Musings and Memories of an Owned Human

Personality Plus

2011-04-04T09:50:00.002-04:00

That describes Tico. If they cast a new Mr. Ed, he could do it in a heartbeat.

Yeah, he's gray... but how many people remember Mr. Ed was a palomino? Was it even in color? I wouldn't know, since we didn't have a color TV until well into the 70s, I think.

Tico can be really fresh with me, I think because he knows it makes me happy. Yes, I know that sounds really demented. He's never dangerous. It's more like play.

When we're trotting around in the indoor and he tosses a little happy buck in, transitioning into a canter, it makes me grin. When he expresses an opinion that he really doesn't think I should keep him from galloping back to the barn by getting slightly light in front and tossing and shaking his head (sometimes augmenting the opionion by whacking my head with his tail), I laugh at him and he ends up having to walk. Of course, it's his "turbo walk" - We'll be 20 feet ahead of everyone else in a heartbeat - but he's walking. It's a compromise, and we're both happy.

A few days later he'll be doing a lesson with a nine year old little girl, and be a perfect little gentleman, taking care of her and when she asks "correctly", doing what she asks. He doesn't do that many lessons - just enough to keep him from turning into a complete Great White Whale - but the lesson kids who ride him are in love. He charms them all. He loves people.

When I got to the barn Saturday, the girl who gives lessons, Jess, interrupted her current lesson to tell me what a star Tico had been on Wednesday.

You'd think I was his mother, I'm so proud of him sometimes. :)

Sometimes I think "bad feelings" should be more specific

2011-02-20T09:03:00.012-05:00

I went to the barn yesterday - nothing new, I almost always can be found at the barn on the weekends.

It's hard to explain this: some days, I feel completely in tune with the world, balanced, perfect harmony. When I ride, I sit deep in the saddle, straight and tall, my body never hindering my horse's movement.

Those days are fairly rare. And yesterday was not one of them. And I knew it.

Some days might have moments, glimmers of greatness... but yesterday was not one of them. And I knew it.

Not that Tico was being particularly bad. I tacked him up in his stall, since he's started the "OMG there are scary things above me EVERYWHERE! Must get away, AIIIEEEEE!!!" breaking of the crossties behavior again this winter, after a long hiatus.

But things didn't feel "right".

I'd tacked him up western. I got on him, but I wasn't happy with the saddle placement, got off, shifted it around and got back on. He had a couple of yee-hah! moments, though nothing of import. These were only to be expected, since the horses hadn't gone out yesterday morning because of the gale force winds. All in all, he was being a pretty good boy.

Still, I cut my ride short - the feeling of unease was still there, and I just didn't want to chance anything. When I ignore these things, I usually regret it.

So I put him back in his stall with a bit of hay to keep him busy, and went out to get the yak, who'd been put outside once the wind had died down a bit.

Dusty, who is starting into full molt, was waiting for me. He doesn't move around much outside in the snow, only following the tracks left by other horses who'd been in the same turnout, and his back fetlocks stock up a lot in the winter. I try to get him moving a bit when I'm there, by taking him into the indoor ring. Sometimes I sit on him bareback, sometimes I just lead him around. Sometimes, I take him out on the lunge line and let him kick up his heels, which the 28 year old fart still does pretty enthusiastically on the lunge line.

First I took off a few layers of hair with the shedding blade, then walked him out into the indoor on a lead line.

There was no one else in the indoor when we went in. Walking towards the front of the ring, I started to think... I'll put him on a lunge line and let him run around a bit, he'll have fun, and it's the old man, it'll be fine!

There's a lungeline hanging on a hook at the front of the ring, tied neatly up in loops. I grabbed it, attached it to his halter as I removed the lead line, and started leading him into the middle of the ring as I unravelled the twists and loops.

Dusty took off. Still walking forward, I looked up to admire his version of the dressage balotade movement. I'm sure it was meant to be a buck, but when you're a 28 year old arthritic horse, the back legs don't stretch like they used to. And he's so fluffy, it's damned cute.

But I looked back down just in time to see, to my horror, one of the loops of the lunge line start passing up my right leg in as neat a little crochet stitch you'd ever want to execute.

The next moments went by, like most disastrous moments, in slow motion. My right leg, now attached to an 1100 lb frisking geriatric, came out from under me, diagonally. My left leg, not so luckily still on the ground, got dragged sideways as I went down. I heard an awful ripping and tearing coming from my knee - it sounded like cloth tearing - and thought to myself, oddly detached, "that can't be good."

I lay flat on the ground. I got the lungeline off my right leg somehow - I don't even remember doing it. Maybe it got pulled off once I went horizontal, right down over my toes, since Dusty was now happily trotting circles around me, oblivious.

Flat on my back, arm with the lungeline up in the air so that it didn't wrap around me as he circled, I pondered things. One thing I did not want to do was try to move my left leg, which was turned knee in, calf and toes out to the side.

If my left knee had decided to detach itself and wander off, I would have been quite happy at that moment with our parting of the ways. I didn't know knees could hurt that badly.

I looked to my left, towards the windows looking into the ring from the front. No one was there.

Down towards my foot and to the right (I'm still horizontal), I could see into the new section of the barn, and Tadpole was on the crossties. Just then, Jackie, Tad's owner, saw me and came over.

Thank goodness for Jackie - she took Dusty away from me and got him stopped. I struggled to my feet - or foot, anyway. She asked "Are you ok?" And I told her that I felt like I was going to throw up.

I explained what happened, and she helped me put Dusty away and generally get my butt out of there, and go home to ice my knee.

Once home, the waves of pain were unbelievable. I was icing it and had taken some ibuprofen. It didn't look really swollen, but I was shivering with shock. Geoffrey called the doctor's office answering service, and they said they'd have a doctor call back.

By the time he called back, the shivering had subsided and the ibuprofen and ice had dulled the pain. After explaining to him what had happened, he said it was up to me what to do - continue with icing and ibuprofen, or come in to the ER and get it looked at.

I hate the ER. And I was relatively comfortable, so last night I decided to just continue with the icing and ibuprofen regimen and see what tomorrow brings.

Today is tomorrow. I'm going to the ER.

Who'd have thought my geezer would have been the one the "bad feelings" were warning me about?

Post Script: I went to the ER today. It's a medial collateral knee ligament sprain, and I'm supposed to take it easy for 4 to 6 weeks. Arrgh.

Google Maps is Amazing

2010-10-04T15:14:00.001-04:00

You too can go on a trail ride with me!

Click on the pushpins on the left, you'll be taken to the location on the map. Cool!!

So Near, and Yet So Far

2010-10-04T13:34:00.009-04:00

Although Dunstable is, compared to Lowell, "the country", there aren't a lot of places to trail ride near where I keep Dusty and Tico.

There are some small trails out behind the back fields, winding through the woods for about a half mile or so, but after a while it just seems a bit boring - even if occasionally, 1 or 2 or twenty wild turkeys show up wanting to share the path.

There is one trail though - out at the far end of the big field behind the Crystal Farm property, across a small street, along the power lines - that has been beckoning, just out of reach.

Over the years we've managed to get through and over the huge logs surrounding a 4 foot high 2 foot wide berm, across a tiny brook that Tico feels the need to leapfrog some - not all - of the time we cross it (he likes to keep things exciting), and onto a small street that people drive on as if they're practicing for the Monaco Grand Prix.

We've crossed the street, ridden down it for about 25 feet, cursing at drivers who won't slow down when they see a horse and followed a rutted, muddy path widened by ATVs,lined by scruffy shrubs and reeds, into an area that's really, most of the time, a nasty swamp.

And usually, we end up turning back because our horses hate getting their tootsies muddy.

Not that we let them get away with it - there would be discussion. Tico would, in his efforts to avoid the nasty black rutted wet goopy dirt on the path (which was at least partially packed down by the ATVs) dance sideways into the nasty black wet goopy dirt OFF the path, which he couldn't actually see was nasty black wet goopy dirt because it was covered with dead branches, roots, swamp grass, sad excuses for bushes, reeds, and other bog flora. It was however, in his mind at least, *safer*. Never mind that he'd sink in knee and hock deep - he'd rather thrash around in the underbrush than walk sanely across Oh My God MUD.

And to continue in the "keep things exciting" vein, he would occasionally walk up to one of the wetter mud patches, nose down and appearing to be mulling actually walking across it like a Big Boy, before gathering all four feet together and leapfrogging that as well.

So far, he has yet to deposit ME in the mud, but it's been close.

Why were we putting ourselves (and our dainty little flower equines) through this unpleasantness? Because, just past one last nasty wet deep pool of sludge and water, just beyond it, are real honest to goodness, DRY trails following the powerlines. Nirvana!

So...

This summer has been very dry and hot. We hadn't ventured out that way for a while -the deer fly population doesn't seem to mind dry heat; as a matter of fact they seemed to thrive on it. Suffice to say, being chased home by swarms of deer flies as thick as your worst nightmare about killer bee swarms is not enjoyable.

But about a month ago one of the other boarders, Elaine, and I, thinking that what with the fact that the other short trails (which had had some muck and water here and there as well) were now bone dry, it might be fun to give the Path to Nirvana another try.

We crossed the log and berm area, across the (now dry) tiny stream, managed to survive the Speedway, and started along the uneven path.

As we came upon the first of the previously formidable horse-eating areas, we started to rejoice. It was dry! The next one, the same. We wove around some more scrappy brush, and again, and again; except that the "trouble spots" were dry dirt and not grassy, you'd have not realized there had ever been a reason for equine vapors here.

But then we came to the Big Kahuna of muck. Not as big as it had been, though big enough to be heartbreaking: brackish standing water, dark mud, and who knows what all *in* the water that could grab hooves and cause injuries.

It may as well have been the Grand Canyon, there was no way we were going to get them into that, and at least in this instance we agreed with them. It's never a good thing to ask a horse to step into water that is probably barely a foot deep but so nasty you can't see what's underneath. At least you can *see* and avoid roots and broken bottles on dry ground.

We turned back, saddened but not defeated: Elaine had a plan...

Getting Old Ain't for the Faint of Heart.

2010-09-05T21:41:00.003-04:00

I went to see my dad yesterday, and we watched the “Saturday Matinee” together. They get a Netflix movie in every Saturday, and the old folks at the assisted living facility he lives in watch it in the Common Room.

So we’re all in watching “Night at the Museum”, with Ben Stiller (and a small part with his mom, Ann Meara playing a job counselor), and half the old folks are having a hard time following the plot. My dad is a bit confused by it too – I think when there’s a lot going on, they just can’t keep up. Then again, it may be that, like my dad they none of them really use their hearing aids correctly, so can’t actually hear it that well.

But one little old lady was really struggling: “Does anyone know what’s going on?” “Oh! That scared me, too!” "What just happened?"

She started to get more and more agitated.

The aides were both off doing other stuff – not all the residents go in to watch the movie, but those that do, they pretty much don’t have to worry about for a couple of hours. It's the ones who don't, who are scattered around the facility, that they need to check on individually, who are a bit more worrisome.

Most of the old folks watching the movie are sitting in these really comfy upholstered swivel/rocking chairs. Once they sit in them, they all pretty much are stuck until someone helps them out of them. Having had to drag my dad out of one a couple of weeks ago, I’d put him into a comfy chair that didn’t move around, and sat in another next to him.

I looked over at the old gal a few times – she seemed to be getting upset, and kept wiping her nose, almost as if she was crying, though she didn’t appear to be. She would exclaim about something, everyone would look over at her sympathetically, but she otherwise was fine so we all would turn back to the movie.

Suddenly, she decided she wanted to stand up. There were a couple of old guys sitting behind her. “Hold the back of my chair, I want to stand up!” she demanded. They held it, but she got really petulant – “Hold the back of my chair!” “We ARE!” they said. "Well, hold it STILL!" she demanded.

She stood up, slightly hunched over, almost teetering forward. Slowly, she started pulling on her skirt, bunching it up in her hands. Pulling, bunching… those of us who could see her, sat there, curious, watching. I initially thought perhaps it had gotten wrinkled and uncomfortable underneath her, and she was trying to pull it straight, slowly strugging with arthritic fingers to make it right.

But no: with each scrunching of her skirt it came up higher, up over her knees, up to her thighs. We all watched, transfixed, as she grabbed the hem and lifted it up, pulling it over her head.

She was wearing pantyhose (thank goodness). I don’t think she had any underpants on. Now that she had the skirt up over her head, she wiped her nose on it, then started arthritically picking at the band of the pantyhose.

There was a floor to ceiling support in between her and my dad – he couldn’t see anything. “What’s going on?” he asked. “Nothing dad – watch the movie.” I sat there, torn between keeping him company or going over to her and trying to settle this poor thing down, and help restore her dignity.

My own discomfort kept me anchored to my seat. I feel shame for that - I wish I could have acted compassionately and ended the spectacle sooner.

At that point, the daughter of one of the old guys behind her walked in to the room, saw what was going on, and went to find one of the aides. Nini, the aide, came in and persuaded the old gal to go back to her room.

I am sure that this sweet old lady would have been mortified had she realized what she was doing. I suppose there's some solice in the fact that she didn't know what she was doing, and certainly won't remember doing it.

But that doesn't make it any less sad.

It's Amazing What a Little Sleep Can Do

2010-06-25T08:41:00.002-04:00

Not that I got caught up particularly quickly - I have some issues sleeping, or at least staying asleep. But, a couple of days later, I was almost feeling human.

I had a whole lot more written, and then the internet connection crapped out mid-save, which meant nothing saved. :( Things have been great, We've done a bunch of dives, and I'll write more later. I just didn't want to leave it at "Vacation from Hell" because though it started out a bit roughly, things have been wonderful since and I'd only written those first few posts to give some background to the whole Wow, Things Are GREAT Now theme.

Later, dudes...

Vacation in Bonaire - Inauspicious Start, Fini

2010-06-23T13:27:00.004-04:00

As we dragged our luggage along, we checked the numbers on the doors and stairwells. In our overtired and overwrought state, it was as if we'd entered the Twilight Zone: 96, 98, 92, 94, 88... well, we found the one we would be spending two weeks in, unlocked the door, and dragged ourselves and our luggage in.

The room was a bit... used looking. As a matter of fact, it appeared that at some point in the not-too-distant past, someone had set off a bunch of firecrackers in the bathroom and entryway: the tiles were pocked with what looked like little burn marks. I went into the bathroom and noticed there was no shower curtain. The closet space still had the unmistakeable smell of ocean funk lingering. "I'll be buying some Lysol before I hang my clean clothes in there" I thought. I'm actually amazed I had such a coherent thought, I was so tired. The AC however was working like a champ and was cranked way up.

We dropped our stuff, and I walked back to the front desk to ask about a shower curtain. I was really looking forward to a shower. I got back to the room and Geoffrey was sprawled out on a bed, nearly asleep.

Unfortunately, I was now WIRED: Must Get Things All Sorted Out Before Resting. I dragged Geoffrey out to walk down the street to buy some Lysol and a couple of other things, and we spent some time at some of the shops.

When we got back, there was still no shower curtain. This time as I walked into the room I noticed the artwork on the wall for the first time.

I was beat. I read it as "HELL"

Still Exhausted

2010-06-23T13:14:00.003-04:00

We wandered back to the front desk after eating breakfast. We were still shuffling hollow-eyed things, but we weren't hungry zombies anyway.

Our room still wasn't ready. Sigh.

We hung around in the office where there was airconditioning, and so we could at least dry off the sticky sweat. They had wifi, and I soon got my netbook connected.

Dive orientation would be at 9AM. The dive instructor to do the orientation wanted us to postpone it - Holland was mid-match in the World Cup and he was sitting at the bar watching it. Hope that our room would be soon available sprung eternal though, so we declined. Since the orientation would be taking place nearby to the TV at the bar, he could still see the replays if anything big happened. No, we aren't football fans. :) He was gracious about it.

Dive orientation over (with a couple of World Cup interruptions, but not too distracting), we again wandered over to the front desk. Our room was still not ready, and our strength and stamina was fading fast. We plonked down in the chairs in the office once again and waited.

"Soon!" the girl at the front desk said.

We joked with her, and asked after people we knew, and passed the time.

Finally, the room was ready. We dragged our luggage out of the back room and headed over.

On Vacation: an inauspicious start

2010-06-23T12:34:00.006-04:00

So, pretty much last minute (one month before takeoff) we decided to go on vacation to Bonaire again. The primary motivation being that it would be Captain Don's 85th birthday; the secondary being that I hadn't had a *real* vacation for 3 years and was starting to snap. All work and no play makes Susan a psychotic girl.

The flights were challenging, but they always are. It's just not easy getting to Bonaire. I ended up booking a 3-leg trip: Manchester NH on Friday afternoon through Cleveland, to Houston, and then the red-eye from Houston to Bonaire. My reasoning: with this itinerary, we'd have an extra day on-island.

I was a little concerned about making all the connections, especially the last as we only had 50o minutes between arrival and departure in Houston. It turned out I had nothing to worry about - there was a handicapped diving group, "Eels on Wheels", also travelling on this flight, so by the time they were all loaded we didn't actually take off for about an hour after the scheduled time.

One thing I hadn't banked on was just how grueling travelling for 12 hours really was.

Yes, checkin was it's usual unpleasant but grin and bear it experience: both Geoffrey and I have had both our hips replaced so we always end up being poked, prodded, and peeled. Then our luggage contains lots of electronic and camera attachment stuff which apparently look a lot like bomb-making instruments, so it's unpacked for us while we're being scanned and swiped. Then we have to repack it all, and try to fit everything back in. All this is time-consuming but once we clear security it's generally over with. We were able to stay in the secure areas for the entire journey, so once we got through that it was relatively clear sailing.

Maybe I'm just old, or maybe it's because I have a really hard time dozing on a plane, but after the half day schedule of fly-wait-change planes-fly-change-planes-wait-fly, I was a complete wet noodle when we landed in Bonaire. Where it was about 90 degrees at 6AM, and not a lot of air movement.

We gathered up our checked-in luggage, got a taxi to the place we're staying, found out that our room was still occupied. Not totally surprising, since checkout is around noon, so we piled our luggage in a back room and went wandering around. However, for whatever reason she couldn't ecen tell us the room we'd be in.

We were both zombie-like in our sleep deprived state. Not to mention, sticky, smelly, and getting grumpy. All we really wanted to do was get into our room and settle in, then go for dive orientation. We wandered back to the front desk and were told that the people in our room had checked out, but the maid hadn't cleaned it for us yet, so we'd have to wait.

Soon the restaurant was open and we wandered over.

We'd been here before, so knew it was a buffet breakfast. "Room number?" the cook asked. "We have no idea!" we told her, and explained our predicament. She remembered us from our other visits, so let us go through. As a matter of fact, she was able to determine our room number, and told us. The people here are beyond compare nice.

Pongo, Dusty's BFF

2010-05-11T14:25:00.001-04:00

Pongo - the other Grumpy Old Man. He's my favorite horse who isn't mine. :)

Dusty, Partly Shed Out

2010-05-11T14:24:00.002-04:00

The Grumpy Old Palomino...

I shaved off that pork-chop sideburn thing he has going on on his ribcage. Of course, then the temperatures took a nose dive...

Why having a gray horse has it's downside

2010-05-10T10:59:00.000-04:00

mugwump chronicles: Missing Horse#links

2010-04-15T10:46:00.001-04:00

mugwump chronicles: Missing Horse#links

A really cute horse and a really cute little kid who's heartbroken... If you live in the area, keep an eye out, and hope this horse hasn't already gone over the boarder to Mexico. :(

Happy Birthday, Dusty!

2010-04-09T11:09:00.007-04:00

On this day in 1983 in Richmond, VA, a scrappy little palomino QH colt was born. He was shown by his Ammy owner at AQHA shows for a few years in VA, doing pretty well and amassing some 40-something WP points along the way. He was also thrown into an AQHA reining class to fill it and make it count; having never been competed in reining, he nevertheless took second in that class.

Dusty in Virginia

When he was 6 he moved to Massachusetts and started wowing them at the North Shore and South Shore Horsemens Association shows, consistently winning Quarter Horse Hunter Under Saddle and Palomino Pleasure classes(ridden western) and Massachusetts Horsemens Council and New England Horsemens Council Year End Championships. I met him then, and introduced him to carrots, a treat he'd never seen before. I also introduced apples to him. He learned to love them both. :)

A few years later he bucked off his then owner at a show, not out of meanness; though I couldn't prove it, I'm pretty sure he was stung by something. She never forgave him, and I started riding him at the shows towards getting him sold. I didn't ride western at the time, so we took our ribbons in Palomino Pleasure in a hunt seat saddle. He won, despite his rider's lack of show experience or enthusiasm for showing - he was that good.

I finished out that year, rode him a bit in shows the next, and ended up buying him myself and "retired" him - to trail riding, which he absolutely loved. He was 13, and I've had him ever since.

On a trail

We've been through a lot together. So today (like most days when I go to the barn to play with my boys, to be honest) he is going to be stuffed full of carrots and Kashi bars, petted and loved on, and told what a wonderful old thing he is. A funny thing: one of his old curmudgeon idiosyncracies is that he's lost his taste for apples; a horse who used to lustily chomp into any and all varieties of apple now sniffs them and turns his head away - so apples won't be on the menu... or at least not for him. Tico still thinks they're quite nice.

Dusty has changed in many ways since I first met him. He mellowed out and calmed down considerably - he'd been a very nervous horse when he was owned by his previous owner. He never used to grow much of a winter coat, but that was another thing he apparently learned to do, too. :)

He's started to shed, but is still really hairy despite my best shedding efforts, and we had a string of warm to hot days last week and early this week. So last weekend, I did a really rushed clip job on him, knowing that the barn was going to be closed for Easter (they close Easter and Christmas) and he'd be in his stall all day when it was going to be warm.

Here's a photo, after I did the clipping. I've since cleaned it up a bit.

After the clipping.

Aesthetically, he could have looked better. There was a kind of plucked chicken look to him at the end... but a friend said he looked like a big, well-loved plush toy with worn spots from the hugging, and that seems fitting.

Happy 27th, Dusty!

Postscript: some videos from a bit more than a week later:
Tracking right, ignoring me

Tracking left, still ignoring me

And still tracking left, doing whatever the heck he wants...

The Evil that Llamas Do

2010-04-02T17:34:00.012-04:00

Tico and I can have disagreements, but they're not knock-down-drag-outs and once he's expressed his opinion (and I've vetoed it), we go from there with little more than a tail toss in my direction to show he really thinks he was right, but heck, it's not worth fighting with The Provider of the Carrots and Kashi Bars.

He's also generally a pretty cool customer: once riding him bareback with nothing but a halter near the barn, a barn girl, not looking, threw a bucket of dirty water out the door, missing
Tico's head by inches. He didn't flinch. He's pretty unflappable, generally.

However, and I'm ashamed to say this... my very brave, look everything in the eye and spit, look at me - I'm a cowhorse! a cat-herder (the poor barn cat got out of there as fast as it could) and
a brick shithouse (what the blacksmith exclaimed about him when he first saw him), has met his arch-nemesisisisisis... and it's name is LLAMA.

Late fall a year or two ago, a llama and his gang of sheep, which had been in an adjacent field for at least a year, dammit, was moved. It was still in that same field, but closer to the stone wall that separated it from the field we rode in.

It was a very windy day and the wind was coming off that field. Tico, walking along on a path we've gone on hundreds of times before, suddenly noticed ... A Not-a-Horse-but-it's-Big-and-Hairy-and-Smells-Funny-OMG-Awful... EMERGENCY!!! RED-ALERT!!!!!!

Yup, he went into a serious meltdown - leaping, twirling, and attempting to high-tail it (I now know what that means) for the barn.

So after he piaffed, levaded, and caprioled around in his western tack for a few minutes I climbed off.

Let me explain: when I was younger and had all my original equipment (i.e. my hips weren't made of ceramic and titanium), I would have "ridden it out" - or at least attempted to ride it out - I fell off a hella lot when I was a kid.

But when you have hip replacements, calming down a horse seems more prudently done off the horse, particularly after a few minutes of attempted persuasion from the saddle results in nothing more than said horse attaining even higher altitude.

Yes, you could get knocked down, but the landing won't be as bad as from say 7 feet off the ground with the horse rapidly exiting, stage left. Been there, done that, didn't like it much - and that was before the metal and ceramic.

So... I figured this was a good chance to teach him to trust me about scary things. I'd lead him slowly, diagonally, towards the llama, stopping, letting him get ok with it, moving a bit more... he'd see it was harmless, and we'd move on.

However, he was having none of that; instead continuing in his effort to prove that QHs can collect and elevate too - and if necessary, can do a passable imitation of a giraffe.

I'd attached a training fork to his reins that day, a very mild one with stretchy surgical tubing for the forks, attached to metal loops that the reins go through. The other end of the training fork was attached to his girth, under his chest between his front legs. I was using split, not joined reins. Looks like this, when everything is set up.

When I'd dismounted, I'd grabbed the reins near his face, and the rings of the training fork slipped off the ends. So the training fork was now dangling down underneath him and flailing around wildly as he danced, leaped, and yes, stepped on the ends of it, stretching them. Of course, once he moved and stepped *off* of them, the ends snapped up, whacking him hard in his belly.

I no longer had a horse at the end of the reins, but something more resembling a kite in a stiff wind, herky-jerky back and forth, and barely touching the ground.

And let's not forget the llama. The attack from below was just further proof of the total evil nature of that... that...

What in God'S NAME IS That! IT's LOOKING AT ME!!! Why is it LOOKING AT ME??

You see, the llama, being curious, had come closer to the fenceline to watch the show, and was now standing right at the edge of the stone wall.

He didn't appear to be blinking. Big, staring llama eyes. A big, standing Very Tall and Making Himself Look ENORMOUS, staring, llama.

I know when I'm licked. I realized that what I'd originally seen as a Training Opportunity had degraded into a situation where the Horse Brains have Left the Building, so I decided to just get him out of there as calmly as possible.

First I managed to remove the training fork - no small feat, considering - and then I led him away, still piaffing beside me and throwing looks over his shoulder to make sure that the Horrible Creature From Hell wasn't following. About a hundred feet away I remounted, and we continued our ride in another field.

We went back the next day. The llama and his gang were still there in the same area, but were all laying down.

It was a complete non-event. He walked by, head low, ears relaxed... what llama? I took him by from every direction, he was Mr. Cool.

I suppose (and it did occur to me that it could be Bad News for me) that had they all decided to suddenly jump up and stretch their legs we could have seen what he was really made of... but he was spared that ignonimity: they stayed prone.

To this day he still occasionally casts the hairy eyeball in the direction of the approximate last-known location of the Creature - even when we're three fields away and he can't possibly see it, or smell it either. As a matter of fact, I haven't seen either the sheep of the llama for quite a while - I think they've moved on.

Tico remains unconvinced.

Some Days are Just Magic

2010-02-28T15:29:00.005-05:00

There are days when nothing goes right... and then there are days when you laugh and realize you're the luckiest person in the world.

I love walking into the barn. I usually visit the front area to see if there's anyone there to say hi to, then go through the front tack room and down the aisle past a few horses and the cows (the barn owners pets), and peek into the indoor ring. There's usually someone to say hi to, and catch up with.

Today I got there at the same time as Dorothy, though by the time I'd collected all the stuff I was going to bring in she'd already gone inside.

As I came around the corner after checking the indoor, I saw Jean and Ebony, Ebony all tacked up and ready to go. We chatted a bit; Ebony'd fallen last week and hurt himself, his right gaskin, but seemed better today. She was going to throw him on the lunge line first before riding him though - he's a high energy horse.

Dorothy took Pongo into the indoor for his pre-ride roll, then brought him back in and started brushing him.

None of the horses had gotten out much this past week, between the rain, snow, then more rain and wind. The wind had been so bad some of the nearby trees had crashed through the skylights in the indoor; there were buckets and wheelbarrows catching the rain yesterday and they were there today, though not really needed: it was overcast but dry. They provided a prop to use to make things more interesting: figure eights around the wheelbarrow, then around the bucket collection. Reverse, and again, then big oval around all... a bit less boring than constantly circling along the wall.

So having been inside for so long, Tico had been pretty perky yesterday. I rode him in english tack, and we had lots of energetic canters, most often his idea rather than mine. I like when Mr Moseyalong has some gumption, so though it's a bit naughty of him to just volunteer it without being asked, I encourage him to continue and get his ya-yas out.

Today, I'd decided to throw the western tack on him. I am the worlds slowest groomer, and though I was trying to go fast, Dorothy had tacked up Pongo and started riding and Jean had taken Ebony out to lunge him and I was still cleaning Tico's feet. I peeked in to watch Ebony and he looked like he was going along well; I went back to getting Tico ready.

Then Jean came back into the aisle with Ebony. He'd gotten a bit rambunctious on the lunge line and taken a bad step, and seemed to have reinjured his leg. I'd thrown Tico back into his stall quickly - he and Ebony don't like each other - when she came in; concerned, I started to walk towards her, talking.

I'd neglected to shut Tico's stall door.

"Tico's loose!" Dorothy said. I turned to see him giving me the horsie-finger - his tail up over his back - as he pranced out the back door. I grabbed a leadline and some carrots, and headed out into the mud to follow.

He looked so smug - head up, tail flagged, big trot through the mud, swinging his head side to side to look back at me - I had to smile. He pranced around to the right and then strolled into an empty turnout, the whole time with his butt to me and his tail in the air. I was navigating the mud and still about 30 feet behind him.

"Ha! He turned himself out!" I said to Dorothy, who'd peeked out the back door to see how things were going. But as I approached, he seemed to have decided he hadn't had nearly enough fun yet. Back out the gate he came, and around to his left, heading down the path to the back ring. Tail up over his back as he splashed through the mud, taunting me, swinging his head to the left and right to make sure I was following - I was getting a horsie raspberry, definitely.

I started down the path he was prancing down. He stopped about 20 feet down, and looked back at me, still facing away.

"I have carrots!" I said, and showed him the handful of cut up pieces.

That was all she wrote. Pigsley turned around and trotted up to me, still head up, ears pricked forward, mane flying and tail flagged. He looked like something out of a romance novel. Even though I knew it was carrot-induced enthusiasm, I felt a thrill watching this beautiful animal running up to me. I attached the lead rope as he gobbled the carrots and led him back in, still prancing. "It's a good thing you're cute!" I growled at him.

The rest of the cleaning and tacking up was uneventful, though by the time I was ready Dorothy and Pongo were already done. I headed out to the indoor, where Frani and Jan were practicing some reining moves; Frani on Boomer and Jan on Newman.

Tico was energetic again today, though not as much piss and vinegar as yesterday. We trotted and cantered around a bit, then I stopped near Frani to watch Newman do some slides. Reining really is fascinating, and definitely requires a sensitivity and timing that I don't think I'll ever manage. I love to watch them.

When they were done, Frani and Jan led Boomer and Newman out and I had the ring to myself. I put Tico back to work, got a nice working trot going.

As we came around the corner near the front of the ring, a couple of barn swallows flew down, chattering and twisting around in the dirt a bit to our right. I felt Tico turn all his focus onto those birds: he pinned his ears and snaked his head down, and darted at them.

Only Tico would try to herd barn swallows.

We worked only a few minutes more after that. I rode him over to face the mirror and played "which side is the carrot on" stretching exercises: showing him the carrot in the mirror, then bringing it down behind my leg and asking him to stretch his neck around for it, alternating sides. We did that until we ran out of carrots (in my pocket, anyway), then I brought him back in, pulled off all his tack, rubbed him down and threw him in his stall with carrots and Kashi bar crumbles in his bucket.

Dusty is starting to molt. I brought out the shedding blade and got some of the hair off him, but he's still holding on to it pretty much. Still, we had a nice time hanging, as I rubbed him down, cleaned his feet, fed him copious amounts of carrot bits, and finally put him out with Pongo, who'd gone out to the turnout a few minutes before. I'd thought of throwing him on the lungeline, but I'd done that yesterday and he'd had a good old time for himself bucking and farting and running around, but ended up getting sweaty - not a good thing for a horse with a yak coat in the winter; it's really hard to get him dry and he can catch a chill. So I figured he'd be happy to go hang with his bud, and I wouldn't have to cool him off and leave him wearing a cooler so he'd be warm and dry.

I raked up the hair (Tico had contributed a good amount of the pile as well), swept up the aisle where we'd been, and went to dump the muck that I'd swept up into the manure pile. When I headed out the door, I saw that Pongo was running laps around Dusty, periodically reaching over to bite him; Dusty was standing there, looking annoyed and put-out.

They are grumpy old men, but I have no idea what had gotten into Pongo. I went out and split some Kashi bars between them and told Pongo to leave Dusty alone. He slobbered on me. I hugged Dusty goodbye, navigated the mud one last time back to the barn, said my goodbyes and handed out the last of the carrot bits to everyone.

Sometimes, the world is just *perfect*.

2009-12-27T18:10:00.000-05:00

I’d been sick just before Christmas. I swear it was because my immune system wasn’t prepared for Middle Eastern germs: a co-worker, an Indian Muslim, went on his pilgrimage to Mecca right around our Thanksgiving. He came home coughing and hacking and sneezing all over anyone and everyone – and he and I have cubicles in the same area, a narrow corridor that leads to the back door. I was able to resist his germs for a while, but I finally succumbed about one and a half weeks before Christmas, was really sick the weekend before Christmas, and was finally feeling better around Wednesday.

I have a Christmas True Story to share with you:

Christmas Eve day I started to install a new car radio in Geoffrey’s car, a gift from me that I was able to get by cashing in some Credit Card “points”, something I’ve never tried before. The stereo is last year’s model but a lot newer than the one Geoffrey had, with new features including a USB port in the front so he can plug in his iPod or anything else that has music on it, and listen to his own music. The one he had was dying a slow death: the display has been out for a long time, and without the display it was impossible to tell what was going on, and if you hit the wrong button and changed settings, you couldn’t tell what you’d done and couldn’t fix it. I knew this would be an appreciated gift, especially if it was installed for him.

I tried to prepare: I knew the new one should “fit”, I’d checked about that before I got it. But there’s “fit” physically and “fit” electrically: I had no faith that the connector coming out of the car would be a match to, or even slightly resemble, the connector coming out of the new radio. An internet search for “1998 Subaru Legacy Outback radio wiring” provided me with a list of colored wires coming out of the car as part of the radio wiring and what function they served. There was a similar diagram on the new radio, so I figured it would be a piece of cake, match function to function. I’ve pulled the radio out of my truck, that had been no trouble at all.

I hadn’t bargained on the Subaru dashboard. I poked and prodded it for a while trying to find the way in, but it was not yielding it’s secrets that easily. Another internet search yielded a detailed report of how another poor sap managed to get in there on the same model and year, so armed with that information I returned to the car.

He’d removed the A/C stuff, then the cup holder, which allows you to pull out the faceplate around the radio, storage area, and ash tray. However, when I looked at the cup holder area, I figured he’d done a bit more than he needed to do, and started there instead.

I had to open the cup holder all the way. Once that is pulled out all the way, you have access to a couple of screws. I unscrewed them (with a bit of contortion – this is NOT an easy car to get around in, especially with a stick shift) and removed the cup holder. Those screws also held in the top of the faceplate, so progress was being made.

However, the next thing that needed to be removed was the ashtray holding assembly. It was attached at the bottom of the faceplate, right next to the stick shift, with the screws going upward into the box in which the radio was housed. Have you ever attempted to unscrew a couple of screws that are pointed up when you have about 4 inches of play between the screws and the ground (well, not the ground but the shift housing) with the shift between you and the console? I struggled with that for at least an hour, trying all kinds of regular and jury-rigged tools (a Philips screw-head bit clamped in a wrench and held in with electrical tape was my most creative), and no joy. It was a Phillips head screw, but I could barely get my hands in there to place the screwdriver correctly. Pretty soon I was starting to doubt if I was even turning it the right way.
Finally, I tried a straight-head short shaft screwdriver, and finally felt a good “bite”. Sheesh. But, it got those stupid things out. Yay, now I should be able to get to the radio!
But nooooo. The cigarette lighter assembly was built into the faceplate. It did NOT want to come out of the hole in the rest of the dash, and the lip of the faceplate that hooked into the rest of the dash wouldn’t move enough to allow it, or come out with it in. It had a couple of wires attached to it that if they disconnected could drop into the bowels of the back of the dash, never to be recovered, so I didn’t want to remove them or knock them loose. Finally, after another 15 minutes or so of wiggling, twisting, pulling, analyzing, and repeating over and over and I still don’t know what I did, it popped out.

Now I could get at the housing box the radio was housed in. Six screws later (four in front, 2 about 7 inches in the back, and which I knew I would never be putting back in) I finally saw the wiring harness.

The connector wasn’t a match to the new radio. Not a big problem, though it sure would have been nice if it had been that easy. It hadn’t been a match to the old one, (an after-market radio that Geoffrey had had installed when he first bought the car) either, so there were a bunch of spliced on male connectors that I could use with the new radio, we just needed the female connector parts. Geoffrey went off to Radio Shack to pick them up. I didn’t have the wiring diagram from the old radio to use for reference, and there was such a mess of tangled spaghetti in there, I pulled all the old ones off to be able to see what was what.

And I discovered that none of the existing wire colors corresponded to any of the colors I found in that first search on the Internet for 1998 Subaru Legacy Outback radio wiring.

I tried, lord knows I tried, to approximately match them. I probably spent another half hour or so trying to get red-with-green-line to be “well, it’s red, but that looks like a black line but maybe it’s really DARK green”. Some might have been right, but most just didn’t make any sense. I was again stymied.

Back to the computer.

About another half hour later I stumbled upon what seemed the right info: a diagram of the connector itself coming off the car with the pins numbered and their assigned function detailed. Yippee, it didn’t matter what the wire colors were, I could just match to the pins! Even better, the functions seemed to make sense in their ordering - right front speaker positive, above right front speaker negative - so I was pretty certain I’d found the thing I needed.

I wired it up. Geoffrey had been popping in every once in a while to check on the status and help with the stuff that didn’t require contortions, and he was there for the maiden launch. We turned it on. And it WORKED! Well, one of the connectors had worked loose so one side of the car speakers weren’t working, but we found that, fixed it, and now I just had to put everything back together.

I screwed the radio tight into its housing, shoved the wires back in the dash, put the radio housing in, screwed it in. I didn’t even bother trying to put the 2 in way in the back - that would only have been possible with a magnetized screw driver, which I didn’t have. They would most likely have ended up being one of those “what’s that metallic rolling around noise” and the housing was solidly in there. I was on a roll.

I got the cigarette lighter back into its hole (no small feat). Victory was just a few screws ahead. I went to put the top of the faceplate in place…

Arrgh!! Crutchfield’s had said it would fit, it’s supposed to fit!! The radio was about an eighth of an inch wider than the faceplate hole.

I had started this at around 10:30 in the morning. It was now nearly 7 in the evening. I’d been doing all this in the unheated but not as cold as outside garage, by flashlight and a 60 watt bulb in the ceiling of the garage. The flashlight was going dim, and the ambient light was gone completely, I could barely see. My brain (and body, from all the contorting) was fried. I could not see a solution. I suggested to Geoffrey that we shave out some of the faceplate inner edge, but he wasn’t too thrilled with that idea.

I still had to bake a carrot cake – I’ve always made a carrot cake for Geoffrey for his birthday (November 22), but what with my dad’s issues after getting his pacemaker, all of which coincided with the birthday, we’d deferred the cake. I promised it for Christmas, instead. I wasn’t about to renege on that promise.

So we left the radio for the night, half installed but working enough that Geoffrey could set it up to his liking and play with its features: HD radio, input from a flash disk or an iPod, other stuff new. He kept saying “It’s so nice to have a working display!!” The simple things in life…

For the rest of the evening we brainstormed as I baked. Geoffrey’s theory was that the radio needed to be set further forward in the housing. I didn’t think that would work, it was just too wide, and the same width all the way back. Geoffrey pointed to an inset ridge in the old radio, and thought that was where the frame needed to sit. I had my doubts, as I didn’t remember a similar ridge in the new radio. We went to bed without a solution as far as I was concerned; Geoffrey was pretty sure he’d solved it.

The next day was Christmas, so we had to defer the radio project for a while longer. I needed to cook, Geoffrey to go up north to break my dad out of Rehab. That went pretty smoothly, all in all – they’d been working on getting him steadier on his feet and back to using a walker, and I’d told the PT that we had some stairs, so they’d been working him on stairs for a few days too. So getting him in the house was a lot less of an ordeal than Thanksgiving – the stairs were taken slow and steady, and we got him in with barely any fuss at all. A cane was really all he needed all day; though we did bring his walker along too, he never really used it.

He enjoyed the dinner, and the fire in the fireplace, which I’d gotten going after Geoffrey left; it was burning merrily by the time they got home. He wasn’t as thrilled with the movie we chose to put on after dinner. A year ago he may have enjoyed it – “1941”, a Steven Spielberg comedy with John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd in it. But after this last time in the hospital, his brain seems to not be able to keep track of too much, and this movie has a bunch of sub-plots that it skips around in. His verdict at the end was: “This movie sucks!”

Oh well… with his chair near the fire and toasty warm, he stayed awake through most of it, so it at least kept his attention. If I had put on one of his favorite movies, “Donovan’s Reef” or “Broken Arrow” (I think that’s the one), or any one of about 10 movies he watches over and over again, he’d have snoozed through most of it. 

Around 5PM he was getting antsy to get back – he was worried about something, whether it be the idea of me driving in the dark or some issue he might have been having that he wouldn’t tell us about, I’m not sure. I talked him into calming down long enough to have a sliver of cake(I’d made it with sugar so I didn’t want him to have too much) and a glass of milk, which he enjoyed and ate with gusto, I packed him a sandwich and some grapes on the theory that he’d missed dinner, then we bundled him up and I drove him home, getting him back to his bed around 6:30 or so. He told me to call him to let him know when I got back; I tried, but he wasn’t answering the phone. I think he’d fallen asleep and though he was wearing his hearing aids he doesn’t really maintain them and I think the battery was dead – I’d been yelling myself hoarse to communicate with him all day.

While I was gone, Geoffrey’d pulled the radio out again, and tried out his theory. It didn’t work.

But, with a fresh, well fed brain, he realized he’d been on the right track: it didn’t need to go forward, it needed to go BACK in the housing, so it would be flush with the frame. By the time I got home, he’d put it back together, including the dreaded upside down screws in the ash tray (it was easier than getting them out, he could use his fingers to start them) and the radio project had been finished.

A nice Christmas, all in all. 

Fun Show at Crystal Farm

2009-11-02T08:41:00.006-05:00

And it was a blast! There will be photos up at some point, but I don't have them so I have to wait until the Crystal Farm website gets updated.

Saturday, Halloween, Frani and Jim had organized a fun show for the lesson kids and the boarders. The morning was dedicated to the lesson kids, and I didn't get there until 11 so wasn't able to really appreciate it. If there's another next year, I'll get there to watch the kids - the ones I saw were great, and such good little troopers!

I was amazed at how many cars were there when I pulled in - if there had been trailers too, it would have been like going to a club-organized fun show. I had no idea there were so many kids in the lesson program.

They have an indoor, but it was warm with a nice wind, and though not sunny it only threatened rain all day, so the show was held in the ring outside. They'd spent days trying to pick out all the rocks from the ring (here in New England, rocks are a bumper crop and you never have to fertilize), and the ring looked pretty nice. Jim had dragged it too, so it was nicely groomed.

The lesson horses were saints: there were 17 classes for the kids, and a couple of them did all 17. They got extra love and attention that night. They all get used regularly so they're in pretty good condition for it, but it still was a long day for them.

There were short breaks between classes of course: we're talking a bunch of kids from about 6 to 13, their parents, and the barn help and some of the boarders trying to call everything to order. Some of the younger kids had people accompanying them in the class, just to keep things from getting out of hand.

When I say "Fun Show", I'm not kidding: the kids got judged pretty fairly but they made sure every one of them got a good distribution of colored ribbons. They were all really well-behaved, and did wonderfully. There were happy smiles everywhere.

Refreshments were provided: soft drinks and water and Dunkin Donuts coffee for the parents, and cookies, muffins, donut holes, and such - so there was ample opportunity to re-stoke the sugar high when needed.:)

Tico being primarily white, I had to stop watching the show and go see how much of a manure-stained mess was awaiting me. It wasn't quite as bad as it could have been, but I spent a bit of time trying to scrub out the rust-colored stains on his butt, belly, face and front legs, with minimal success since it really was too cool for a real bath. The trials and tribulations of owning a gray horse...

I then spent some time with Dusty, because I had a feeling I wouldn't have the energy to spend much time with him after the show. He's always appreciative of a nice rubdown, but makes it clear that the rubdown comes second in importance to carrots. He was of course provided with those, what he considers his basic needs. He's starting to look like a big woolly bear - if he's any indication, this is going to be a bad winter.

It was about 1PM, when the boarders part of the show was supposed to start. I tacked up Tico, and brought him out to the ring to show him what was going on out there. Being as cute as a button and knowing it, he attracted some attention from the bystanders, and got lots of pats. It turned out the kids show still had a number of classes left, so after Tico basked in what he considers his due attention for a few more minutes, I brought him back in, untacked him, and threw him back in his stall.

Once the last of the lesson kid classes was over, and the kids and their parents and friends had left, Jim and Frani brought out lunch and "adult" refreshment for the boarders.

I was expecting a friend, whom I'd invited a while ago to come see the horses but who hadn't been able to get the time until this weekend, so was keeping an eye out the tackroom window, but found time to have a nice glass of Merlot.

When Mary, my friend, showed up, I brought her back to visit Dusty and Tico. She'd known Dusty back before I bought him too, and though he's aged she thought he looked pretty good for a twenty six year old... and he does. She met and approved of Tico the schmoozer as well.

We caught up for a bit, and I showed her around the barn. Mary stayed to watch the show, and she enjoyed it. I'm trying to convince her she needs to get back into horses, now. :)

Soon we were told the boarder's part of the show was about to start, so I changed my shirt for a clean, fairly presentable printed collared shirt, and tacked Tico back up and took him into the indoor to mount up. He was a bit affronted at this: he figured he was done for the day, the lazy boy. But he got over it.

The boarders and staff were split up into two groups: those of us who ride primarily english, and those of us who ride primarily western. I've been riding primarily western because my english saddle is now too wide for the still wide-bodied but not quite as round Tico, and doesn't fit him right.

We were all just automatically entered in each class - there was to be a "Pleasure", "Egg and Spoon", "Equitation" and "Command" class. If anyone told us the order ahead of time, I never heard it, which was fine - we were all just enjoying ourselves... and did I mention, we had been drinking wine? :) It was all very "Go with the Flow", and we were all laughing and joking with each other. When one group was in the ring, the other was on the sidelines shouting encouragement. Jim was providing a lot of funny commentary, too.

Dorothy had been worrying about Pongo being able to be up for the show: he's older than Dusty though in better shape; dentally challenged but he's got a strong back and is a tough old appaloosa. She didn't think he'd be able to canter for very long when the command was given, especially as the day wore on. Riding just for fun, he'd only give her a few steps of canter, then come back down to the trot.

We all were a little dubious, truth be told.

Well, Pongo showed us all what he's made of: first class, when she was asked to canter and Dorothy gave Pongo the cue, he went right into it, and held it until the "now trot" command was given. This was met with a rousing cheer from the crowd: "Yay, Pongo!" Then, the other direction: correct lead, and more cheering from the crowd. Every class it was the same: when asked, he cantered. Pongo is a horse in a million, and he'd shown a lot when he was younger, and he knew this day was "different".

Suzanne and River, it was the same thing: River knew this wasn't your run-of-the-mill hack around day, and rose to the occasion. He's a former eventing horse and has some arthritis issues, but you'd never know it by the way he was moving - they looked great.

Linda and Avita were their usual lovely selves: Avita is a sweet little chestnut Morgan who always gives her all, and she was lively and lovely and Linda rode her with her usual grace and class. What a sweet team!

Katie and her horse Honey, a Tennessee Walker, were at a bit of a disadvantage: Honey run-walks, she doesn't trot. But they did really well in Egg and Spoon - they took the Blue Ribbon!

The first class, I found out later, was the "Pleasure" class. The horse is judged for his willingness to go and happy demeanor throughout, while being asked to walk/trot/canter with other horses around. In other words, no pulling nasty faces at other horses, and if the command is given to trot or canter, don't try to buck your rider off because you're having a bad day and don't wanna. :) The riders job is to smile and look like this is the only place in the world they ever want to be, even if the horse IS having a bad day and expressing himself about it.

I was in the second group, so was riding with mostly Western riders, with the exception of Michelle, the instructor, who was riding Nash English.

Shelley, who events but whose horse Topaz hurt herself a bit so is off work for a while, rode one of Frani's reining horses, Simon, western. Simon is a very cute and VERY short palomino, so Shelley was not only riding an unfamiliar style but a horse about a foot shorter than her horse... well maybe not quite that much, but Topaz is a big girl.

Tico seemed to know the situation was special, too: he turned into Mr. Western Pleasure (old style, not peanut rolling wog* or trope**). Aside from blowing a lead in the later Equitation class, he was a little star - and the blown lead was my fault I'm sure. We got 4ths in "Egg and Spoon" and "Command" class, but came in second in both Pleasure and Equitation. For a horse who can't keep moving when he feels the urge to poop*** and will stop dead in order to take care of business, not bad, not bad at all!

Thanks again, Frani and Jim and Crystal Farm!

* and **: In AQHA (American Quarter Horse Association) and other la-di-da shows, the "Western Pleasure" classes were intended to show the horse going slow, steady, and happy. Even the "fast" gaits were supposed to be slow - as in "under control". This got bastardized,and now even the "English Pleasure" classes have the poor horses trained to do these really torturous-looking, absurdly slow, unnatural and ultimately crippling gaits that detractors (I'm one of them) call "wog" and "trope". The western "jog" is a slow trot. A nice jog is very comfortable. The "Western Pleasure" bastardization of it, the "wog", has the horse dragging their feet, their heads nearly touching the ground, and the horse barely moving.

Similarly, the "trope". The true western lope is a slow, easy canter. The "trope" looks like a hellish combination of trot and canter, four-beats rather than three, with the horse looking completely lame as it moves along, barely bending it knees. It is completely uncomfortable looking both for the horse and the rider, and contrary to the original description of a what constitutes a Pleasure horse.

AQHA *claims* they don't advocate these abominations, and the rule book says the judges are to reward "forward movement" (which these don't resemble in the least). But the big name trainers still train it into young horses, and the judges still pin it.

*** Show horses are expected to keep on moving at the instructed gait when in the show ring, no matter what. A horse who can't poop while moving doesn't go far. Dusty used to always make sure to poop outside the ring; Tico is of the opinion that when the urge hits, satisfy it. I have to admit I wouldn't want to have to poop and keep moving, and we aren't exactly show-focused anyway, so I let it slide.

A Reminder of My Misspent Youth

2009-09-20T18:13:00.003-04:00

Today was a gorgeous day. A little breezy, in the 70s, the sun shining. I got to the barn around noonish.

I groomed Dusty first, giving him a long workover with the rubber mitt, really massaging his withers and shoulder and butt. He made the horse faces of appreciation.

I also wormed him, and he made the horse faces of disapproval: tense lips and chin, ears half-back, the hairy eyeball... completely disgusted. As usual, he would sniff but refused any and all treats for about 15-20 minutes afterwards. Shuffling carrot bits and Kashi Bar crumbs around in his grain bucket, he was a pitiable picture. But he got over it - they were gone when it was time to be turned out.

Tico'd been doing his usual jealousy faces at Dusty while I'd been giving Dusty attention, seesaw bucking in his stall: butt up, shoulder up, butt up, shoulder up, ears back, threatening to kick the wall (he's been seriously screamed at when he DOES kick the wall so he doesn't do it that often anymore).

He got growled at a bunch of times today, and each time - my attention now on him - his ears would go forward and he'd give my his angelic face, "Who, me? Wha?" and poke his nose out through the hole by the grain bucket, mugging for a treat. Brat. Sometimes, he got them. OK, most of the time. I'm a sucker for a cute face.

I put Dusty away and got Tico out. I brushed him, cleaned his feet, put on his leg wraps, saddled him up, coated him in fly spray, and headed outside. Of course, this all took more than an hour - I'm a slow groomer, and easily distracted - I like to play with him: tickle and kiss his nose, scritch his ears, make him move his legs by pointing at them, have him do silly tricks, for which he earns carrot bits, so he's a more than willing participant.

I mounted up in the indoor and we headed out the back door. About 5 steps out, he stopped.

Sometimes I indulge him. He likes to sight-see, so I sat still in the saddle while, head high, he gazed fixedly to the right. One of the trailers usually parked there was gone, maybe he was noticing that, I'm not sure. Then, turning to the left, he looked over in the direction of some of the turnouts, where horses were standing around, heads down, ignoring each other. Then again, to the right; then straight ahead.

I was getting a bit tired of the view, so I nudged him. He didn't budge. I nudged again. Nothing. I poked with the spurs and he woke up and started walking, just as Elaine, one of the other boarders, was walking towards us. "He's practicing to be a statue today", I said to Elaine, and she chuckled.

We wove on down the path between the turnouts, heading to the gate to the back field. The clover along side the turnouts was calling to him, I was preventing him from eating it, and so we sort of oozed along from one side of the path to the other, eventually making it to the back ring. Once there our path was a bit straighter - no grass to tempt him, and he knew that in that back field there was a lot of taller grass he could snipe a grab at walking along.

Have I mentioned that he's a pig?

Anyway, we got out to the back field finally, and started walking along. There are paths out there that go alongside the power lines, I was heading out to follow them. I had no other plan in mind - I considered going on the trails in the woods but I'd done that yesterday. I thought I might just take it easy - the view was wonderful, with some trees already turning red and yellow, and the taller golden stalks of grass waving with the easy breeze, the sun shining down... a perfect early fall day.

When we got to the part of the path that paralleled the power lines, I thought I'd ask for a trot. Tico willingly went into it, then up into a canter.

The wind was whistling by my ears, almost deafening, as he went into a full gallop. Wheeee! We galloped from the far end of the field up to where the path gets gravelly; that's where I asked him to stop. He did, eventually - my fat boy whose favorite gait is usually "whoa" had his head up, ears pricked, and actually pranced! He'd enjoyed himself.

I turned him around and we galloped off again, down the same path, until we got to where someone had dropped a tree across the path. I pulled him up (him still reluctant to stop), and we did it again. And again. Up and back.

I felt both afraid (he was, after all, the horse who helped me to invent the Superman Emergency Dismount) and super-alive. The wind whipped my face, stinging my cheeks. I know I'm 54 and shouldn't be riding like this. I know it's crazy and it's dangerous, and most importantly I know I'm mortal. The last time I rode a horse like this, I was an indestructable teen. And Dusty, in sedate hand-gallops, never felt this wild, this close to untamed.

On the final gallop, from the graveled area to the downed tree, I thought "I wonder if he's tired?" He's in better shape than he used to be, but if pressed to describe what kind of shape he was in, it's still pretty much "round".

I reached forward with the reins, midway up his neck, and leaned a bit forward. I never touched him with my legs; just the opposite, I was trying Very Hard NOT to touch him with the spurs at all.

He shifted into Sixth Gear. I could feel him both coil up and stretch out, close to the ground, flying. Oh. My.God. OH. MY. FUCKING. GOD!!!!!!! Yeah!!!!

About 20 feet before the downed tree, I started to yell "whoa" and sit back. He galloped on. I sat back more, really trying to grind my butt into the saddle, and took hold of the reins. We turned off to circle to the right, at a *slightly* slower gallop. I finally got him stopped about 20 feet from the gate back to the barn.

He walked a couple of steps, then jogged, and tried to go faster again. "No, no, we're done for the day", I said, and walked him on past the gate to the track on the other side of the field, to get him walked down a bit.

I let him stop and nosh a few times, too. He'd given me an incredible adrenaline rush, it was the least I could do. :)

Bats

2009-06-19T12:08:00.011-04:00

This is not a story about horses. I've just had my memory jolted recently in regards to some close encounters of the bat kind, and I thought I'd write about them.

My parents (and after the divorce, my mother) owned an old, large, three-family house. The house had been built in the mid-eighteen hundreds, and had some decidedly old "features". Ceramic knobs on the beams in the basement were an integral part of the wiring, for instance.

We grew up in the first floor apartment; the other two apartments were both accessed on the second floor, with third floor rooms in each. In one of the apartments we inherited tenants with the house, and they were there almost until my mother passed away - one himself passing away, and the other moving into a nursing home just before my mother died.

We went through a number of tenants over the years in the other apartment. That apartment had a door in the ceiling of the third floor hallway right at the top of the stairs. It gave access to the attic - a regular door, not your typical attic door. In order to access it, you needed to place a ladder at the top of the stairs, beneath the door. If the ladder toppled, you'd go down about 20 stairs and end up sprawled in the bathroom.

Both apartments also had little crawlspaces into the attic with half doors up in the third floor rooms. When I was a kid I loved those little doors - they were like Munchkin doors.

We also had another set of tenants: bats. Quite a few of them. In the summer, in the early evening, we'd see them circling around, diving, veering, catching their mosquito supper.

Anything that ate mosquitoes is all right by me. I liked our bats.

Over the years, various tenants would report bat sightings. Once, the very-pregnant wife got a shock when she went to open a window, only to find a bat hanging from it. Our first inkling that the bats were active again would be panic-filled tenants pounding on our side-door which accessed the stairway to the upper apartments. Screaming in fear or anger or both, demanding death to bats - I always thought it was funny. Miserable brat, I was.

The attic was off-limits to tenants, so my father, the delegated bat-executioner, would climb up a ladder at the top of the stairs, open the door in the ceiling, and haul himself up. The attic space was maybe five and a half feet high, and my father 6'1", so he'd always have to crouch over. In some places, there wasn't any real floor, just cross beams.

He would open the hatch to the widow's walk to get some light in, as well as bring an electric torch. Beaming the light into all the nooks and crannies, he would try to find the bats (he claimed, though he never found any) and any holes where the bats got in and out; and if he found anything that looked a likely access point, he'd patch it or stuff something into it and declare victory. He'd tell the tenants again to not leave the Munchkin doors open, and not to go up into the attic or even open the door to it.

As far as he was concerned, if they ignored his warnings any bat visitations were on their head.

And the next night we'd still see the bats coming out of the eaves at dusk to feast on the mosquitoes.

Fast-forward a number of years. A tenant had been a problem, had been trying to intimidate and threaten my now failing mother. I'd had to get involved with the jerk - sometimes I would be there and he wouldn't know it. When he'd start hammering on my mother's door and screaming obscenities I'd whip the door open and snarl at him and he'd run up the stairs so fast you'd think I'd held a gun on him - the asswipe was too much of a coward to confront a young woman, only had the balls to harass an elderly one. After finally getting them out, my mother decided she didn't want another tenant.

But she was sick and getting frail, and I decided to move into that apartment to keep an eye on her, take her to her doctor's visits, and be close by if she needed help. I didn't give any thought to the bats - we hadn't had a report of a visit for a few years.

One hot summer night, asleep with nothing on me but the bedsheets, I woke up terrified: something had just gone from my knee to about my chest, a soupcon of a touch, a flittering, a tingle... and then was gone.

"Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit!!!" I thought to myself as I jammed my eyes closed, pulled the sheet over my head, and lay there trying to not move at all, straining to hear my attacker.

The room had gone ominously quiet. I lay perfectly still, too afraid to move. Then I heard it: scritch scritch scritchscritchscritch scritch...

Thoughts going through my mind: "What the hell is he doing?? Where is he? I really need to turn on the light! There's no way I'm going to move! Hello, stupid: he knows you're here, it's not like not moving is gaining you anything! Get a grip! Turn on the fucking light! It's probably a mouse!"

Finally, I managed to pull the covers down off my face and look around. The scritching noise abruptly stopped when my sheets rustled, and I turned my bedside lamp on. I sat up and saw no one.

Boy was I glad no one had been around to witness what felt like hours spent cowering under the sheets. Relieved, feeling a bit sheepish, but still with a little niggling fear that whoever it was was standing in the living room around the corner, out of sight, but there... I forced myself to move, to get up and look - to face my arch-nemesisisis.

Just before I put my foot to the floor, I looked down. There, almost completely camouflaged on the dark brown section of the rug at the foot of my bed was a small bat trying to act nonchalant.

I had no experience dealing with bats in my bedroom. Little did I know that I would live to acquire that experience... but I digress.

I didn't have any gloves handy and didn't want to touch him bare-handed. Going out to the kitchen, I grabbed a paper bag and a tennis racket.

I'm still not quite sure why a tennis racket, except that it gave me a couple more feet to put between my hand and the bat. Using it, I tried to coax it into the paper bag.

The bat was having none of that: he clung onto the rug for dear life.

I nudged a bit harder. He clung a bit more desperately.

Finally, I managed to dislodge him and quickly closed the top of the bag, hoping that he was in the bottom and not squished in the folds. I threw a robe on and flew downstairs, opened up the door, and with the opening facing away from me shook the bag.

No bat. I shook it again. Yup, something's in there. I tipped it over, nothing. I tapped the bottom of the bag, and finally, the bat flopped out. He seemed alive, but wasn't moving.

I left him on the porch, and checked the next day. He wasn't there anymore, and I really hope he survived.

That was the first visit. I got a few more through that summer, sometimes finding them clinging to curtains, even walking around (I think they were juveniles - they didn't appear to be able to fly).

Once, as I was cooking up a batch of chili and had just lifted the cover to check on it, one flew down from the stove fan and landed on my jeans pocket.

After I got over my surprise (it isn't every day a bat uses you as a perch), I started to head out my back door and down the stairs. As I was going down the stairs, the bat started to climb. Up my shirt. Slowly, inexhorably.

"Stay THERE! Stay THERE! Stay THERE!!" I was chanting with each step. My mother, sitting in her kitchen on the other side of the stairway, called out "Who are you talking to, hon?"
I didn't answer, I didn't want to make any extra noise and startle it. I stepped out onto the stoop, grabbed the bottom of my shirt and started to dance around, flipping the shirt madly around, jumping up and down. I can only imagine what that looked like to a casual observer.

Finally he got the message and let go. He also ended up on the porch, a bit more violently than I'd intended. When I went back to check after telling my mother what had happened, there was no sign of him.

When thinking about these bat visits and my dumping them on the stoop unceremoniously, I sometimes wonder if maybe they all were really too young to be outside. I hope Miss Kitty, our calico cat, wasn't responsible for them dying a horrible death after I tried my best to "save" them...

Odd that I dredged up this memory today - it's the 17th anniversary of my mother's death.

Buzz and Jetty

2009-05-14T22:33:00.009-04:00

Buzz died after falling down the shit hole. Not immediately, but it was the beginning of the end.

He'd always warned us: "Watch your step, don't fall down the shit hole!"

I suppose I should explain. The barn he was renting was a real New England old style, and really old, barn. It was built in such a way that the main entry was level with the drive while one side of the barn faced the street. The other side faced the field, and on the field side there was a whole other level of the barn evident - a basement of sorts. In past years it had been retrofitted by the owners for I think pigs; before that it probably had had stalls on that level.

The barn was old enough that the upper floor, though the planks were thick and solid and worn so smooth that they almost seemed to be one big plank, sagged quite a bit. Buzz was constantly vigilant about checking the joists he had put in in the basement that were holding the floor up; but where joists weren't, dips were. It was a floor with character.

There was a trap door in that floor, right outside the tack room - about 2 1/2 ft square and about 6" thick, with a big iron ring to lift it up with. In the winter, when the snow piled up so high that trucking wheelbarrows full of manure out to the back of the field became impossible, Buzz would lift the trap door and dump the manure down that hole. In the spring, with the snow gone, he'd spend weeks traipsing it all back out to the back of the field.

That was the shit hole. In the dead of winter he'd hoist the heavy trap up with a hay hook looped through the ring, to dump the brimming wheelbarrows. It seemed as if he was opening up a portal to the pits of hell: the malodorous steam would billow up in the cold air, the warmth of it hitting our faces as we giggled nervously, trying from a few steps back to see down through it to the manure mountain below. We were all a bit afraid of and fascinated by the shit hole.

So it's kind of ironic that Buzz himself fell down the shit hole. It must have been late winter, since he didn't fall too far, but he did scrape his leg up badly. He didn't take care of it, it got gangrenous, and he ended up in the hospital. He delegated care of the horses to Karen, since she lived so close it only made sense, I suppose. My memories of this time are a bit hazy; I think I also had a new boyfriend at the same time, my first, and so my attention was elsewhere. A typical self-involved teen.

I don't have a good sense of the time line: I think he was in the hospital for a couple of months before he finally died; but I also seem to remember he came out for a bit, then went back in. He had lost a lot of weight before he died, so he probably had more wrong with him than that he'd fallen down the shit hole, but I don't think anyone ever told us (or at least me) what the whole truth was. His was the first wake I'd ever attended, and I remember thinking how that body wasn't Buzz at all - it was too tiny, and too waxy, and too wrong.

After he died, his family and Karen argued about the horses. She said Buzz had told her she could keep them; I don't know if he did or he didn't, but he never put it in writing and they were his family so they had the last word.

They had the oldest ones - Little Dick and the little gray pony Smokey - trucked off to the killers, and I suppose must have sold most of the others, though I don't know that for a fact. I do know that they ended up keeping Jetty and a little white welsh pony named Jessie.

I don't know why they kept them - they had no love for them - unless it was just because Karen had been such a pain in the ass they did it for spite. And because I was Karen's friend, I wasn't allowed to see Jetty either.

I don't remember how it happened - I think I just got up the nerve to try again, and stopped at Buzz's ex-wife's house where they were being kept - but about a year later I was allowed to see Jetty.

They'd almost killed him. He was so thin, I could see all his ribs, and his hip bones jutted out like wire coat hangers. I begged them to let me start bringing food, and they said "Sure, it's your money". So I started bringing food for Jetty and Jessie.

For about a month, I'd bring over grain and some hay. I'd gotten maybe a hundred pounds back on Jetty - his condition wasn't great, but he wasn't quite so skeletal any more. For the first time in over a year I climbed on his back for this photo -

I'd thought the photo in the previous post was my only one of Jetty; I'd forgotten this one, which I just found recently looking through an old photo album.

He seemed so frail, at first I wasn't sure if he could support my weight, and I didn't want to ask him to move. But he knew he had a rider up, and he arched his neck and tucked his head in, proudly. I got off him quickly but I was encouraged: he seemed to be rallying. I went home happy that day.

A few days later, I brought over some worm medicine for them. I mixed a bit in Jetty's and a bit in Jessie's grain. Jetty ate it hungrily, but Jessie was suspicious. I left it there, hoping she'd eat it later. Neither one of them had been wormed in a long time.

After I left, Buzz's family saw that she wasn't eating her grain and, even though I'd told them that I'd mixed wormer in it, fed that to Jetty as well - they didn't want any to go to waste - as if they'd been the ones to actually put up the money for it.

Jetty colicked that night - the double dose of worm medicine (and it was very harsh stuff back then) was too much for his already stressed system. They called me, and I walked him for hours, and I called Billy Cash, Buzz's friend, who came over and got mineral oil into him, and whiskey (these were the things the old-timers did for colic), and we walked and walked into the night.

I went home exhausted; he didn't seem as stressed so they told me to go home. The next morning they called to tell me he'd died.

He was a good horse.

A Tale of Two Slushes

2009-05-11T08:47:00.002-04:00

Sent to the younger sister of one of my partners in crime at Buzz's barn. She'd posted about just watching True Grit again, and that her favorite scene was where John Wayne puts the reins in his teeth and charges at the villains with a rifle in one hand and a pistol in the other.

I don't know if Karen ever told you about the time we went to the variety store on 129 (Mike's Corner Variety, right?) for slushes, against Buzz's direct orders to stay off the road.

She and I think it was Cherry Berry went in for the slushes, while I held the horses. When they came back, Karen handed me my slush and hers, so I put the reins in my teeth (on Jetty) and she went to climb on (I think Heidi).

Heidi started to move off, so Jetty thought we were going home, and turned and started trotting/prancing off (remember how he never walked)?

My reins-in-my-teeth ride ended less than stellarly: I fell off, still clutching the slushes, right on the only hard part of that mostly dirt parking lot: a big slab of concrete. Karen and Cherry raced off to get Jetty who was running down the middle of 129 (we didn't want him running into the barn riderless, or Buzz would have banished us) while I lay on the concrete moaning.

They caught him, and brought him back, and I rode him home (really wishing he'd just friggin WALK for a change). I'd bruised my tailbone, and it was probably the most painful injury I'd ever had.

Here's a photo of Jetty - the only one I have, sadly. He was much more handsome than this Polaroid made him appear; he had lovely proportions, not a huge head and small butt. That's Karen on Honey, behind us.

A Recent Day at Crystal Farm

2009-04-24T17:01:00.003-04:00

It was late morning. When I got there, I was told that Tico had already been turned out and Dusty hadn’t gone out because the turnouts had been too wet in the morning.

No big deal - I figured, switch Dusty for Tico in that turnout, Dusty will get to stretch his legs and I can ride Tico.

When I saw Dusty in his stall, I changed my mind: he was coated in mud and loose hair. I decided I’d vacuum him first (I have a Shop Vac just for that use) and get the dead hair and mud off him, then I'd switch them around.

There was a LOT of loose hair and dirt, I had to empty the vacuum after doing one side of him, then again after the other.

Of course a few carrots and Kashi bars were passed his way all the while, and praise for being such a good boy, just standing there. Then I picked his feet and we started to go out.

It was then that I saw Tico in all his muddy splendor.

I hadn’t recognized him at first – he was so coated in mud I wasn’t sure if it was Tico or the appaloosa Comet, another boarder, I was seeing. But there was a blue halter on the muddy face, and when I called his head came up and he came running over.

The switch went well - Tico can sometimes be a twit with Dusty, he's very jealous of any treats Dusty gets, and has been known to act out about it in his stall. I didn't want to see any such bad behavior with them out in the turnout, so I made sure to give Tico a treat, switch the lead line, and keep a good hold of his halter to make him pay attention - and he did.

The amount of dried mud on him, I didn’t want to just move it around and have it end up crusting on his skin so I decided to vacuum him too.

This was not a decision I made without some trepidation. He’s not good about being vacuumed and we've had some cross-tie breaking incidents involving the vacuum.

The vacuum has never done anything to deserve this kind of attitude.

While I've been accused of being a bit of a fluffbunny in my dealings with horses, I don't have a lot of patience with a horse who was good about something *once*, and then not. He'd apparently come to the conclusion after some thought that he didn't care for being vacuumed. Breaking crossties and going on walkabout on the property was definitely the option he preferred when the vacuum was presented.

Not being vacuumed was not an option as far as I was concerned. Still, I just didn’t feel like having to fix broken crossties again; so Tico, the vacuum, and I (with a pocket full of carrot bits), all went into his stall together.

I turned the vacuum on. He eyeballed the vacuum and cowered against the wall. He did a little tippy-hoof dance, and shot me the stink eye. I produced a carrot, and approached, vacuum nozzle in hand. The carrot reached his face as the nozzle touched his skin. His skin jumped, but he stayed put.

We continued this approach, for a bit - he'd get a piece of carrot if the eyeball was too buggy, but the vacuum was relentless. When he'd start to really get himself wound up, turning, or backing up, I'd growl "Whoa!" and he'd stop - he'd listen. Which makes me even more sure that it was all an act: if he was truly afraid he'd have knocked me down and gotten the hell outa Dodge.

I had to get him turned around to get the other side, and it all started again of course. The equine brain is a wonderful thing: things they see with only the left eye are completely surprising when they're turned around and catch their first glimpse - again - this time with the right eye.

With the continued application of well-timed carrot bits, we got through the ordeal. By the time I was done, he was still standing against one wall, but with his head down, relaxed.

So I took him out onto the crossties, and noticed a big nasty streak of black on the inside of his back leg. Crap! Out came the warm water, and he got a quick cleaning *down there*. :)

Of course this all took some time and I had things to do. I debated not riding at all, but decided I’d just do 15 minutes. I brought him out back, and we trotted and cantered a bit, and he was pretty good – a bit high headed, but moving up and not doing anything really naughty. There were gusts of wind, and everyone knows they carry horse-killing monsters, but all in all he was pretty well behaved.

I was just about to go back to the barn, but I thought I’d try something.

One of the other boarders had set up some jumps out back, including a tiny thing – basically they’d taken a couple of the X-shaped bottoms from some jump standards, turned them on their sides and set a rail across them. It was about one foot, maybe a foot and a half high.

Since this is a horse who doesn't like lifting his feet up all that high (and so every so often trips over things real or imaginary) I decided I’d have him walk over it, to get him to lift his legs.

We walked up to it. I gave him a chance to really look at it.

The first time, he bumped his front legs, not lifting them up high enough. He stopped for a moment after getting his front legs over, then tried his backs.

With his back legs again, he rapped against the rail. I think he was hoping he’d knock it down with one of his back legs and wouldn’t have to step up with the other, because he kind of ended up almost standing on it on the way over, and then getting a bit tangled in it. It stayed right where it was.

He didn’t like that at all.

I asked him do it again. His front legs he lifted right up and over, quite handily.

Then we stopped. You could almost hear the gears grinding in his head.

I didn’t do anything, just sat there waiting to see what he’d do.

He started to move... sideways. As nice a sidepass as you’d like to see. Until we got to the X, which was of course wider and higher than the rail itself.

He stopped again, thinking. He must have stood that way another 20 seconds, before I gave him a little nudge.

He *very* carefully lifted first one back leg, then the other, up over the rail, not even a tap.

For that, he got to grab some grass on our way back to the barn.

Jetty

2009-02-28T10:58:00.008-05:00

I'm going to be skipping around a bit, I guess. I was just reading a post from mugwumpchronicles.blogspot.com about an old horse named Annie, and she reminded me of an old horse who taught me a lot, when I was growing up.

He was one of Buzz's horses, and named Jetty.

I've found the only photo I have of Jetty, me riding him. Karen is on Honey, the palomino.

He was actually much more handsome than this Polaroid makes him look. His head was not that huge, and his butt not that small. I remember being appalled at this when it was taken, but I'm glad now that I saved it.

Jetty was not in the usual string of horses we little girls were allowed to ride. To ride Jetty, you had to earn the privilege. I worked my way up the ranks, first with Zero the sociopath pony, then Oscar the ugly palomino (who taught me that a horse will ALWAYS run back to the barn), then Little Dick the hackney stud pony (who helped put me on Buzz's good side, winning him 6-packs of Schlitz from unsuspecting patsies), until I reached the pinnacle: I was Jetty's rider. No one else was allowed to ride Jetty but me.

Jetty was beautiful. He was about 16H. A big red bay with black mane and tail, his coat shone dark copper in the sun. He was also pretty old - Buzz said he was about 25, 26 years old. When you looked at his back, you could believe it: he had a prominent wither with a bit of a swayback. He'd had a bowed tendon at some point in his life but it was now fully healed; and though it didn't bother him, he would twist his left foot out to the side in a little flipper-like movement when he moved.

Leading him along, he looked like a regular old horse, but once I clambered onto his back, he become the quintessential "noble mount", head tucked, neck arched, flaring nostrils - bigger than life, awe-inspiring. This horse never walked. His slow speed was "prance", and after that we had trot, then an incredible extended trot, then canter and gallop.

And then there was the "canter in place": if I held him back and asked for a canter with my leg, he would - only we wouldn't go anywhere. He'd also switch leads at a touch of my leg, every stride if I asked.

Idiot that I was back then, I didn't realize that a lot of what Jetty did was dressage - and higher level, at that.

What Buzz told us of his history was this: he'd been a lead horse at the track, and had been owned by Billy Cash, a track blacksmith at Suffolk Downs (I think it was Suffolk, not Rockingham). Buzz said he'd bowed the tendon there, and Billy Cash was going to have him put down because it was a bad bow and he didn't think he'd be able to get him sound.

But Buzz, who'd been trying to get Billy Cash to sell him for a long time, persuaded Billy to give Jetty to him. He wanted to try to get him sound.

And this is what he did: he set up a big sling, and supported Jetty in that sling for weeks to keep the weight off his leg, while wrapping it every day, until finally Jetty walked off sound. And aside from the flipper movement to the side, you wouldn't have known the leg had been injured.

This all happened before I started going to Buzz's barn. I hung on every word as he described putting up the sling, and getting it around Jetty's belly, and how some horses can't be slung up like that because they panic but Jetty was a perfect patient and he brought him around. Then he'd give Jetty a beer.

We all accepted Buzz's story because we were kids, and it sounded good to us. And it was all "a few years ago", we couldn't conceive of the possibility that Jetty's history could go back further. It's only in retrospect, thinking about the way that horse could move, that leads me to believe there had to have been more.

He was a good horse.

We would ride down to the Old Airport in Billerica: me on Jetty; Karen on either Honey (a palomino mare Buzz had brought home one day from the Shrewsbury Auction) or Heidi, a grade mare Buzz told us was Little Dick's daughter; Cherrie on either Heidi or another horse (I'm having trouble remembering all their names, sadly).

The ride over, Jetty would start to lather up: he never stopped prancing, you see. Karen would sing - usually "Skippy, the Bush Kangaroo", really loudly and really off-key. We'd laugh and joke, talking about family and boys and school and everything else. The ride down Aldrich Road always seemed both shorter than expected and longer than it was the day before, because we all anticipated what was to come. Even the horses would start to get excited as we approached the turn-off.

Turning in to a tree-lined path, we crossed through woods towards "the Pits". These were deep holes in the ground where we believed granite had been taken out years before, and that filled with water in the spring. There were often a bunch of older kids hanging out there, drinking and carrying on - it was always a bit scary passing them. But beyond them, we would arrive at the long, wide dirt path that went behind the abandoned hangar on Hopkins Street.

There, we'd race. Riding like indians and pretending we were jockeys, crouched over necks, their manes whipping our faces, our own hair streaming behind us and our grins wide and wild, we'd race until the dirt road ran out.

Then we'd turn around and do it again.

Jetty never won, though he tried. I'm not sure if it was age or that he'd pranced for nearly two miles, but I always was a little sad for him - I could tell he wanted to be fastest, he wanted to win, for me.

He was a good horse.

We had a lot of adventures over at the Old Airport. Hopefully I'll write about them sooner than I did this one.

I've been looking at one of my other sites...

2008-12-26T17:12:00.002-05:00

This still cracks me up:
Tico being himself.

If that takes too long, go back to the main page and click on the low-bandwidth version. There are also other movies, and some photos, from Dusty's 25th Birthday this past April.

Merry Christmas! (Alright, yes, I'm a day late...)

Nothing to do with horses, but...

2008-11-05T11:10:00.004-05:00

I've seen a lot of history happen.

I was in grammar school when Kennedy was shot. That horrible day I barely understood; I remember it mainly because of the image it evokes for me: my mother sitting in her bedroom on the blanket box, staring in disbelief at the black and white TV, wailing in grief.

That was followed by some dark days. People who seemed to promise hope for America and for the world were being gunned down: Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King... gone in a blink of an eye.

Of course, not every world changing event I've seen has been bad: there were the space flights, moon landings, technological breakthroughs that had been barely imagined in Science Fiction stories.

There have been triumphs and tragedies. I have seen things... :)

Yesterday was different. I saw and I participated in history. I voted. More people voted than probably have ever before voted in an American presidential election. The apathy that seemed to have had a stranglehold on America was lifted, thanks to an African-American man who most of us had never even heard of not all that long ago.

It was exhilarating to be a part of it.

Taking a Left Turn here...

2008-10-27T22:29:00.006-04:00

I'm not happy with how my day off spent at the barn story is going... so, here's what happened a little over a week later (last Thursday):

I'd gone over, even though K, the instructor, had cancelled our lesson that morning. I spent a good deal of time gossipping with the girls (there'd been lots of drama since I was there last), and finally got around to tacking Tico up and taking him for a ride.

It was a crisp fall day, so we went out to the back ring for a bit. Dusty and Pongo are turned out in the paddock that wraps around one side of the ring; Stoney, Elaine's old boy, is across from them.

Dusty and Pongo were hanging out by the water trough; Stoney was off away from the gate but came over to say hi. Dusty had just had a big drink and was standing there with his tongue hanging out.

I should mention: this is how Dusty drinks. He curls his tongue up and slurps water through it. He then holds the water a while (I can only guess that he prefers his water lukewarm, so warms it in his mouth) before swallowing. While he's holding it in his mouth, his tongue hangs out.

I rode Tico over next to to fence and reached over to pat his head and say hi. He greeted me, tongue still hanging out; when I didn't offer carrots he lost interest, and we moseyed along to the ring.

I rode Tico outside for a short while, maybe 10-15 minutes, then went back in. At the time I didn't notice if Dusty was still standing in the same place as we rode by.

Later, after brushing Tico, taking off his boots, cleaning his feet, feeding him carrots, etc. etc., I walked out to see Dusty and Pongo with some carrots and an apple. As I approached them, Dusty was near the water trough, it looked like he was in the same place as before; Pongo was about 25 feet away, dozing.

Dusty had his tongue hanging out - I thought, wow, he's been thirsty! I called to him... no reaction. I started to get a bit concerned: "has he had a stroke or something? Why is his tongue hanging out for so long?" As I approached, calling him, calling Pongo, he still was not reacting. I walked a bit faster.

I got to the gate, opened it and went into the turnout with them - still no reaction to my presence.

This is *really* odd: the horses all know (even those who aren't mine) that there's a good possibility a treat is going to magically appear in my hand, and they all live in hope when they see me.

Dusty just stood there, tongue hanging out. It even looked a bit dried out - we had a fairly brisk breeze that day.

So I grabbed it. I wanted to see if he *could* pull it back, still working on that "stroke" theory.

He'd been fast asleep. He gave a start, pulled away, and did a thbaw! thbaw! with his tongue. I got the hairy eyeball, and he looked at me accusingly, as if *I'd* been the one who made his tongue feel so weird.

Through all this, Pongo was fast asleep.

I started feeding Dusty carrots (carrots make EVERYTHING better), and about 30 seconds later I felt a little nudge on my back. I turned around, and there was Pongo. He hadn't woken up when I was calling Dusty and talking to him, or calling both of them, but the crunch of carrots came through loud and clear. So I gave them both some carrots, and took bites out of the apple and fed them each little bits (Dusty turned his nose up at it until I did that; little bites is all the dentally-challenged Pongo can eat).

Dusty had been turned out in his sheet, and even though the air was a bit chilly the sun was warm, so I took it off. He'd been stepping right up for his share of carrots up until then, but then when I tried to give him more (the sheet still in my other arm) he acted like I was attacking him and hid behind Pongo.

WTF??

I finally figured it out: he thought I had some idea of putting his sheet BACK ON, and he was having NONE of THAT.

Meanwhile, I realized there was a chain-clanging going on in the background; behind me, Stoney was standing next to his gate, shaking it and rattling the chain holding it closed, trying to get my attention. It was pretty obvious he knew what was going on, and his thoughts were "Hey, what am I, chopped liver?" I held a few carrots back from the two grumpy and sleepy old men and went over to give him his due, as well.

Boys!

Oscar the Palomino

2008-09-02T20:51:00.010-04:00

I grew up watching Rex Trailer a local TV "Cowboy". Rex had Goldrush, a gorgeous palomino. And of course there was Roy Rogers and Trigger, and let's not forget Mr. Ed. All beautiful palominos.

Oscar was a palomino, too. Well technically. He was kind of yellow, with a kind of beige-whitish mane and tail.

That's as far as his resemblence to the aforementioned palominos went.

Not to put too fine a point on it: Oscar was butt-ugly. He had a big head with a roman nose. If you've ever read the Terry Pratchett Discworld stories: Oscar was the equine equivalent of the Igors, without the stitches and scars. He looked as if someone threw horse parts in a pile, then asked a bunch of preschoolers to pin the pieces together to make a horsie.

However, Oscar had one HUGE thing going for him: he wasn't Zero.

Oscar was a bit over 15 hands, too - we'd graduated to a horse! We still sometimes had to ride Zero if someone else (actually his eventual owner) was riding Oscar - but we'd managed to advance a grade in the Buzz School of Equitation, which was heady stuff.

Not to say Oscar was well-trained. Nope, no one would ever have said that. Oscar was pretty typical of Buzz's herd of little-girl-dream-crushers: like Zero before him, he often seemed to be striving to destroy all the horse-as-magical-creature fantasies we might have had the misfortune to entertain.

We were stubborn little sods, though. We. Loved. Horses. And Oscar was certainly more... something, granted not magical, than Zero. Bigger? Less homicidal? Something...

Oscar lived in a straight stall - you don't see them much anymore. When he wasn't being ridden or let out to graze, he basically stood there. His manger was in front of him; he could twist around a bit; he could move forward and backward a few feet. It's possible, though I don't remember it, that he could lay down - I've seen some horses manage it in a straight stall.

The ponies were also in straight stalls; but being smaller they were able to turn and look out into the aisle, watch what was going on. For Oscar it was just too narrow for him to turn around.

It was however, wide enough for a girl or two to squeeze in next to him and brush him - which is what Cherry and I did one day. I was on Oscar's left side, near his shoulders; Cherry was on his right, near his rump. Karen being late to the party, was straddling the half-wall separating Oscar's stall from the next horse (I think it was Little Dick) on the same side as I, behind me and to my right. The wall to the right was a full wall - his stall was next to the tackroom. Oscar was probably dozing - I think life in the straight stall didn't offer him too much to get excited about.

I don't know why, but Karen apparently decided that she couldn't really brush him from the wall, so decided to hop on his back.

Her plan, not well thought out, was of course poorly executed. Squatting, balanced on the balls of her feet, teetering, with her left hand holding the post that the stall door was hung on, she tried to launch herself onto his back and swing her left leg over him.

But she was off-balance: instead of her leg going over his back she kicked him - pretty hard - right in the kidneys.

A horse generally will try to run away from anything scary or painful. Oscar, dozing only moments before, found himself being attacked - probably soon to be disemboweled - with nowhere to go. His only choice was to defend himself; jaws agape, he turned towards the monster on his left side.

And there I stood, happily currying his shoulder, humming.

A huge bug-eyed, curled-lip, bared-teeth, roman-nosed yellow head snaked at me, a blur of fear and anger and of course, teeth: I know I'm repeating myself with the teeth thing, but they were pretty memorable. He bit me right in the cheek. On my face. If I look for it I can still find the scar.

My mother was appalled: to add insult to injury, she made me get a tetanus shot.

It was a while before I forgave Karen for that incident.

I have at least one more Oscar story before I move on to Little Dick and Jetty. If you read this earlier, and you're confused about the new title: I decided to change it since this story doesn't even mention Buzz. The next Oscar story will.

Oh, by the way:

Just in case you don't realize it: we were doing a really stupid thing. We did a lot of stupid things. When I look back on it, it's a wonder I survived some of the stupid things we did.

Just saying.

Oh Crap.

2008-08-27T14:38:00.000-04:00

It turns out I wasn't as lucky as I'd thought when I invented the Superman dismount.

I cracked/broke an eyetooth that's part of a three point bridge - with a front tooth.

It happened that I'd been at the periodontist that morning, and was seeing the dentist two days later: I'm in the early stages of getting an implant for ANOTHER broken cap.

I'm pretty hard on my teeth.

I mentioned to the dentist that the bridge seemed a bit loose. He agreed, but hoped I'd just jarred the tooth a bit loose and that it would get better with time. However, he had his doubts and called the periodontist; I was back in seeing him a few days later.

He saw the crack, and sent me yet again back to the dentist... who agreed there's a crack, but can't tell how bad it is. Now I have an appointment next week where he'll attempt to remove the bridge to assess the damage, while trying not to do any further damage to either of the anchor teeth (the other one is loose, probably not being helped by being moved when the broken side moves).

He doesn't think it is going to go well. Sigh.

I'm looking forward to a few weeks of being a complete hillbilly hermit. Oh boy.

Dusty, ex-show horse

2008-08-21T15:55:00.002-04:00

In Groton, there were apple orchards nearby where he could run, and trails to explore through woods dappled with sunlight. In the fall, the orchard owners let us take the "drops". There were two or three apple varieties planted: Macintosh, Delicious, maybe Cortland - I'm not too well-versed in apples. We would take empty bags over and as we were picking up the less bruised ones (for the horses - honest!) he and the other horses would be grazing in the treasure-laden grass, their steady chewing interrupted by occasional KERRRR-UNCHes as they found the half-hidden, juicy fruit.

One time we saw a deer in the orchard, standing at the top of one of the rows. Or at least I saw it - Dusty was giving the grass a loving glance. The deer saw us about the same time I saw her, stock-still, head high; the wind shifted and I think Dusty smelled the deer before he saw her. His head came up and he stared, mesmerized. I didn't know what to expect.

The deer turned and leaped away, and the next thing I knew Dusty was after her. I don't know if he wanted to say "hi" or if it was some long-latent cow-horse herding instinct kicking in, but it was exhilarating and fun and funny all at the same time. I hated to stop him, but the deer was far into the woods and whatever his reason for giving chase, it would have been fruitless. He obeyed, but kept looking back towards the spot he'd last seen her until we topped the next hill.

Dusty had become engaged with life; he cared that you groomed him, he loved his carrots and apples, he nickered at me when I came to see him. He'd calmed down and blossomed into the really sweet, trusting and loving horse he is to this day. The Lunatic Horse had morphed into a sweet and kind, loving and gentle good boy. I don't think it had been S's intention, but kicking us out had been the best thing she could do for Dusty.

Dusty at his barn in Groton:

Dusty on a trail ride. The trail had flooded:

In a postscript: S kept Bonnie for about 2 months, then sold her. After being unceremoniously shown the door for no good reason, and then hearing that she'd sold Bonnie when she had said she wouldn't, I stopped speaking with S for about 5 years. I learned Bonnie's fate later, when we were again on speaking terms.

The woman who bought her was well-intentioned but a newbie owner. She boarded her, and Bonnie had been turned out in a field where they had electric heated water troughs. The one in her turnout went dry and shorted out. She got shocked and then refused to drink for a number of days, but no one realized it until she had a bad colic. She never really fully recovered.

S eventually took her back after a few years, I'm not really sure why. When she got her back, Bonnie's hooves and feet - and Bonnie had had GREAT feet - were a complete mess.

We eventually spoke again (S admitting what a complete bitch she'd been went a long way towards reconciliation; she'd got her indoor ring and new barn in the meantime) and that was when I heard about Bonnie's situation. I visited with her, and she seemed to remember me - or at least the carrots I brought.

She'd been my first horse who would do the "Kiss for Carrots" trick (Dusty knows it too), and my face was covered with orange slobber by the time I ran out of them. I brushed her; she'd always had the most beautiful shiny blood bay coat. Even when she was filthy, that coat shone. She made all the appreciative faces I remembered as I found the "right spots". It was good to see her again. She seemed to be doing pretty well all in all, and I was glad S had got her back.

One day S told me that Bonnie was just in too much pain, that just standing was hard - she'd lost the spark in her eye and her interest in food. S was going to have her put down. Bonnie was 16 years old. She and Dusty were almost exactly the same age - 10 days separated their births. Was it really nine years ago? My gosh.

I got to say goodbye and overload her with carrots a few days before - for carrots, she roused herself. S wouldn't tell me the exact day it would happen, she didn't want me to be there crying, making her cry. She called me when it was done.

Soon after, I moved Dusty back with S, and we were there until I was thrown out again. :) Well, she decided she didn't want to be involved with horses any more, they wanted to sell their place, so Dusty and I had to move along.

Dusty, more history, Part Deux

2008-08-21T15:52:00.000-04:00

Truthfully, I was enjoying riding him even though the shows were stressful, and though he could be flaky - my nickname for him at the time was "The Lunatic Horse". I was only allowed to ride him a day or so before a show - S would "tune us up". So there was no real "getting to know you" time, but still I could appreciate his level of training and his wonderful naturally collected gaits. And given how clueless I could be, he was a pretty forgiving horse - which I appreciated as well.

He didn't sell that year. And he was still having lameness problems. I'm not positive, it was a long time ago, but I believe she had his hocks injected again.

The following year our show career together didn't begin well. It was a blustery April morning, and just as we entered the ring the wind came up and the three flags on the entry booth, which was right next to the ring, snapped. It sounded like guns going off.

Our entrance was spectacular; I think we covered the entire circumference of that ring in about two seconds. I finally got Dusty down to a close approximation of a walk-jog; he was on his tiptoes with his eyes bugging out. He was definitely not the epitome of "push button".

They closed the gate, and the class started. I think it was "Palomino Pleasure".

"Trot or Jog, please."

As soon as the announcer uttered those words, we took off at a gallop again.

I realized that our pinning in this class was not to be, and when I managed to bring him back to a more controlled gait we moved into the center of the ring to get out of the way of the saner horses... where Dusty proceeded to rear and hop around about four feet from the judge. I don't think the judge was happy - he kept glancing over his shoulder, which no doubt made it difficult to judge the class.

In the interest of safety - the judge's in particular, and everyone else's in general, the ring steward let me out of the ring as quickly as they could.

Luckily for me, S had her own dramas going on with her baby, Tuffy. She'd put Halter Class makeup on his face and he'd proceeded to wipe it on her beige Stetson. She was NOT amused, but since I was on Dusty, her all-suffering husband took the brunt of the abuse.

Happily enough, the judge we nearly squashed, despite his brush with death, actually liked Dusty. He pinned us in the rest of our classes - though to be fair Dusty *had* settled down and was being his usual pretty-moving self, so it wasn't completely surprising.

Dusty and I muddled through that season, and we endured a little less abuse because S was showing Tuffy so didn't have the time to obsess about what I was doing wrong. About half-way through it, she made me an offer: she'd trade Dusty for Bonnie Scamp plus money. I didn't think I could do it at first; but she said Bonnie would have a forever home, I'd see her every day.

So I bought Dusty. And though we finished out the season and won Year End awards for Palomino Pleasure and Quarter Horse Hunter Under Saddle that year, he never showed again - and I'm pretty sure he didn't miss it. He was 13.

While all this was going on, around 1993 or so S and her husband had sold their place and bought a place with more land, further north and west in Massachusetts. She was supposed to get an indoor but they weren't able to afford it right away.

The horses were cozy enough in a temporary barn building, but that wasn't *her dream*, and she was making every one in her general vicinity miserable about it. I'm almost positive a lot of her behavior at horse shows and in private was due to her deep disappointment about not having her indoor and attached barn, and I'm truly surprised her husband didn't divorce her back then.

Anyway, in another fit of pique, she kicked Dusty and I out of her barn soon after I bought him, and I moved him to a place in Groton where he learned to be a regular horse. Though our first trail ride was less than auspicious, it was soon obvious he loved his new life.

Part Trois, to follow...

Dusty, more history

2008-08-21T11:53:00.001-04:00

The first year S had Dusty, he was everything she hoped he'd be: they won class after class, and took home championships and year-end awards in AA rated shows, Massachusetts and New England. The following year was pretty much the same.

Dusty in Massachusetts, now owned by S:

Then Dusty started having lameness problems. These frustrated S, and she started to get irritable. At shows, she'd have temper tantrums by the trailer if anyone, human or animal, annoyed her in any way. One time, it was the night before a show, she was in his stall banding his mane. She had given him a flake of hay to keep him occupied and quiet.I was there in the stall with them, she and I chatting and Dusty quietly eating. It was a very pleasant evening; until Dusty, in quest of a more delectable bit of hay and in his own world, moved his foot... and stepped on hers.

The screech scared ME. The sheer volume hurt my ears. I think poor Dusty nearly had a heart attack, and he didn't know what had happened. He cowered in the corner, wild-eyed.

I've been stepped on before. Yes, it hurts. But good god almighty, that was simply uncalled for.

Her sudden outbursts were taking a toll on him. He started getting jumpy, and she started to not like him - he wasn't "push button" any more. She'd had his hocks injected in the off-season and he was still getting ribbons, but he always seemed tense, not sure when the next outburst would happen.

Then at one show he bucked her off outside the gate. I was at that show but not present for the wild west exhibition; she said he did it on purpose and she couldn't trust him anymore.

Oh, please. I truly believe he was stung or startled by something. He has never been mean, even when he was scared.

So that was pretty much the end of Dusty for her, even though she had him for a couple of years more. She rode him to the end of that show season, but her temper was always at the boil, and he was always on tenterhooks - as we all were - around her.

The following year she got herself a Palomino baby to show in hand, and she asked me to show Dusty for her, towards getting him sold. I did, but I've never been much into showing - Bonnie hated it and it was a lot of effort for... a lot of effort. And with S so focused on getting Dusty a buyer, if I wasn't doing what she expected of me she would scream at me from the rails, which was embarrassing. I only rode hunt-seat at the time, so the rest of Western Pleasure King Dusty's show career was English, not Western.

We still managed to pull in a couple of year-end awards, but with more reds than blues in total - and that was a disappointment to S as well.

I've decided to break this one up into pieces. Part 2 to follow...

A bit about Dusty

2008-08-21T08:35:00.001-04:00

Dusty is a double-registered Palomino Quarter Horse, registered name "Ima Cute Lad". He's 25 years old now; I met him when he was seven. S, the woman I was taking riding lessons with, and at that time leasing Bonnie Scamp from, bought him. She'd been showing in Palomino and Quarter Horse shows but not winning, and S didn't like not winning.

S was told about Dusty by the daughter of a friend of hers. The girl, K, was working at an Appaloosa show barn in Virginia as an apprentice trainer. K had worked with Dusty and liked him, and knew he was for sale.

This was Dusty with his former owner, before S:

S was desperate for a "winning" horse, and all she heard about Dusty made her think this was the horse for her. She was very excited about seeing him, and she and her husband drove down to Virginia - a huge thing, she *hates* to travel.

She didn't expect his color.

Dusty is not the flashiest of Palominos. He's sort of beige. In the winter, he's a uniform beige, mane, tail and coat; in the summer he gets a bit of a pink gold tinge to him so his mane and tail stand out a bit more.

S almost didn't buy Dusty because of his color. It was Virginia and hot, and his coat was almost completely bleached out from the sun. He didn't look like anything special, and certainly not like something that would catch a judge's eye.

But then she rode him.

Dusty *floated*. He was Western Pleasure trained, but this was 1990 so he didn't move in the abominable broken-legged-spider gaits that became "standard" a few years later. His poll was level, his nose wasn't dragging on the ground; he naturally collected and he just always looked happy: ears forward, long tail wagging. His tail dragged on the ground back then.

He was the "push-button" horse she'd always dreamt about. She even took him out of the indoor ring and out for a trail ride; he was willing and happy. She found out later that no one had ever ridden him for a trail ride around the property before.

He was even then a very sweet guy, and they used him as "Uncle Dusty" for the newly weaned babies. He'd take care of them but not take any guff from any of them. He helped them cope with being separated from their mommies and then, without hurting them, taught them the rules of the herd.

He was sweet, but he was reserved, aloof. S didn't want a personality though, she wanted "fresh blood", a horse she could show up with at the shows and knock their socks off.

So Dusty came home to Massachusetts.

I met him soon afterwards. I wasn't impressed at first: he was skinny and small and built like a thoroughbred and didn't look as flashy and chunky as her other Palomino had been, Mister Bid Hancock. I was shocked that she'd sell Bid (to a trail riding owner who absolutely loved him, so he ended up finding his niche) in order to buy *this* horse.

And Dusty was so tuned out - he seemed to not want any attention, Even more shocking to me: he apparently had never seen a carrot. Or an apple. Or any kind of treat.

Well, this was totally unnatural.

I had my Bonnie Scamp (I'd bought her) to give treats to, but I felt awful for this little beige guy who didn't even know he was missing an experience other horses completely prostitute themselves for. I'd offer him carrots; he'd sniff a bit suspiciously, and turn his head away. S and I would laugh about how this horse didn't have a clue what they were, and she'd say (though not completely joking) "don't you go teaching him about treats! I want my toy horse to stay a toy!"

I didn't give up though - carrots are a God-given right for horses, a reward for having to do what we tell them. One day he gingerly took a bit in his mouth and crunched. His big golden-brown eyes lit up.

I'd turned him to the Dark Side.

More about Dusty in the next posting.

Dusty on his 25th birthday, this past April. Some friends from work came out to help us celebrate with carrots and apples. Dusty's pal Pongo helped Dusty celebrate, too.

Buzz

2008-08-16T21:42:00.000-04:00

When I was around 11 or 12, a fellow-horse crazy friend named Cherrie told me about this old guy who had horses and ponies, and who would let you ride them if you cleaned the horse and it's stall. It happened that he was renting the barn that belonged to another friend, Karen's, grandmother.

This was tantamount to heaven on earth for a horse-poor daughter of clinging-to-lower-middle class parents.

And so I came to meet Buzz.

Buzz had prepubescent and pubescent girls fluttering around him like bees around apple blossoms. Before you jump to any conclusions: he wasn't a pedophile - unless pedophiles endear themselves to children by saying things like "Hey, chicken legs - where the hell do you think you're going with that horse, did you brush his tail?" or "Get back on that goddamned horse, you goddamned farmer!" He loved his horses; young girls on the other hand - with their high-pitched voices and daily dramas - he sometimes barely tolerated.

I think of him as a New England cowboy - and a real oldstyle horseman. He didn't ride any more by the time I met him, but was keeping around all his old horses because he owed it to them, I think. Occasionally too, he would add to the herd after trips to the Shrewsbury auction on tack or supply runs. He didn't have a trailer, he'd just toss the horse into the bed of his pickup and bring it home.

Days he worked as a meat packer at the Finast Supermarkets, unloading sides of frozen beef from trucks. He'd start work at 5AM, and then he'd come to the barn around 3-3:30 in the afternoon to open up - the door was padlocked shut.

He liked his beer, and after a six-pack or two he sometimes would tell us stories of his riding days. One that I still remember was about his beloved Harry the Horse, a big paint he'd ride to the Oaks, a bar in Billerica. He said he and Harry would both get shitfaced drunk - apparently they served horses there. Then he would laugh, and say that one time, when riding home along the Shawsheen River after an evening at the Oaks, he and Harry tipped over and fell in. He'd laugh, take a sip of his Schlitz, and say "Harry was a hell of a horse..."

In hindsight, I have to say that he had a pretty sick sense of humor: "Harry the Horse"? "Little Richard" (a stud hackney pony he usually referred to as "Little Dick")? But it all went way over my head back then - I was pretty naive.

Every afternoon when Buzz arrived, speeding up the dirt drive in his Chevy pickup, we'd be waiting. The horses would be too: we could hear them nickering their greetings from inside. He'd unpadlock the bolt and slide the two doors wide, letting in the fresh air and sunlight.

Then they'd be set free: he'd go to each stall, open the stall door, take them by their halters to the opened door and let them go, standing back to watch each one of them gallop out into the unfenced field, tails up, manes streaming, nostrils flaring.

There was about 15 acres of land, and those horses and ponies never wandered off it. The newly-added horses would stay with the herd, and he never had to chase down a horse who'd gone walkabout.

It never occurred to me at the time that any of this was odd - the fenceless turnout, the horses locked up tight until 3 or 3:30 in the afternoon - I was a kid, it was what it was.

The horses didn't seem to care, either - or not that I remember. Maybe I'm just romanticizing it: knowing what I know about horses now, I can't imagine there NOT being a lot of neighing and kicking and carrying on to be let out FIRST.

Instead what I remember is feeling an incredible thrill standing next to Buzz to watch them running, kicking, bucking, and cavorting with each other. We were blessed to witness it, and we knew it: young and old, they drank in the glorious smells of grass and trees and flowers; they channelled their inner wild horse - and we got to watch.

It was and continues to be a sight that takes my breath away.

As for letting us ride: Buzz had a rule. Well actually, he had a lot of rules and some of them we actually followed - at least when we were within his eyesight. I'm pretty sure he knew about our transgressions too, but he never let on. We really were brats.

But this one rule was one we couldn't bend: no saddles - he didn't want us falling and getting our feet caught in the stirrup and dragged.

The "falling" part was a given; the dragged part was what he was interested in avoiding. So we all rode bareback.

That wasn't to say he just said "Here, clean this horse - clean his stall - you're good to go, have fun!" Nope. You had to *earn* the right to ride one of his animals.

Buzz had a system to cull out the dilletantes in his gaggle of horse-crazy sycophants: It was named Zero.

Zero was a paint pony of about 13hh, with the attitude of Godzilla with a hangover.

Zero hated little girls. While grooming him, he'd try to bite you, kick you, and stomp on your feet. Once you'd finished, and after Buzz had inspected him for cleanliness and an untangled tail, the real fun began.

This was the routine:

Lead Zero out to the driveway, keeping his teeth an arms distance away from your body. Gather up the reins, grab a hunk of mane, and face his back.

Block his attempt to bite your butt. Watch his hind leg for a muscle twitch heralding an attempt to kick you in the leg.

Chase Zero around as he does spins on the forehand, all the while trying to cow-kick your knee.

After about 10 rotations, launch yourself at his back.

If you're lucky you get on and don't flip over his back to the other side, because he stops spinning the moment you're airborn, and he'll stomp you if you're on the ground.

Wrap your legs as tightly around his fat belly as you can and hold on to that hunk of mane, because the next thing that happens is you're on a pony who's galloping across the field bee-lining for some trees to knock you off on, meanwhile tossing in a few bucks and crow-hops just to let you know he can.

Zero was the great equalizer.

I'm proud to say I survived him - many fell by the wayside - literally and figuratively - and were so disheartened they were never seen at the barn again.

Those of us who managed to survive Zero and kept coming back - and that's not to say we didn't fall by the wayside literally ourselves, we just were too stubborn to give in - were offered another mount after a couple of weeks.

For Karen, Cherrie, and myself, it was Oscar.

I'll continue about Buzz in another post.

The Posse

2008-08-16T16:23:00.000-04:00

There's a group of us at the barn who hang out together. We're women of a certain age. We don't have show ring aspirations; we're content to ride and to hang around and shoot the breeze. What we have in common is a love for our horses, despite their imperfections.

When we first started hanging out together, we jokingly referred to ourselves as "The Pussy Posse". That's been shortened to "The Posse" with a little nudge-and-wink look, the naughtiness unsaid but implied. We crack ourselves up.

Some of us have never really had girl friends before - for myself, I always was more of a guy friend gal. :) Women were too bitchy, too backstabbing - not to be trusted. Men could be untrustworthy too, of course... but you almost always knew where you stood with them.

So it was guy pals for me; guys and my horse. Horses, when Tico came into the picture. Hmmm, they're both guys...well, minus a couple of parts...

When I moved my boys to their current abode in Dunstable, Crystal Farm, it was really the first time I had them somewhere where there were friendly, adult women - some even nearly as old as I am. I started to realize that, at the very least, there were HORSE women who were cool.

Soon after, the Posse was born.

Here are some of us... Linda and Avita, the cutest little chestnut Morgan mare you'll ever see, are missing . )c:

Elaine and Rascal, Dorothy and Pongo, Suzanne and River, and myself and himself.

We ride together every weekend, if we manage to all show up at the same time. If we don't, it's not a big deal. We know we're there for each other: we share our family issues, work issues, concerns about our horses and worries about life in general. We're all smart, opinionated ladies and we share our opinions. We worry about each other.

It's a nice thing.

Some of the Posse got together last night and shared a PuPu Platter and had yummy Chinese Restaurant-style libations. We ate, drank, and laughed our asses off.

Some of us couldn't make it: family obligations, or too tired after a stressful week at work. They were missed, but spoken of fondly.

Women can be cool. Who knew?

A Tico Story From September 2005

2008-08-13T21:08:00.000-04:00

I got Tico in July 2005, and moved him and Dusty to a new barn soon after. I managed to find a barn close to a state forest with trail access, and close to my house. It turned out to be a not-so-great place and I moved them out the following March, but at the time it seemed ideal.

Tico was and is sweet (though mischievous), and can sit around for months and then ridden without ever needing to lunge him. I know this because he was barely ridden at all - no more than 10 times - in the year prior to my buying him, and most of those times it was by me.

At the time of this story, this was important because I was seven days away from hip replacement surgery. I was not going to be getting on him again for a while after this ride.

Anyway, back to September, 2005.

Like most people here in the northeast, I'd been suffering through a steamy bug-choked summer. There were trails tantalizingly close - something I hadn't had in a long time - but they were chock full of hungry and marauding gangs of deer flies, horse flies, mosquitos and all things buzzy and bitey.

In one earlier but soon-aborted attempt at a trail ride I did learn that Tico didn't mind being non-stop whacked all over his body with a branch full of leaves: he was smart enough to realize that I was defending him from the exsanguinating hordes and not trying to beat him into submission. So that was a plus, anyway.

Anyway, it was the Labor Day long weekend and time for riding was running short, and so I bit the bullet. I coated him in bug spray, put his fly mask on, and we headed out.

Like many horses, Tico doesn't like leaving his pals to go somewhere he's never been before, but he never fights about it. Well, at least not to the death. :c) I like a horse you can persuade with little effort and no rancor and resentment. I've known the opposite - not fun.

Our path wasn't the straightest - there was some weaving back and forth across the trail, with surreptitious glances back towards his pals - but for the most part he walked along well, and was being careful where he walked. The trails had quite a few rocks and tree roots to step over and around; he navigated them well.

So I was feeling pretty good about this horsie purchase, and happy with life in general.

We had one incident where the trail came close to someone's back yard. We could hear them: kids hollering, dogs barking, and big splashes as (I presume) the kids cannonballed into their pool. We couldn't really see them, except for an occasional glint as the sun reflected off the splashed water.

We stopped. He was on high alert, stock still and focussed completely in the direction of the weird sights and sounds. I didn't bother him - as a matter of fact, I took the opportunity to snap a photo. We stood there for a few minutes, and his head came down, his ears relaxed, and he tried to turn back.

Well, that wasn't a "get-me-outta-here" trying to turn back, it was a "can I get away with cutting the ride short" turning back, so I suggested we keep moving forward, and he complied, no problem. He was just checking.

But then it happened.

We rounded a corner and up ahead, there was a mud puddle. It was a dark and dank looking puddle, but not really notable otherwise.

We continued on towards the puddle.

Suddenly, about 100 tiny mud colored frogs who had been sunning themselves on the "shore", decided it was a really good idea to make a hasty retreat before the approaching big monster stomped all over them.

The puddle went from a dark brown splotch of innocuous mud to hundreds of tiny bits of earth suddenly animating and splish-splashing into the water. It was ALIVE!

Snorts and honks ensued. Legs akimbo and stiff, sides heaving, neck about 10 feet longer than normal, he stared down the alien mud puddle.

But the mud puddle had gone ominously quiet.

I asked him to go forward. We accelerated backward over twigs, roots and rocks. His concentration was completely on the placid goo - they weren't going to surprise attack him, no sirree bob!

I got him stopped, asked him to move forward again. We creeped up slowly to approximately the same place as before. Again, I asked for forward movement; again, we ended up about 10 feet back. A third time, we got to the same spot and I got off.

I had the (probably unwise) idea that if I could find one of the frogs and show it to him, he'd be ok.

Well, I couldn't find one - they were keeping a very low profile. But we did manage to go all he way up to the edge of the puddle of doom. He was still wary but obedient and offered only slight resistance; pretty soon he was calm enough to look around at the rest of his surroundings.

So I told him he was a goof ball but I loved him anyway, got back on him, and we headed home. Heck, I was going to turn around at about that point anyway.

I only allowed him to walk (I won't let a horse race back to the barn) but I swear, he may be a quarter horse, but he was doing a running walk as we left the lair of the mud monsters.

I've invented a new emergency dismount style. I call it the Superman.

2008-08-12T17:17:00.000-04:00

... of course, you need to have the complete cooperation of Dobbin, as it requires that s/he trips and flips over onto his/her back.

And in the immortal words of some LOLCat or another, "... it's not so great, akshully."

Yesterday, I went over to the barn around 3:45. I was going to groom and ride Tico and groom Dusty.

I was feeling a bit lazy though, so I decided to ride him in his english snaffle and the bareback pad (I also add an english saddlepad underneath it, not that that really matters).

So... as I'm grooming him on the crossties, the barn girl threw his supper hay into his stall (they feed hay pretty early there).

Mr Piglet was not pleased. Although he obviously has not missed a meal in quite a few years, he *hates* when I don't let him dive right in and start noshing if it's *there*, waiting for him.

Too bad, fatarse. :)

So, I jumped on him and started riding in the indoor. Weather around here has been rainy, mixed with downpours, thunder, lightning and sprinkles. Not a great summer, all in all.

This indoor has a side door from which you can look directly at Tico's stall. Every time we were near to it, it called to him... "Hay!! Hay!! The Hay is in your stall, come, eat!!!"

So... walk... a bit of a trot... and Every Time we came around to the door that faces his stall there was bulging, a little hissy fit and general brat behavior. I ignored it. We went both directions, then I asked for a canter.

Again, at the corners, some brat behavior, and some pitching forward like he was thinking about throwing in a buck, Tico style (Tico's bucks are not particularly deadly), but I caught him up and made him move forward.

We went his "good" direction first, to the right; then tracked to the left (so we were looking straight at his stall on that one corner again).

I got the correct lead out of him, but he was being spazzy and really leaning on the reins. We came around the corner, and he tripped. A BIG trip. He went down on his knees, and I went flying over his head and did a modified face-plant - more horizontal than directly on my head, hence the "Superman" - and I kind of skidded to a stop.

During my flight, I was aware of a lot of commotion behind me. I tucked up my legs and turned to look.

About 3 feet away from my face, there was a fat gray horse butt with legs flailing in the air. He'd done a face plant himself, and flipped all the way over onto his back.

I got up fast: I was a bit concerned about surviving all that, only to be kicked in the head by flailing hooves which looked a lot closer than 3 feet away - and may actually have been, come to think of it. Tico got up pretty fast too, once he finished flailing. His face was coated in sand, the bareback pad was coated, his butt was coated. There was sand in his eyes and in his ears. As for me - I looked like I'd been rolling around in the dirt - pretty much the same as he did, when you come to think of it.

At first he seemed to be favoring his right hind a bit, and he did the "pain" face once. I checked him over - nothing broken, no heat - and walked him off to the aisle. He was a bit tentative but no real limping. He mostly looked a bit abashed.

I called the vet. Again. Between Dusty and Tico he probably is starting to feel like I'm stalking him. Anyway, after I told him what happened, he asked me "What's he doing now?"

"He's just standing here."

The vet must think I'm a complete friggin' idiot.

Anyway, he said to give him some bute, but to not be too surprised if he's ok - that horses sometimes take amazing falls without hurting themselves. Meanwhile, he just said keep an eye on him.

So, aside from a skinned elbow, a slightly twisted knee and a sore neck, I'm ok. I'll be checking on Tico this evening to see how he's doing.

That's the buttprint Mr. BigButt left behind