11 Jul 2010 0 comments
Today’s lesson: a taste of piaffe and passage.
And by “a taste,” I mean “two or three steps at a time.” Of passage. The horse took my application for piaffe, considered it, and rejected it.
Which is all fine. The moments where he considered piaffe, and the few steps of passage that we got, were awesome.
Also awesome: the collected trot going into the piaffe and passage attempts, and the trot coming out, which was big, bold, beautiful.
Now to make sure I am doing lots and lots of my super secret ab-killer crunches at the gym, because I have found a whole new reason to
find out whether I even have ab muscles improve my marshmallow belly develop a core.
Filed: Progress of Sorts, Training the Rider
0 comments
6 Jul 2010 4 comments
Around a year ago, give or take a month, I decided I really should stop saying I was going to lose weight and actually, you know, do something about it. Otherwise, I was going to have to go out and buy pants in a size I swore I would never wear.
I sat down and acknowledged some truths, like “I hate change,” “Sugar makes me happy,” “I’m lazy,” and “Cutting carbs out of my diet just might make me homicidal.”
This raised some interesting questions, like: if my own inertia is going to make developing a real exercise program difficult, and cutting sugar and carbs from my diet is going to make me even more unhappy and unwilling to stick with a new program, how the hell am I going to lose weight?
The answer was to change one thing at a time, so that I was only vastly unhappy about one particular aspect of my life at any given moment.
And, periodically, I decided I was awesome and threw the whole program into the trash for a week or two and had some milkshakes.
This has worked, it really has.
Total weight lost in one year: 35-40 pounds.
For the past six weeks, I’ve been celebrating my awesomeness. While I haven’t gained, I haven’t lost more—and my overall fitness has decreased.
I decided I would have to do something before I started gaining again. There’s a gym on the way to work. I hate exercising, and I hate mornings, so I might as well exercise in the morning and hate everything all at once.
It’ll build character. The fact that this is the exact opposite of last year’s plan is not lost on me. This would never have worked at this time last year, but I think it will work now; I know that I can and will stick to a routine once I get into it, and that I can and will get through the hellish adjustment period.
So today I stopped at the gym to sign up.
As I chatted with the membership guy, we did the usual goals and such things. I explained about the last year, and he said that was great and asked how I did it.
I had to think for a moment, because the obvious answer is: eat less, exercise more. I thought it might be a trick question. Are there other weight-loss techniques? Has someone invented an eat more, exercise less program? Turns out they haven’t. Bummer.
We got all the details sorted out and I handed over my driver’s license. He looked at it, looked at me, and said “Is that really you? You really did lose a lot of weight!”
Well, no. I got someone fatter than me to take my DMV photo, because if there’s one thing any of us needs, it’s to increase the inherent awfulness of DMV photos.
And I’m somewhat bemused by the implied “I didn’t believe you before” in his statement, but I can’t fault him there. I’m sure a lot of people go on about the weight they (never actually) lost or are (not really) going to lose. It’s probably like horse people listening to the average person on the street saying “I’m a great rider!” and we’re thinking “a pony ride when you were six does not make you an Olympian.”
But I do like being flattered, even when the flattery is probably just part of a pitch to make sure I hang around long enough to sign on dotted line.
I signed. Tomorrow they are doing the orientation session. They promised to kick my ass in a whirlwind tour of all the equipment.
If you hear groaning tomorrow night, it’s probably my ass, wondering what it ever did to deserve the end of this prolonged celebration and the rather cruel resumption of… THAT word.
So far, my body hasn’t quite caught up with my brain and realized that I’m serious about the exercise-in-the-morning thing. When that happens, I’m sure you’ll hear the screams of protest.
I’m warning you, so you can go out and buy wax to stuff in the ears of any small children whose psyches might be permanently damaged by the choice phrases I am likely to resort to. I can’t be held liable for my language under the influence of exercise in the morning.
Filed: General Topics, Weighty Matters
4 comments
4 Jul 2010 4 comments
As I was cleaning the apartment today (isn’t that what holidays are for?), I realized my shower curtain was starting to grow mold. I pulled it down, intending to throw it away, and then thought better of it and threw it in the washer. I figured that the worst that would happen is the agitator would tear it apart, and then I’d have to throw it away anyway. At best, maybe it would clean the mold off.
And it did. I’m sure it also washed off whatever mold inhibitor was on the plastic, so I went and bought a new curtain, but now I have a big, clean sheet of plastic that I can reuse for purposes unknown. In my experience, you can never go wrong with big sheets of plastic. They always come in handy
for moving bodies eventually.
Score one for me.
But while I was at the store picking up my new shower curtain liner, I took the time to pick up a few other things.
While I was checking out, the clerk kept looking at my weirdly, but I assumed it was because I bought the last, dusty case of non-Piss Poor Beer that the store had. This was Big Box Store, after all, with a decidedly Piss Poor Beer drinking clientele. Look, I’m not a complete beer snob. I will drink Corona or Sam Adams if I have to. And I’ll drink Piss Poor Beer if someone else buys it. But I won’t buy Piss Poor Beer for myself, not even (memorably) if I’ve been sent out to get beer for the beer batter halibut. In theory, Piss Poor Beer would work for that as well as anything else, but I came home with an imported British beer, because you don’t need six bottles for beer batter. As I pointed out to my family, you might as well enjoy drinking the rest. They rolled their eyes at me and have never let me live it down.
*ahem*
Anyway. I assumed the Big Box Store clerk was confused by a case of beer that was not a crappy major brand and thought nothing more of his strange looks, until I got home and looked at the receipt more carefully. In order:
A couple cans of shaving cream.
Several packs of razors.
Two bottles of Liquid Plumber.
Thank god I have my beer. The retrospective embarrassment would kill me otherwise.
Filed: General Topics
4 comments
1 Jul 2010 7 comments
It’s taken me several days to pull myself together enough to write this post, but I thought you, lovely readers (and spambots, and the odd person whose unwise search results stranded them here) would understand my grief.
I broke my Kindle.
Apparently, it doesn’t like being knocked off a table and then slammed against a table leg in an effort to keep it from hitting the ground. In retrospect, I might have been better off letting it fall.
But then a small ray of light: Amazon slashed the price of the Kindle, putting it under the $200 range. I was tempted, but I waited. Plastic Logic’s Que is… somewhere in production. I figured when the grief was less keen, I’d find out where “somewhere” is and see if I could buy a Que instead. Would I have to mortgage my soul to afford it? Sure, but it’s the Que.
Not that waiting changed the fact that my Kindle was broken. Deep down, I don’t think I believed it. Maybe, just maybe, the battery would run out, I could charge it, and this would all be a bad dream. (Denial: the first stage of grief. It’s nice here. It’s quiet, peaceful, serene with my fingers in my ears and my eyes closed.)
Then today, an entire sun’s worth of light: Woot had Kindles for $149. What is Woot? I don’t know. Some sort of Tack of the Day thing for non-horse items. I saw it mentioned on a tech blog I trust, and I hurried over to buy a replacement Kindle.
Sold Out.
My grief continues.
I’m still not entirely sure if I’ll buy a new Kindle or wait until Que’s production line gets rolling. The under $200 price on the Kindle is hard to ignore. Que is pretty awesome.
If nothing else, let this be a lesson to you. Expensive electronic toys do not like being body checked against hard surfaces. Take note. Be smarter than I was.
Filed: General Topics, Books & Literature
7 comments
30 Jun 2010 3 comments
Recently, I went out to dinner with someone and she gave me some news that left my jaw dropping on the floor. I still have to periodically pick it back up. It just boggles my mind.
And it was only the latest in several months’ worth of drama events (not all, I assure you, from the same source).
At one point, I had to write my non-horsey friends with some of the details, to find out if my perspective was slipping and I was becoming part of the problem and not part of the solution. They have not written back yet. About anything. Erm. Granted, every so often we do these six week silences, but—drama alert!—I found the timing of this silence a suspicious confirmation that they are afraid to touch my drama with a ten foot pole, in case it’s contagious.
The fact that I found the timing suspicious made me decide I have, indeed, slipped. Not off the deep end. Off the continental shelf, perhaps. Chatting with Jacques Cousteau. 20,000 leagues deep, hanging with Jules Verne. Journeying to the center of the bloody earth.
Since then, not really through anything I did, the drama has dissipated. Thank god.
Although I kind of get where the drama comes from—horses are expensive, and we all get a lot of time and money invested into doing things a particular way. We don’t want to know that others disagree with our way, because that would imply that we wasted all that time and money. Therefor we are ferociously protective of Our Way. Interestingly, people seem to be able to tolerate people who do things Not Like Us At All a whole lot better than we tolerate People Who Do Things Almost Like Us But Pick Out the Left Hind Foot Before the Left Front Foot (or whatever minor, inconsequential thing is feeding today’s drama).
And yet, I kind of don’t get it. I went to a women’s college and lived in dorms for four years with hundreds of hormonal women surrounding me, and we never had drama like horse people have drama. I am pretty sure that if someone could figure out how to harness the elemental stable drama element, we could solve the world’s energy problem six times over. Controlling surges would probably be an issue for a while, but I think my experiment with my friends shows that running especially hot currents through an outside current will effectively kill things. Friendships, perhaps, but also some of the drama.
Ah. I have just found my solution. I will start patenting that idea, and then I will be too busy for drama. Horse drama isn’t going anywhere—I know better than to ask for ideas to minimize it, because I know how to minimize it. And even I can’t avoid it—so if I’m going to have to deal with it, I might as well profit from it.
I wonder if I need to know anything about electricity when I submit the patent? Is a drawing with an arrows labeled “drama in” and “electricity out” pointing to opposite ends of a pipe sufficient, do you think? Must go research…
Filed: General Topics, Probably Horse Related
3 comments
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