Blog
February 2007
Full Stop!
I’m moving this site to a new server. Actually, I’m asking my hosting provider to do that, because they’re awesome about those sorts of requests. The reason? It has to do with the cliff hanger thing in the last post—which I’ll tell you about next Monday. 
In the meantime, I’m turning off comments and the “Add a Blog” part of HorseBlogs, and I won’t be making any new posts—this is to make sure all the content transfers over to the new server. As soon as things are set up again, I’ll turn everything back on.
And if the site goes down for a few hours—it shouldn’t, but it might—consider it a planned outage. It’ll be back.
What’s happening with HorseBlogs?
There’s good news, there’s bad news, and there’s a cliff hanger.
The good news: I’m ready to start moving the HorseBlogs directory over to the new system. Prior to this, I’ve been playing with the software and getting a feel for what is and isn’t possible and how to best organize the data. I’m always surprised at how much work actually goes into the planning stage of a site like this, but I’m trying to plan ahead, for future possible additions to the site, and not just focus on its needs right now. In the long run, all this planning should pay off, although I know it’s frustrating to wait on some of the updated features I keep promising to add.
The bad news: It’ll take at least a week. I have to do this in between my day job stuff, and I’m trying to redesign it as well (since there are some display issues with various browsers). So, to keep me motivated and on task, let’s say the new version will debut a week from Monday. What is that—the 12th?
The Cliff Hanger: I finally got notification today that something I’ve been trying to set up for a week is set up and ready to go. It affects the HorseBlogs directory (and this blog, to a lesser degree)—you’ll find out what on Monday.
Meanwhile, of course, keep adding new blogs to the current directory!
In which the horse and I fool around together
Why is it that the one time I don’t copy my post before I hit submit (in case my control panel arbitrarily decides I’ve been idle too long and decides to make me log in again instead of posting the post), my control panel arbitrarily decides… look, you’re not going to make me type out that whole parenthetical statement again, are you?
It was a lovely post, but now it’s gone.
The gist of it:
While I love lessons, and they are invaluable, sometimes I really miss the chance to just ride. Me and the horse. And, sure, sometimes we’ll make mistakes. And sometimes, when I go to correct the mistakes, I’ll make them worse. But you keep trying until you make them better, right? And when you’re done, there’s a certain satisfaction in having worked through it on your own, even if it did take longer than it would have taken in a lesson.
Well, when I’m done. I shouldn’t speak for “you.” It’s this weird habit I have—I say “you” when I mean “I”. For that matter, I say “we” when I mean “I” too. The latter can be credited to my secret desire to the be Queen of Halt Near X-dom, and the former comes from years of poetry workshops, where any poem with “I” in it got the kiss of narcissistic death, but any poem with “you” in it was a brilliant attempt to bridge the gap between author and reader. Or something like that. I think my workshops eventually figured out “you” meant “I,” but they were too polite to mention it. Deep down, I’m horribly narcissistic. It’s why I blog. Wait… am I supposed to admit things like that? In public, I mean?
Anyway. My lesson this week turned into, in effect, an open ride for me—my instructor and I discussed the exercise I was going to work on, and then she let me work on it without any comments from her. It was really nice; I’d sort of forgotten how enjoyable it can be to concentrate on just the horse and the exercise, without keeping half an ear out for the instructor’s comments. And there’s a little more room to play—like permission to make mistakes—where I can keep trying slightly different things to see what effect they have on the exercise. It’s a different sort of learning process than what happens in an actual lesson, but it’s one I really miss. It was a good ride—by the end, I “got” what I needed to do in order to do the exercise correctly, and I got there on my own. Well, not on my own—with plenty of feedback from the horse. We got there together, which is how it should be, really.
January 2007
Comments, Twelve-Month Pseudo Update, and Barbaro
This has been one of Those weeks. I don’t think I need to say anything more.
So a few half-posts that I’ve been trying to make, and then I’m off to bed for five hours before I get back to work. Again. (Ah… life. What am I whining about?)
First:
Everyone whose comments I appear to be ignoring: I’m reading them, I swear! I appreciate your thoughts and suggestions and recommendations and have laughed quite a few times as well (only when it was meant to be funny!). I’ve also been able to check out a few new blogs thanks to your comments, and although I certainly hope to get over and leave a comment soon… erm… give me a bit to get back on track.
You can blame technology for my apparent anti-social behavior at the moment. I know I do!
Second:
The Twelve Month Plan update, whenever I get around to doing it, will be positive for the first time in months. Not meeting my goal, but positive. I know, because I just paid off one of the small (very small) loans. Any progress is good, and that’s the one thought that’s going to get me through the rest of this week.
Third:
Barbaro.
I hate racing. Love TBs, but hate racing. It makes me cringe and leaves me feeling ill, and I just can’t watch it. I admire the legends who succeed at it in a general sort of way, the way I admire any athlete who is at the top of their game. But I’m not emotionally invested in them. So I may be the only horse person who will say this, but Barbaro the Racing Legend doesn’t captivate me. You won’t find me bidding $300 for a Breyer model of him anytime soon.
However. However.
I have followed the story of his recovery—not because he was a great race horse, but because… because of Super Saint, really.
The year before I bought Super Saint, he had a horrible accident at a show. I wasn’t there, but I heard it was heart-rending to see him immediately after. I had sort-of imagined the scene, but seeing the pictures of Barbaro was, in a way, like “seeing” Super Saint’s injury. Not that their injuries were the same, by any means—but that the situation was similar. I think many people in the area expected Super Saint would be euthanized.
Super Saint’s owners made the decision Barbaro’s owners did: give the horse a chance, every chance they could. We were in the same barn, and I spent the next year watching Super Saint and his recovery. We were all affected by it, even if we weren’t directly involved in his care or (obviously) any of the decisions.
I appreciated Super Saint while I owned him, but watching Barbaro this past year has brought home to me how close I came to not having that chance.
And as a result of all this, what drew me to Barbaro had nothing to do with his status as a legendary racehorse, although I acknowledge his story would never have been what it was without that status (how’s that for a conundrum?)—the powerful part of the story, for me, was that relationship between vet, owner, and horse. I think most horse owners have been through this at some point, to some degree—if not personally, at least on the edges of someone else’s experience. At the very least, most of us have at least given it serious thought:
What would you do to save your horse? What should you do? And when is it too much, so that the best choice you can make is to give the horse a peaceful ending?
Behind all the fame, and hype, and publicity, and money, Barbaro’s story was one we all worry we’ll face. In some cases, already have faced.
I followed his recovery not because I thought he was a great race horse who “deserved” to survive more than any other horse, but because here were owners trying their hardest to save their horse. That’s a story I’m emotionally invested in.
I am happy there are others who will celebrate Barbaro for his accomplishments as a race horse—I think he deserves that. And I know I’m not the only one thinking of his owners. But I can’t help but see Barbaro’s recovery without thinking of Super Saint—of how lucky I was his owners gave him a chance, and how doubly lucky that he recovered, and, eventually, the decision I had to make for him.
It’s a bittersweet mix of emotions that has very little to do with a race track and quite a bit to do with the simple joy and risk of owning a horse. Any horse.
When Horse People Speak Code
You know how when you love something you start talking in code?
It’s innocent enough. A friend asks how your lesson went and you start explaining about inside leg to outside rein and a well-placed half halt, and suddenly you realize that they really don’t care—they wanted to make small talk, but they’re looking at you like you’re speaking gibberish.
It’s worse when it’s web design, because you get not only the insider’s vocabularly, but also acronyms: “So then I used PHP to pull the date variables from the URL and pass them to a MySQL query, which pulled relevant rows out of the DB, and I used an open-source calendar script, but modified to be pure CSS, and the result was supposed to be a monthly calendar with Javascript roll-over effects, but what I actually got was an accidental infinite loop.” To be honest, even when the person you’re speaking to knows code, they still don’t want to hear you say that, because nothing upsets a system administrator like hearing “accidental infinite loop” and “I left the room before I realized it and went to make dinner” in the same sentence. Not that I have any personal experience in the matter. Of course not.
Horse people should know that nothing good comes of having your own secret language. You say something innocent like, “I have to clean my gelding’s sheath on Saturday,” and suddenly the guy you were almost-but-not-quite dating is the guy you are definitely not dating, and you find this out when he sneaks a note in your locker that says, “To be honest, you should have just said you were washing your hair.”
So I have to admit: it surprises me that so many horse people willingly dive into the world of web design. Yes, despite the fact that I love code to bits and bytes, I can’t figure out why everyone else wants to learn something that will reduce them to speaking in acronyms. Don’t we have enough trouble trying to explain the whips and spurs in our luggage?
I suspect part of it is that we tend to be proud of the work we do, and we want to get it right. And, since any web designer will tell you that the proper way to build a website is to hand code it, well then, we learn to hand code it. (Actually, I’m making assumptions there. I learned HTML back in the day when there was no such thing as a What You See Is What You Get editor like FrontPage, so we had no choice. For your reference: these were also the days when animated gifs were cool, background music was practically compulsorary, and everyone—and I do mean everyone—was using those wave/reflection applets. Yikes. These days, of course, people have choices—templates and WYSIWYG editors and such. Templates are perfectly valid if you don’t want to worry about HTML at all, but if you’re going to custom design a site, you really should learn the HTML and hand code it. See? It’s like we can’t help ourselves—if we learned HTML, by golly, you should too!)
I also think horse people, in general, have a great deal of independent drive. We learn something new every time we ride (at least, we hope we do), so we’re not daunted at the idea of taking on another task, like learning about web design. And if we make mistakes along the way, we aren’t ashamed to admit them, because we know everyone starts at the beginning. For example, my first site had a logo made in—I kid you not—Microsoft Word. With Word Art. Colored in camoflague. I was as proud of that logo as I was of my first braiding job, which is to say: all out of proportion to its actual aesthetic value. I’ve improved since then—my braids are much better, and I avoid the logo question by using plain text.
Whatever the reason, we seem to take to coding and all things technological. The English grad students I know never did—at least, not beyond what they had to know to do their research and find out if any of their undergrad students had plagiarized their papers. I’m not complaining, mind you—I love the fact that I can get geeky once in a while on this blog and people will tolerate it. And some will groan in sympathy because, truely, you’ve never lived until you’ve survived the wrath of a system administrator whose server is sitting in a dark room somewhere with an ice packed strapped to its head. Metaphorically speaking.
Besides, I have high hopes that one day we’ll combine the two languages and have a secret code no one else will be able to break:
“So I tried passing a new function to Dobbin, but he kept flashing SQL errors at me, and it took me forty-five minute to find the misplaced half-halt and then, well, you know—turns out there was a bug in the code anyway and he went off on an infinite bucking streak. I think it’s time to just go all the way back to basics and wipe and reinstall everything. I’ve been hearing good things about *nix systems, so I’ll try that—maybe he just isn’t compatible with a Western saddle.”
And you thought we get strange looks now?!