in which a fair amount of good, ol’-fashioned American ingenuity was required. We’ve a section of our property that has a number of dead trees. We’re going to be using several of these for fenceposts for an electric fence. One in particular is a dead pine tree with the top half broken off – so this was the natural pick for our gatepost. It’s strong and sturdy and not likely to get uprooted, even if a 2500-lb Percheron decides he wants to lean against it. Trouble is that the gate pegs are about 12 inches long – with flat ends. No sharp point to make driving them easier. Oh, no, that’d be _much_ too simple. I basically had to make a hole with the power drill with a much-too-small bit and screw the peg in partway. Then I had to pull it out and use – of all things – a tire iron and hammer to make the hole a little deeper. Screw the peg in a little further, screw it back out, repeat with the tire iron and hammer. Repeat a dozen times until the hole was actually deep enough for the peg to grab the wood enough to drive itself, using the tire iron to get enough leverage to turn the peg. Tough work, let me tell you – and I had to do it twice! Then, of course, the gate is a 14-foot, ancient, heavy beast itself, and _that_ required a bit more American ingenuity to hang by myself. It required a cinder block and several 2×4 pieces to prop up the one end while I wrestled the other end onto the pegs and beat them on with the hammer. But now the sucker hangs like a little beauty that not even two clever draft horses are going to be able to get off.

I have to say that I’ve gotten far better sleep since buying this house and property than I ever got living in Indianapolis.