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08:09 am
[Link] | Going to the horse show (4-H roundup) today. Weather looks to be cooperative. I'm taking a cooler with lunch in it so that there will be healthy lunch for me. Fortunately, stuff like the red lentil cauliflower curry and ratatouille eats cold as well as it does hot. Also am taking perfectly ripe pineapple chunks for dessert.
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10:36 pm
[Link] | I had a really good ride on Goof after work today. I've been working on various and sundry things with her since forever (At least since she was a four year old. She's like eleven this year, so it's been a while.) and today I asked Trysta to look at her and see if things were coming along.
( A second pair of eyes is helpful. )
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11:06 pm
[Link] | We got the new jump standards and six additional poles painted today after lesson. Kat (lesson lady) is departing after August in order to return to college. Not sure what we're doing for Sunday lesson at that point -- Trys is looking into some leads for us on that front. I had a decent ride on Hoshi -- it takes his brain a while to come online, which is kind of annoying, but we're doing somewhat better at getting on the same page. I told Kat that it'd be okay if she stuck me on something different if she wanted. I don't really care what I ride at lesson.
( Read more? )
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09:04 pm
[Link] | Every time I think I understand how wonderfully funny and appropriate to things Terry Pratchett's satire is, I realize that I do not really understand. I thought I got Thief of Time. I thought I understood about monks and whatnot with the saffron robes and the Lu Tze and all. Then I read that book on Zen from brother-the-younger and suddenly Thief of Time expanded marvelously like Maligree's Wonderful Garden when rendered by Coin... because my own understanding of the thing-being-riffed-upon had improved. And so I'm going along minding my own business on the intarwebs whereupon I discover that (a) there is such a thing as an Eisteddfod that (b) really is about singing and shit and (c) really takes place somewhere with a llot of extra lllls in the front of the words. (It's from Soul Music, all right? The book about Imp y Celyn, whose name is a joke only funny if you speak the llanguage where there are Eisteddfod thingies or can use the wikipedia For Great Justice.)
This is not to say that I haven't enjoyed the books prior to these later add-ons -- I totally have. It's just that picking up random bits of things takes my prior enjoyment and fills it out like a rendering getting from wireframe to 3-d then with textures and light and shadow and stuff. What was there before, yeah, is still there. But now it's more. It's the difference between looking at a cartoon (art definition) and an oil painting. Pratchett is my favorite modern author whose text keeps getting more interesting the more I look at it.
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08:26 pm
[Link] | Grocery shopping today was very rewarding. It's high summer. Eggplant, green peppers, summer squash, zukes, tomatos = ratatouille. Also cilantro (always a win) and sweet corn (very good, had some for lunch). I love summer food. I did forget to buy onions, which makes me stupid, but I can pick those up tomorrow after pony and they will not preclude me from making cabbage curry this evening in lieu of ratatouille.
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10:47 pm
[Link] | I got two books on teaching horses to jump in the mail today -- both look to be pretty helpful, with diagrams and exercises and stuff to, indeed, try this at home. From the happy advice offered in the books, the basic idea here is to set the horse up with simple, structured problems that progress from easy to more difficult so that the horse kind of figures it out on his/her own.
( Read more? )
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09:54 pm
[Link] | Today, I discovered that Nick trots at almost exactly the speed and rhythm of Billy Idol's Dancing With Myself, which is a nice thing to know in the even that I ever have to put together music for a dressage freestyle. (This is not very likely but still.) I discovered this because I was out riding the horse with my mp3 player on. The whole thing here is (as Thursday Pony Lady says) Rhythm, Relaxation, something-I-forget-what. It's so infrequent that I get past Rhythm and Relaxation that I haven't learned more than that just yet. Internet says Rhythm, Relaxation, Contact, Impulsion, Straightness, Collection. We're working on Contact at lesson but I suck at it. I am just full of suck. Anyway, I do Rhythm a lot better with music, which was why the mp3 player in the first place.
( Read more? It's horses all the way down this time of year, I'm afraid... )
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09:16 pm
[Link] | After work today I dewormed the Ungrateful Babies, who are doing better at eating their Omolene 200. Purina makes it. It's about fifteen dollars for fifty pounds of the stuff, which comes in a pretty red bag what has a picture of horses on it. They're having a promotion where if you feed the stuff for a given period and fill out a chart on how your horse does with it, they will give you a "buy eight, get two free" coupon and also a 10$ off coupon on something. Whatever. Anyway, coupons are involved. The promotion is called something like "A difference you can see".
( Read more? Eventually I talk about stuff other than horse feed promotions. )
Current Music: Ship's Company -- Minguelay
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10:41 pm
[Link] | I had a nice 4th in Philly with the usual folks. There were mojitos and there was pico de gallo and it was good. I got up 6 am on Sunday and drove home to La's for brekkie (scrambled egg thingie folded over with veggies. French. Can't spell it.) and horses. Rode Callie over to Lynn's house to get Saffron. (La came along -- she led Saffron back with Irish Red, who needs the work). She was fine, no worries. I hadn't been on her in a while but she didn't do anything. Definitely no motor on that horse. When I got back, I weeded the onions in Hazel's garden and took the little (18") jumps up beside the corn field and set up the cross pieces in an X shape.
( Read more? There's math... )
Current Music: DJ Oetzi -- Noch In 100000 Jahren
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06:38 am
[Link] | Horse is no longer interested in the carpet. It is boring from both sides at this point. She's also getting mighty responsive to turning off of seat and legs, which is a good. I still have no feel for contact and (related) she still plows through my hands. *sigh* Something to work on, not that we're short of material there. Also, horse accellerates. She just does. It's a feature. She's an accellerate-y sort of horse. I have to work on that, too, the not-accellerating thing. She falls on her forehand and just goes ass over tin cup. We can manage properly at the walk, but then it all falls apart at the trot. More practice, yes. It is at times like these that I need to remember that an easygoing and pleasant horse bores the living shit out of me. If I didn't have things to work on, I would be bored.
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07:45 am
[Link] | I had an interesting day on the pony yesterday. When I go out to ride Nick, I try to have a game plan so that we're not just twinking around. We both do better if I have goals and stuff. However, I didn't GET to the game plan portion of the program because there was a learning opportunity before I got that far along.
( Learning happens when it happens. )
Current Music: Hanson -- MMMBop
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10:11 pm
[Link] | I had another busy weekend in this, the summer of the year. I have no idea where the time has gone, but it's flown by this year. I keep thinking it's still May. *sigh* This weekend I spent Friday night and on into Saturday morning destroying a set of clean sheets. That was nice but it meant that I was starting the weekend down about four hours of sleep.
( Read more? Debauchery part is over now. )
Current Music: Boubacar Diebate -- Badima
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09:41 pm
[Link] | I built jumps with Trys last night. We used 2x4s and a 4x4 -- cut 16" pieces of 2x4 for footies, cut height of jump out of the 4x4, stuck the footies in a round-n-round pattern on the base of the 4x4 using 3" exterior screws. Made jump cups (fixed) to hold the cross rails out of leftover small pieces of 2x4. Four standards, two at 18" and two at 2'3". They look really cute. (We are not advanced enough for bigger jumps. Starting small is the way to go, here.) We were going to paint them today but it rained. I probably should have showed up with the intent to paint but I thought it would rain and it did so I don't feel too much guilt over not showing up.
( Read more? )
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08:59 pm
[Link] | Busy weekend full of busy stuff. Scents bring back memory, I've read, more than any other type of sensory trigger. It makes sense to me -- long ago, in History Back, after I got horribly dumped by Jim, the smell of his conditioner could yank me back to remembering him for years after I thought I was done.
( More stuff? )
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06:49 am
[Link] | It was a lovely day yesterday -- clear and sunny but not so hot as to be unmanangeable. I helped La clean up a bunch of junk (string, old round bale wrappers, bits of wood) around the gate to the lower field. We set the junk on fire -- bonfires of ritual purification are lovely -- and then added to the fire as we gathered up more things.
( Read on? )
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07:06 pm
[Link] | Meatly, who had not been doing well of late, died peacefully (The dirt wasn't scuffed around her feet very much -- with people, you don't know if they die peacefully or not. With horses you can look at the ground and see if there were signs of struggle.) last night.
( Read more? )
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09:02 pm
[Link] | I was thinking how, at the show where we showed hunter hack the other day, Goof settled down happily and worked well in the practice ring after some, yo, practice. It'd be nice to get her in a practice ring again without the hassle of getting dolled up in show clothes and paying for show classes. She could use some rail work and I've been thinking about how I can get that on the cheap. Fortunately for me, La will be taking the truck and trailer and a pony up to the fairgrounds for Horsemanship Skills. The trailer fits more than one pony, so she can take Nick up too. I can do my own little Horsemanship Skills with her in the practice ring while La is doing her 4-H stuff in the official ring. If I get done with Goof early (she works well for about an hour or so and Horsemanship Skills takes longer than that) then I can untack her and let her eat grass in the parking area (it's huge) while I read a novel. It's a near-perfect plan. Go me.
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11:00 pm
[Link] | Roses are blooming. In the wild, it's R. multiflora, the smell of summer. In my yard, Stanwell Perpetual tied with the rugosa closest to the sassafrass tree for first-to-bloom. Fantin Latour (lovely, light pink, scented -- new this year) was next. Chuck (Charles de Mills) looks lovely as does New Dawn. Ispahan (new this year) is covered in buds, which is weird for a rose less than a foot tall. My suspected Banshee is sulking after being pruned last fall as part of the great garden shuffle.
I also mulched the blueberry bushes with carpet this afternoon.
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01:07 am
[Link] | Y'know, I like when my house is clean. I really do like the clean. The problem, though, is that no matter how much I like the clean, I don't do well at maintaining the clean.
( Read more? )
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11:06 pm
[Link] | While making eclairs the other day, I broke the ganache. (I was reheating it after several weeks in the fridge. If you let the ganache in the top half of the double boiler and just pop it in the fridge, it dries up and cracks and gets weird after that kind of time. Fresh ganache is easy to reheat but fridge-aged ganache is difficult to reheat without breaking it.)
( Read more cooking woe? )
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