Blog :: Random Rambles
August 2008
Convenience isn’t everything
You know, banks will try to tell you it’s a great idea to consolidate all your accounts in a single place, because then you can manage them easily from one website. Bank with us! Get your car loan with us! Get a mortgage with us!
Yeah, that’s nice.
Not so nice? Knowing you spent more money than usual on the credit card this month, logging into your account, and seeing an amount nearly double what you expected to see even after accounting for the extra spending.
Holy heart attack, Batman!
I was envisioning all sorts of identity theft scenarios when I realized I was looking at the car loan balance.
Ooooohkay. Much better. I am an idiot.
On the plus side, when I clicked the right link to view my credit card bill, the actual amount came as a relief.
Olympic Fever
NBC will be providing full (2,200 hours) coverage of equestrian Olympic events on NBC.com (see press release).
The press release says the media will be available on demand as well as live, for those of us who can’t be glued to our computer constantly to watch it live.
Incidentally, have you seen the TV schedule for the equestrian events? I think they are on an offbeat channel (Oxygen?) but they are scheduled for prime time—6-8 p.m. or something—for several days straight. I think the last Olympics poor cableless me was bribing my way into friends’ houses at the oddest hours and then trying to explain why a trotting horse was making my jaw drop. Heh. This time, my jaw can drop in private.
I have to say, I’m excited. This is far more coverage than I was expecting, and I’m glad to see NBC is embracing the possibilities of online coverage. I have no doubt there is plenty of advertising money behind it, but, you know, I’ll happily soak in the ads for this opportunity.
Besides, I can make fun of the ads later. That’s hugely fun. (I’m also hoping some of the advertisers will be stepping up their ads, a la the Superbowl, but that may be too much to ask for.)
Stuff and Things
It’s been a busy couple of weeks, and at the end of the day, I have to admit I’m less than enthused about sitting down at the computer and attempting to type coherently.
The new Carnival of the Horses is up at Innstyle Montana. I am not on it because I had an out-of-state wedding to go to and didn’t plan ahead and submit early. Is anyone surprised? No? Me neither.
Riding: things are going good. Last lesson we worked on the sitting trot a little and that improved (more weight in the stirrups + more relaxed knee = looser hips and better sit).
Also, remember all those pregnant mares I was walking all winter? I got to see them and their babies while at the wedding. They are as cute as you would expect foals to be; I was unbelievably tempted to smuggle one home with me (it could fit in a large dog crate, right? No one would miss it…).
And an aside: a couple weeks ago I had Pookie at the vet and overheard a woman screeching into her phone at the police. I don’t know the surrounding circumstances, but based on the overheard conversation, the impression I got was that she was poor, loved her dog very much, thought the vet was obligated to save her dog’s life, and did not think she should be responsible for any part of the bill that she couldn’t afford to pay.
Which was baffling to me. Can I walk into a car dealership and get a half-ton truck and only pay what I can afford? It’s not very much, but I would really love the truck. The dealership will understand, right?
Maybe because horse owners are more open in general about these things, but most people I know have said that they have made a decision on how far they will go in treating their animals. It’s usually some combination of what they can afford and how good the prognosis for treatment is, but they’ve thought things through before they happen. I don’t think anyone likes admitting that finances are a part of this decision, but I also don’t think someone who wracks up more than they can afford in veterinary bills and then offloads the bills onto someone else (usually by making the vet clinic write off the cost) is somehow a more “responsible” pet owner because they “did everything they could.“ Actually, they let someone else do everything they could, and the owner just walks away. (This is fundamentally different than someone who gets into more than they can afford but has a plan to get out of it—like picking up an extra job. It’s the people who expect someone else to fix their problem for them that I don’t understand. Either you are solely responsible for your pet, or pets are a luxury you cannot afford.)
Sorry. I’ll put my soapbox away. I don’t know why the situation nettled me quite so much that two weeks later I am still a little dumbfounded by her attitude. I realize it’s possible—maybe even likely—that normally she’s a perfectly reasonable person who is making superhuman efforts to get by on a nearly impossible budget, and then got swept into an emotional situation she was unprepared for, but that’s not how she came across. Why do people expect someone else to clean up after them? How did people become so entitled?
July 2008
Feeds are back
It took a little longer than I expected, but the RSS feeds are back. There are three to choose from:
Blog entries only
Gallery and Texts entries only
Blog, Gallery, and Texts entries
All feeds are in RSS2 format. If someone really needs Atom format, let me know.
Comments should be working too, now. If they aren’t, please email me.
Thanks!
Politically Incorrect
We are supposed to say “A good horse is any color, and differences within a breed are greater than the differences between breeds, so the breed of a horse is less important than the individual horse’s ability.“
In the abstract, sure. In reality? As I’m window shopping? I confess to a multitude of politically-incorrect opinions:
Feathers on a horse do not make my heart go pitter-patter, unless you count the flutter of anxiety as I think about mud and burrs and scratches. Should I be so unlucky as to buy a be-feathered horse, my very next purchase will be a set of clippers and the horse will quickly be de-feathered, breed standards not withstanding.
Gray horses take my breath away. I look at them and think “I never, ever want to own a gray horse,“ and then I realize that sort of thinking is only tempting fate. I feel like someone has sucker-punched me in the stomach, and I know, I just know, that when I go shopping the Most Perfect Horse Ever is going to be gray, and reason is going to win over aesthetics, and I am going to end up owning a gray horse. With feathers. *sob*
It takes some serious girding of the loins before I can open any Friesian-related ad. It’s not that I dislike the breed—I’m not partial to them, but some of the crosses are ok—it’s the purple prose that tends to creep into the descriptions. It’s so… magical. Mystical. Fantastical. Fantastically absurd. It makes my eyes bleed. It’s like fingernails on a chalkboard. It hurts my teeth. It’s almost enough to make me want to look at more ads for gray horses.
Almost.
Gypsey Vanners make me laugh. Sorry, but they do. (The purple prose doesn’t bother me here, because the entire breed is purple prose. It’s so absurd it’s actually funny.)
I’ve stopped looking at paint/pinto-colored horse ads. In the abstract, I am sure there are some nice paint/pinto-colored horses out there, but for some reason every ad I open seems to show the same upright shoulder, straight backend, and limited shoulder reach (assuming there is a trot picture). It’s depressing, and the mares are all in foal. Why?
If the horse is a chestnut thoroughbred mare, she could be 30 years old, toothless, and hopping around on three legs and I will still think she’s perfect.
People who put up ads for well bred, nicely balanced warmblood yearlings and then price them reasonably are evil. I do not need a yearling! Do not make them look like a viable option!
People who put up ads for ugly, butt-high, yak-haired yearlings are my saviors, because they bring me back to reality and remind me that yearlings are walking vet bills with suicide pacts. I do not need a yearling!
Not all ponies are cute. In fact, the cuteness of any given pony can be mathematically defined as an inverse relationship to the ad’s emphasis on said cuteness.
“Two for One” packages = I thought your mare was nice, and I was really interested in her, but now I’m not.
“Three for One” packages = You couldn’t sell the mare on her own, and you couldn’t sell the foal on its own, so clearly the best thing to do is breed the mare again for a third unsellable horse. Brilliant!
I will look at an ad for a lanky bay gelding no matter what obvious faults he has or how unsuitable he is by his description.
While I respect your right to sell your ginormous draft as a dressage prospect, you cannot convince me that he is my dressage prospect.
So… at this point I think I’ve basically dared fate to send a pinto-turning-gray Friesian mare in foal with feathers on her legs to me next spring. Sweet. Even I can appreciate a joke.