Blog :: Recent Additions
January 2009
January Blog Carnival
I have to ask your forgiveness for the blog carnival being a little late. I have all sorts of excuses, ranging from the plausible (enter New Year’s Eve, and an unexpectedly divine bottle of champagne that helped me ring it in) to the whinging (by the time I am an old woman, I will have already told enough mind numbingly boring stories about my various imagined or real ailments to bore the pants off an entire hospital-ful of nurses).
Never mind. The blog carnival is here now, which is what matters. Without further ado:
Karen Brenner presents Karen Brenner Blogs about her Horse Paintings and Equine Adventures posted at Horse Paintings by Karen Brenner, saying “Get organized in 2009 with Karen’s free weekly “To Do List” featuring her equine art.”
Liz Goldsmith presents Beet Pulp Fact and Fiction « EQUINE Ink posted at EQUINE Ink.
Sibyl White presents Sibylline Secrets: Rescue Horses posted at Sibylline Secrets.
Janet Roper presents Janet Roper::Animal communicator » Wisdom from the Horses: To Be or To Do posted at Janet Roper::Animal communicator, saying “What the horses teach about having the patience to simply be.”
Halt Near X presents It’s that time of the year again… posted at Halt Near X, saying “And I don’t mean New Year’s Resolutions.”
Liz Goldsmith presents How Long can You Keep the Marbles on the Plate? posted at EQUINE Ink.
Araya presents RECYCLE AND SAVE THE PLANET AND HORSES, TOO! posted at Stable Days, saying “Check out my article on recycling, saving the planet and horses at the same time!”
embee presents Day long beach ride posted at embeetravels.
Chris presents Profile On: Mel Widdis posted at .:EQUUS:., saying “An interview with Mel Widdis who runs her own business, creating music for freestyle dressage tests.”
GrrlScientist presents Wild Stallions posted at Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted), saying “These are two wild stallions from the McCullough Peak’s herd of wild horses, which is located just outside of Cody, Wyoming.”
It’s a great collection of new and familiar blogs, so take the time to stop by and enjoy everyone’s post! If you missed this carnival, there’s another coming up in February. It’ll be hosted at MiKael’s Mania; you can submit your entries here.
December 2008
It’s that time of the year again…
No, not New Year’s Resolutions. I never keep those, so making them is sort of silly. Why set myself up for failure?
I’m talking about the “weird search terms that bring people to this site” post. Without further ado:
super
Yeah, I think I’m pretty super, too. Thanks! (Is that enough ego for everyone?)
general view on pseudo saints
Well, if we assume that every religion has another religion that holds opposing and contradictory views, I think it is safe to also assume that for every saint one religion claims, there is another religion that will claim they are not really a saint. Therefor, generally, it’s safe to conclude all saints are considered pseudo saints by someone, somewhere.
the metaphors of stopping by the woods on a snowy evening
The poem is about death. All Robert Frost poems are about death. If you’re a high school student, you will impress your teacher with this statement, because most high school students seem to think Robert Frost is a fuzzy, bunnies-and-lambs kind of poet. He really isn’t. It’s all death-death-death, more death, and the occasional filling-time-before-death. Bit disturbing, really.
olympic cross country coarse video utube
Most YouTube videos are coarse. I’m sure it has to do with the compression algorithm they use. This person would have been better off searching for ‘course’. And ‘YouTube’ instead of ‘utube’ might have helped—can’t find what you want when you look on the wrong site.
can a grey mare and a chestnut stallion have a black foal
Yes! I’m just happy I know the answer to this one. If the grey mare only has one copy of the dominant grey gene and has at least one copy of the black gene, she can pass on the black gene but not the grey gene, which will give the foal a black base (regardless of the stallion’s chestnut color, because black is dominant and chestnut recessive). However, if either the mare or stallion has the agouti modifier and passes that on, then the foal will be bay. And, yes, the agouti modifier can be carried by a chestnut horse—- it just doesn’t show, since there’s no black for it to affect. That’s a lot of ‘ifs’, so I don’t know what the chances are here, but it’s certainly possible.
i want to halt someone s computer
Interesting phrasing. Also interesting: the legal repercussions. I wouldn’t try this, if I were you.
am i a crazy person
Probably. Most people are.
how to find out if a horse had been injured in the passed?
I don’t know. What did the horse pass (or what passed the horse)? What happened immediately after—was a vet called? Did anyone look concerned? Did life go on as usual?
why i learned to
It’s a build your own query, apparently: Why I learned to… finish a sentence. Why I learned to… rob ducks. Why I learned to… eat peanut butter. Why I learned to… become a super spy.
appliques popsicles
I wouldn’t recommend it. The popsicles will melt, and you’ll be left with just a wooden stick and a sticky mess.
how to teach your horse half-pirouette
Oh, lord. There are always “how to teach your horse…” entries, but they keep getting more and more advanced. People! Find a trainer! Random, anonymous bloggers on the interwebz? Not qualified to be your trainer! If they were qualified, they wouldn’t be random or anonymous! I’m both random and (mostly) anonymous, so I should know!
difference between a half past and leg yield
One is a time of day… actually 24 different times of the day, one for each hour… and the other is a First Level dressage movement.
is that a zebra
Does it have stripes?
And, finally:
you won t believe this
Actually, after reading the list of search terms for this blog, I feel pretty jaded and cynical. I bet I will believe it.
Where do you draw the line between proactive checking and stalking?
I am a notoriously bad communicator.
No, really. Some of family just learned I moved to Texas. They are furious with me for not telling them sooner. I’m not sure what they expected—for a long time, the standing joke was that no one knew what country I was in at any given time, so it’s not like I moved overseas (again) and didn’t tell anyone (again). I’m in the same country still. You’d think that would count for something.
Apparently not. Whoops.
Anyway, as a bad communicator, I have to admit that when I read forum posts from breeders or former owners saying “I sold my horse to someone in city/state and haven’t heard how they are doing; would someone go check on them?” I get a little creeped out. No, I get a lot creeped out.
I understand the motivation—people want to keep track of their former horses and make sure they stay in good situations. That’s great.
The thought of asking people you do not know to go spy on someone because you want to know how the horse is doing? That’s creepy. At that point, the breeder’s “I want to know” sense of entitlement is overriding the owner’s right to privacy.
I think my issue with all of this is the language used. There’s a difference, for me, in someone saying “Hey, I used to own this horse and want to know if anyone has heard anything recently about her, because I’ve lost touch” and “I used to own this horse and the current owner refuses to communicate with me, so someone go spy on them and tell me what I want to know!” In the first case, you’re only asking about what knowledge people already have—and if the horse has been on the show scene, there probably is public knowledge about how the horse is doing. In the second case, you’re asking total strangers to proactively invade someone else’s privacy.
It’s semantics, I know. The intention is probably the same either way—and I really do think it’s great that breeders want to keep track of how their horses are doing—but the second creeps me out considerably more than the first. Knowing a breeder had gone online and asked the second, quite honestly, would make me immediately cross that breeder off my list of people to talk to when I’m ready to buy a horse. The semantics of it bother me that much. They probably shouldn’t, but they do.
We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming for a moment of extreme entitlement
Some things should be outlawed, like the holidays.
I was being so good. I wasn’t looking at the sale sites. I wasn’t browsing classifieds. I was behaving.
And then the holidays come along, with the “buy presents for everyone else, and then buy more better presents for yourself, because you deserve it!”
Yeah? Yeah?! Great. Now I feel positively entitled to a horse. ‘Cuz it’s the holidays and it’s almost my birthday, too.
I’m a good person. I work hard. Don’t I deserve a $10,000 yearling?
While I’m feeling entitled, I think I deserve a $10,000 yearling for free. ‘Cuz, you know, I’m me. The market is bad, right? The breeder should be grateful I want to take their yearling off their hands. Especially the super-fancy bay colt with all the chrome. He wants to come home with me. I can tell, just from looking at a picture. We’re soulmates.
....
....
Yeah, ok, I’m back. The holiday spaz moment is over. The rampant sense of entitlement has been exorcised. No more typing in italics. Besides, if I were going to buy a horse, it wouldn’t be a yearling. There’s not enough bubble wrap in the world to get a yearling and I through the couple years until it could be ridden.
On the other hand, if you are a breeder with a spare fancy warmblood yearling looking to make a lifelong dream come true… I happen to know a (if I say so myself) deserving adult ammy who would be over the moon to help you out with that.
And then you could buy stock in the bubble wrap company and make a fortune on it in the next few years. Win-win, right?
The renovation of an old horse property
I went to a Christmas party last night at a house that had been a horse property until they bought and renovated everything. Apparently it had all be pretty run down, but the husband works in construction and knew what had to be done to fix everything.
The house is absolutely gorgeous now. The outside is a pretty stone, and the inside is all stone and wood. It’s not a very large house, but they opened up some rooms and the main area has very high ceilings, so it feels much larger than it is. One thing I noticed is that they replaced the plain white doors you usually have for bedrooms/bathrooms/etc. with some lovely honey-colored wood doors, and that made a huge difference in the way the house looked. I’m thinking the first “unnecessary” renovation I’m going to do when I buy a place will be to put some pretty doors in.
Then, I did say this had been a horse property, right? The house is on the front part of the property and you drive through to the back part. You can see where the arena used to be because the lights are still there, but they took down the arena and put in a garden. There’s a huge round pen that I think he actually renovated and reroofed, so that will be staying up although not used for round penning, obviously.
And then the barn. Oh, the barn. It was converted into a garage. All the stalls were taken out and the barn now houses some classic cars and the tools to work on said cars. But it’s wonderfully decorated; the owner said it has everything he’s been collecting but had no place to put. This barn is clearly a man’s paradise, and although he can work on his cars here, he can also entertain his friends. There’s a bar, what looked like an entertainment center, some seating, etc. There’s even a little apartment in what probably used to be the tack and feed rooms, complete with a tiny kitchen. It doesn’t look like what you’d think of as a garage, in other words.
And now for the cool part. These people aren’t horsey at all, which is why everything got renovated and the barn is now a classic car garage. However, when you walk in you can immediately see where all the stalls used to be. Apparently, the only concrete in the barn was under the stall walls. He left that concrete intact and poured new concrete everywhere else. Since the old concrete is a different color due to age, you can still see where the stalls used to be. There’s even a little space between the old and new concrete filled with some sort of filler stuff (that’s the technical term for it) so it’s really obvious where the stalls where, and it’ll always be obvious. He could have ripped it all out and poured in new concrete everywhere, so I think it’s awesome that he left in the concrete that marked off the stalls.
The walls, from what I gathered, used to be just the metal barn walls, but he went out and bought the wood from an old barn and has paneled his barn’s inside walls with it. So you walk in and see this great weathered wood. You can even see where some of the wood must have been painted that ubiquitous red-barn color in the past, although it’s all well faded now.
So even though the barn is a garage now, he hasn’t tried to erase the fact that it used to be a barn. It’s sad that what must have been a great little horse property is not a horse property any longer, but on the other hand—he’s updated and worked with the structures to retain something of what they used to be while making them into something he can use for his own interests. If someone absolutely has to renovate, this is the way to go.