Barn Pixie

Gorgeous gorgeous day today, and hay was cut all down the Valley and drying and smelling lovely. It is nice to feel toasted and dry.

35 miles on a bike, averaging 12 mph, makes me speedier than last year. Also my legs hurt less and it took no time at all for my breathing to return to normal.

I was going to ride this evening, but I have to deal with supper stuff instead. Maybe tomorrow.

I am strong, strong like bull!

exercise: barn cleaning
horses: all three Canadians
fabric: yes indeed, took me all weekend

Thank you all for the sympathy. Right now it is more not knowing than not having.

I did ride the red mare today, and we went off stomping in the woods and got LOST. I was amazed and disgusted because it just isn't that much territory to get lost in, but I managed it. The nastiest part was the ice remaining on the trails in the shade, which caused us to skid and slip and get worried. The bravest part was where I hopped off and we tiptoed across an icy bridge because honestly the only other way home was ALL the way back. Fifteen minutes home one way, and hour and a half the other way. Maybe she heard that reasoning, because she did it like a trooper. And stopped on the other side, when I had to drop the reins because I couldn't keep up, and got handfuls of peppermints. The ice was awful. The mare was veryvery good.

And then because I'd failed the training part of the morning (my knees vetoed running on the treadmill) I rode the other two as well. Penny goes like a freight train, but can be brought round and light(er) on the left rein. On the right she is ugly and bent wrong and dropping her should and... We have a lot of work to do. Plus we are clickering standing like a plug, or a rock, or a bored horse, next to the mounting block while people scramble up and down her side, and not squealing like a pig when the ride is done and the rider goes to dismount. I ahve no clue why she might be nervous about these things, or if she just got in the habit of being pushy. I think the dismounting really worries her, so we are really schooling that to desensitize and relax her. The mounting block is straight up rudness and we can fix that easily enough.

And finally I took little Ruby down the road. She was alert to all potential hazards, and a little spazzy. Cars going by bothered her, leaves blowing past bothered her, the melt water running down the edge of the road and the shadows of the trees across the road and the flags in the graveyard, all bothered her. This is not the cheerful, forward little trail horse I rode in the fall. I don't know where she went, but I'm working on getting her back.

Ended the day looking after Lani's horses. Her stud colt (just 4 years old) is getting increasingly obnoxious. He chomped a great hole in his (now ex) pasturemate, and now he busts out of the pasture routinely and goes to talk to (squeal and paw and rear and show off for)  the horses in the back field. He is hard to get to the head of, and mouthy. I think he would be better with hard, steady work, but the weather and Lani's life have not conspired to make that happen. I haven't got the chops or the courage (at the moment) to offer to help. All the rest of them were just wild with the wind. Blankets for tonight because it will be cold, and yet, we are anticipating 45-50 farenheits tomorrow. I will be pleased when it warms up, but I realized that the instant the ice is gone the black flies will come out. And that is a tough call: Black flies, or ice?

the minuses:

I can't think of any other pluses. The croci won't appear till the freezing mostly stops. Spring won't start until I see a crocus. 

In other news, the red mare, the bike ride on Sunday in the amazing sun, and the fabric made of washers that I constructed yesterday
Also, I used a saddle on the blonde Haflinger tank in my lesson today, and it felt Really Odd. I couldn't feel his back, and I felt kind of bereft. And those dangly things I was supposed to put my feet in? What a curious concept(!)

And finally, may I protest some major inadequacies in the mood choices? There is no Present, no Inquisitive, no Puzzled - to name a few I have wanted to choose and been unable to. humph. We are Not Impressed.

exercise: minor shovelling
horses: waved off the barn work
fabric: oh yeah, plus some sekrit stuff

I am on the steep, crap part of the learning curve for my new fabric toy/tool - that place where you have to write the first million words, or spend the first year in the saddle, or work the first 200 hours to get the feel for the medium, and what you I can and can't do with it. So I figure I'll just whang away at it, and see what kinds of things I can make. They do have a kind of unified flatness that I am finding kind of boring. I think the stuff/end result might be best used for backgrounds and substrates for embroidery, both hand and machine, and maybe construction.

I have work to finish on a 7" square of Exquisite Corpse containing boobs and shoulders. Since none of you are my EC partners I think I can tell you this. You people are reading my stealth blog. (insert stealthy music of your choice)

The snow day was completely legit - we got about a foot, and it kept coming down and the wind blowed like snit from the north, which was cold. It was fluffy and I fell down in it a bunch while I was clearing off the cars.

I will be so pleased when it is spring. Although I must admit I kind of dread mud season.

exercise: pilates/yoga plus headstands
horse: Red Queen, 2.5 miles of slow road work
fabric: not yet

I knew, if I could just pry myself off the bench and get up to the barn I would have a good ride, and it was still So Fucking Hard to get going.

We did, in fact, have a great ride. We walked down the road away from home, and trotted on the flat parts, and turned down the dirt road and trotted on that, and finally just before we turned around she sighed a couple times and sneezed and relaxed that last bit. Once we turned around she was interested and forward but not crazy like the last time. I think it helped that there was no one to show off for. When it is just us she behaves better. I think she has to have more faith in me as a leader when we are on our own.

We battled fear of a flapping plastic bag, and won.

Now all I have is driving and circus, and I intend to climb the fabric today, and maybe see if I can still do any of the fabric tricks, because it has been a while.

I forgot that all that outdoor riding depended on the proper conditions: fluffy snow that is kept cold, and does not have a crust on the top of nasty sharp ice. We got more snow on Wed, with a final coating of freezing rain, and we are back to what i think of as "normal New England": thick crust that supports no weight and chops up the fronts of you shins. I keep thinking there has to be some way to groom riding rings in NE winters the way snow trails are groomed - maybe a snowmobile or something? - that would break up the ice and compact the snow and make a trottable surface out of it. I don't care if I can't go faster, but trotting without wobbling would be really lovely.

I thought I was going to the Y yesterday but my car took me up the hill to the ponies instead. I hopped on baby Ruby and we walked about the trails they had already blazed through the icy crusty snow and the older mares followed along behind to see if anything interesting was going to happen. Ruby is such a couch to sit on, and so cute I can hardly stand it. Kaboose is home again, and she had a proprietary interest in the the contents of my pockets that was sweet, and greedy. She looked incredibly relaxed back in her home territory.

I'm going down to a different lesson today, with Mara-from-last-spring on (probably) one of the springy arab mares. I need to ride someone, anyone, and if I can't get on the Canadians at their house I guess I'll have to pay to ride where I can. For the moment.

yah, I will go riding.

'm just waiting till the temp tops 15F, because that is just my own stupid mental limit to exactly how cold it can be and I still have to get to ride. It was 0F (-17C) early this morning, and it is still cooooold.

I finished a strange little book yesterday. It was like the person had read all the stable intrigue/horse show/girl&pony stories, and reproduced them all together in one lumpy book, without actually understanding how any of it works: how to keep a horse sound, what judges look for in a hunter class or an equitation class, how to train a horse to jump, what a jumping class looks like, the work that actually happens when a horse is shod or worked, or put away. I found it very frustrating, and kind of funny.

On the other hand, Monica Dickens has a perfect grip on what it takes to keep horses. I have House at Land's End which I've read repeatedly and love, and Follyfoot which I haven't read, and looks like it was part of a series, even perhaps part of a series that the BBC made a kid's TV show out of. I started Follyfoot and it made me laugh twice in the first chapter, from the correctness of the descriptions of the people and the horses. She is the author of one of the other adult riding books, called Talking of Horses. I recommend it highly, just for the happy descriptions of rides she has taken and horses she has loved.

The last adult book is an extremely hard to find object called A Breed of Horses. Moyra Williams, the woman who wrote it, found a two year old she liked the looks of, bought her, and then bred her and took amazing notes on the growing up and training of the resulting horses. She even has a giant table in the back of characteristics of the different offspring at key points in their careers. There are used copies around, which is good, because for years it was unfindable, and well worth the read. While she looks at breeding and training, she is also trying to tease apart some feeling for inherited and taught traits in horses. I like the tone of the writing as much as anything she says, and there are some descriptions of horses' responses to things (pasture mates, new experiences, object) that crack me up.

I keep killing this and having to type it again.

I hate shifting from mac to pc and back because it is always the tiny reflexes that kill me, not the big procedural questions.

I get to return to barn pixieing today; water buckets and turnout and stall cleaning. My instructor is in Mexico where I hope the weather is correct for the season. Last winter it snowed on her, in Mexico. She was only a little bummed.

I am relieved the cold has moderated. I don't mind winter, and I am even mostly equipped to cope with it in terms of long underwear and endurance. For extreme cold I like HWB's attitude: survival is a sport, and venturing out without freezing off any crucial parts? Major Win!! But when water buckets are involved the extreme cold becomes a kind of grim fascination with exactly how fast the buckets become solid. And then have to be kicked out and refilled. Forming huge glaciers to slip on until spring arrives. Maybe I am not as inured to this as I thought.

What does it say about me that I have switched the thermometer that registers outside temps to metric, not so that I can be compliant with more of the world but so that I can, on a day like today, referring to XKCD's guide to metric conversions, tell the eldest child that it has surpassed a cold day in Moscow and is slightly below fuckfuckfuckcold. We are still a good 10 degrees above fuuuuuck though. 

Aside from provoking profanity, it is outrageously gorgeous out there. See?  And here?