Blog
December 2006
I should feel bad about this, but I don’t
I went to the grocery store today.
In my barn jacket, which hasn’t been washed in a few weeks. And my muck boots, which are, well, muck boots.
After a five-hour shift at the barn, too. I didn’t even have the decency to stop on the way out. No, I waited until after I cleaned up the hay shed and groomed a few horses and hauled a muddy hose around and groomed some babies. The babies, of course, tried to eat my jacket and hat and hair. It wasn’t until the third one tried to eat my jeans pocket that I realized the problem: one should never clean the hay shed before grooming babies. They think you’re a walking snack.
I could claim I wasn’t thinking when I dragged my tired, stinky, dirt-and-hay covered self into the grocery store, but that wouldn’t be true.
I was thinking.
I was thinking how good salt and vinegar chips would be.
And I was right. They’re yummy.
The Red-Headed Diva Saves Christmas
Do not get drunk the day before you’re going to cook the family holiday dinner. Cooking spicy tacos while hungover is Not Cool. Ask me how I know. I dare you.
Because I’d hate to accept responsibility and spoil a perfectly good pity party, I should point out that the hangover was my brother’s fault. See, Lil Bro and I agree that gift cards are evil. They’re the “I don’t know you well enough to get you a personal gift, but I think cash is crass, so I’m going to give you plastic-cash that you can only use in one location. And it’ll be a different location than everyone else will pick. So while you’ll have enough gift money to buy, say, a really nice pair of show breeches, what you’ll actually end up buying will be some bubble bath from Wally World and a book from B&N and a pair of socks from Freddies. None of which are as nice as a pair of show breeches or as useful as, say, four quarts of oil and a filter, which you could have actually used, as the car is overdue for a change.” Ahem. At any rate, my younger brother and I hate gift cards. Cash or loot, please. No plastic.
Unfortunately, he’s one of those guys with impeccable gift sense. He buys you things you never knew you wanted. I once bought him a plastic cup and some bubble gum. He has never leg me live that down, and so on top of all my other holiday issues I have Lil Bro Gift Angst.
Which is how I ended up sitting on the couch last night, staring at his gift, and freaking out that it was, once again, All Wrong. And one cider led to another.
And this morning I woke up hungover and had to face the Skillet of Spiciness which… oh my. Not when you’re hungover. And then, despite two weeks of planning… actually, allow me to clarify that. I mean “two weeks of waffling about date and time,” not “two weeks of solidfying details and preparing for the event”… despite two weeks of discussion on what we were doing as a family and when and where, my older brother heard “Christmas Lunch,” not “Christmas Eve Lunch.” So he never showed.
Which was a bummer, because Older Brother shares my despair at finding anyone the perfect gift, so we could have huddled in a corner and commiserated and plotted ways to undermine Younger Brother’s perfect gift giving skills.
And, of course, without Older Brother there, we delayed the present exchange until tomorrow. Which means I have 24 more hours of Lil Bro Gift Angst to get through, and he left an interestingly shaped and probably perfect gift under the tree for me. Argh.
All in all, by the time the afternoon wrapped up, I was exhausted and wrung out. Not really for the reasons in this post, but not everything in one’s life needs to be blogged. More than anything else, I wanted to go to bed for two weeks and ignore the world, but it was out to the barn instead.
Where the Diva (formerly “Her Highness,” but this nick suits her better) uncharicteristically hung her head over my shoulder and let me stand with my arms around her neck and let everything else go for a few minutes.
Maybe Lil Bro’s gift will be a disaster, but that’s why they invented gift receipts. (Don’t tell me about “it’s the thought that counts”–you’d only have to see my brother’s face after some of my gifts to realize he’s trying to figure out what the hell I was thinking.) And if Older Bro missed today’s get-together, well, we just do it all over again tomorrow. With pizza. And for everything else that’s going on… well… it goes on. But there are always ways forward, even if they aren’t clear yet.
Aren’t horses remarkable? Not only because they can help put everything back into perspective by just standing there and letting us lean on them… but because Miss Standoffish Diva, of all the horses in the barn, was the one who knew what I needed.
Merry Christmas, indeed.
Self-Reflection in an arena mirror
The indoor arena has mirrors set up. Nothing surprising about this. They’ve been there for years.
It was like Princess G had never seen them before. I have never seen a horse react to the mirrors like this. Walking down the long side towards the mirror, this big TB mare just about turned herself inside out: prancing, snorting, high-stepping, and other -ing verbs that all translate into either “OMG I’m going to explode!” or else “OMG, check out that cute mare! Let’s be Best Friends Forever!”
And yet as soon as we turned the corner, she deflated and walked normally. Except that, as we rounded the next corner, she turned to look at the mirror–as if to ask where the other horse was and why it hadn’t followed her.
Six times we repeated this: prance, snort, deflate, look for the other horse.
And then she gave it up.
Weird.
Flying Dismounts
I was taught to fall via flying dismount. Because I have a mortal fear of being sued, a disclaimer: there’s still a chance you could get injured, and you should only do this under a qualified instructor’s supervision and if something goes wrong (or bystanders laugh at you), I’m not responsible. Try this at your own risk.
Whew. I feel better. Although I have no idea what people think they would get if they sued me. My grad student loan debt?
Flying dismount–kick your stirrups free and jump off as fast as you can. Start at the halt, then try it at the walk, then trot. If you’re exceptionally balanced, you can try at the canter but there’s even more risk there of, say, landing badly and breaking an ankle. If you aren’t sure, just practice at the halt and walk. These days, I don’t ever do this at the canter–I leave that for super-atheletic teens.
The point of the flying dismount is that you push yourself off the horse with more momentum and, at the walk and trot, you also have forward momentum to deal with. The goal is NOT to stick your landing like a gymnast. It’s to figure out how to use up that momentum safely.
At the halt, this tends to mean sinking even deeper with your knees, and maybe taking a step or two away from the horse. At the walk, this tends to mean taking a step or three forward with the horse, until you can both stop safely. At the trot, you may have to run with the horse. Don’t ask me about the canter; I don’t do it anymore.
And the chances are you won’t be able to stay on your feet anyway–you’ll come down on your bum. That’s fine. Concentrate on keeping your arms in against your body and rolling away from the horse. This is not about your dignity or the state of your wardrobe; this is about learning how to use momentum and training yourself to tuck and roll.
I have heard there are people who learn the flying dismount and then use it to bail off their horse every time they get the least bit worried. DON’T. That’s not the point. If you keep bailing off, eventually you’re going to get hurt. Your horse is going to learn that if he acts up, you’ll get off. And you’re going to learn that you can’t deal with your horse’s misbehavior. That’s a miserable situation all around. In almost all cases, you are safer on the horse than off him (because you can hope to regain control, which you can’t do if you are sitting in the dirt with a wrenched knee because you landed badly in the fall).
I find that this builds rider confidence–I learned I could come off the horse while he was moving forward and I was fine. I also gained some muscle memory–I knew what a good fall (arms tucked, rolling away from the horse) felt like, so when I was having actual, unplanned falls, I was more likely to tuck and roll and not attempt to catch myself.
But despite knowing this, I still managed to get hairline cracks in all my knuckles one fall, when I stuck my arm out like an idiot. So, even when you know how to fall, sometimes… you still get hurt. But I can think back on all the times I came off and didn’t get hurt, and I think the flying dismounts helped there.
And believe me, I had lots of falls. The Super Saint had a round, crack-his-back arch over fences, and until I learned to stick it, I came off after every single fence. Tuck and roll, people, tuck and roll.
Snow, snow, more snow
We got seven inches of snow today. The barn is in the area of town that gets plowed later/less often than the main streets. My two-wheel drive car likes to pretend it’s an ice skate.
Surprisingly, it all turned into a non-issue.
My little car zoomed through the roads like a champ, happier than it’s been in months–probably because the snow provided some traction on that interminable ice.
I saw plenty of big trucks sliding all over–one almost rear-ended me at an intersection–but my little car? Like a day at the beach, with less sand.
I love my car.
The barn owner seemed surprised when I showed up. Darn it. I’d have gone shopping if I’d known I could have used the snow as an excuse–bet no one was in the stores today. (Kidding! Don’t fire me!) The mares were happy I showed up, though. And I got to play with the foals a bit, which is always fun. See? I knew there was a reason I didn’t call in snow-bound (you call in sick; we call in snow-bound).
Ooh: 237 billion cubic feet of snow fell on the city today. The news just said. I’m so glad I’m not responsible for shoveling any of that.