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...
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Dusty, Partly Shed Out
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...
Monday, May 10, 2010
Thursday, April 15, 2010
mugwump chronicles: Missing Horse#links
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. :(
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. :(
Friday, April 9, 2010
Happy Birthday, Dusty!
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...
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...
Friday, April 2, 2010
The Evil that Llamas Do
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.
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.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Some Days are Just Magic
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*.
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*.
Sunday, December 27, 2009
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.
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.
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