Life Gets Sparkly (and planning help needed)
Now that the holidays are over and I’m too bloated to do more than sit on the couch, a little catch-up:
Ro was nursing an abscess for the last couple weeks, so she hasn’t had to do anything besides eat and sleep. This is ok with her, but I’m planning to ruin her vacation and put her back in work this week.
Our ramp up into work will be helped by the shiny new surcingle I received for my birthday. I think Ro will be less excited about that gift than I am.
Hopefully, her shiny new browband will pacify her a bit. That’s right: I got a bling browband. I hear they are going out of fashion, so the timing seemed about right. But this isn’t crystals, so it’s probably ok. This is a combination of navy bluestones and some white something-or-others. It looks fabulous on her, and the navy stones stand out from the black leather more than I thought; it should look absolutely stunning in sunlight.
I took pictures tonight, in the barn, when it was dark. Ro looks a bit… evil… due to the flash. I’ll try again tomorrow, when I may be able to get out to the barn while it’s still sunny. If that doesn’t work, you’ll have to take my word on how great it looks and wait for spring to actually see pictures.
Other shiny news: my brother, the one person in the world whom I would have said was even less likely than me to get married, got engaged. The wedding will be in Oregon sometime later this year. According to my rather liberal grasp of geography, that puts me in driving distance of the Redwoods (note: I live in Texas and am pretty sure Colorado is in “driving distance.” When I lived in Ohio, New Orleans was in “driving distance.” For that matter, when I lived in Ohio, I thought going to Virginia was a good weekend trip. Like I said: liberal grasp of geography.)
So an early planning plea for anyone who lives in “driving distance” of Portland: where would you recommend I go (or not) during the two or three weeks I plan to be driving around that area? “That area” isn’t too well defined—but probably western Oregon and northern California. I miss scenery desperately (Houston, which may have a redeeming quality or two, deep down where no one is sure it exists, has a negative scenery quotient). I do not drink wine. I do like micro brews. I don’t particularly want to do big-city stuff. Redwoods, beaches, mountains?
Ideas?
When technology turns homicidal
So, this weekend was my extended family’s Christmas party. They always do a white elephant gift exchange.
This year, I was out of ideas and finally settled on a basket of gourmet chocolate. You should always bring a gift you’d want to keep, just in case you get stuck with it.
Unfortunately, between work stress and holiday stress and PMSing, the chocolate… uh… Look, I wrapped it, ok? And then I desperately needed some chocolate and figured no one would know if I grabbed the liquor-filled stuff. And then, you know, I don’t know. I woke up and there were wrappers, wrappers everywhere, and not a gift to give.
My scale assures me that I am to blame, but I don’t believe it.
Moral of the story: bring a gift you’d want to keep, but not one that you really want to keep. Otherwise, you’ll have to go out and buy another gift.
Which I did. And then my gift and my GPS and I headed off to the party, which was outside Austin.
Do yourself a favor: never drive in Austin. I live in Houston, and I know what people say about Houston drivers. I will take them any day of the week over Austin drivers. In over two years of driving around Houston, I have never actually thought I was going to die. I thought I was going to die about every other second in Austin.
But we made it through Austin and to the rural neighborhood where the party was being held. It was a little too rural for my GPS, as all the roads disappeared and my GPS began advising me to turn left, turn right, and turn around when possible in increasingly desperate tones. I turned it off and found the party on my own.
Apparently, that offended the GPS unit.
The next morning, I turned it on again. Still no roads, but this time the GPS knew exactly where it wanted me to drive: right into the lake.
When I declined, it got sullenly silent until we hit a road it recognized. It then decided I couldn’t be trusted to stay on the road at all, and began to give me turn by turn directions.
And I do mean turn by turn. Every curve. Every. Single. Curve: Bear left. Bear right. Keep left, then bear left. For over an hour, it refused to act as though the road was longer than a couple hundred yards, and every couple hundred yards gave me an update on what I needed to do to make sure I would stay on the road.
Eventually, it settled down and decided to trust me just a little. About that time, we were arriving at my next destination—another rural area. Which, again, my GPS had no maps for. I shut it off when it advised me to drive in an ever-increasing spiral until I found a road again.
As there were no lakes around, it couldn’t advise me to jump in one when I turned it back on. I figured everything was good—it was back to acting like, you know, a piece of technology and not a grudge-possessing demon. It got me pointed back home with normal directions of the sort you’d expect from your run-of-the-mill GPS. All seemed well with the world.
Out of the blue, it advised me to turn left and then turn right. As we were on a highway and had at least 100 miles to go before the next change of direction, I wasn’t sure why it wanted me to turn. I looked at the screen.
That’s when I realized I own a homicidal GPS.
It was telling me to cross the median and drive the wrong way up the other side of the highway.
When I declined, it reprogrammed my route for me and advised me to take the next exit.
I checked the screen again. It was going to loop me around and then run me up the wrong side of the feeder road.
In retrospect, I suppose the GPS may have just reached the end of its rope and was trying to commit suicide—that it didn’t particularly care if I died, too. On the other hand, I’m the one who never updates the maps on that thing. Maybe it was happy at the thought of taking me out. God knows I ignore what it says half the time. The “Turn around when possible” subroutine gets a major workout every trip.
I did get home eventually. After the second attempt to kill me (third, if you count it trying to send me into the lake), I turned off the GPS and got out my paper map. It turns out I can still read one, even if there aren’t any blinking icons to tell me where I am on the map.
I desperately need some chocolate right now. And a drink. Or both at once. Too bad I already ate all the liquor-filled chocolates. And all the other chocolates.
But hey—at least I have a present picked out for next year’s exchange. I might even update the maps in the GPS before I wrap it.
A Navigational Comedy of Errors (with maps)
When I moved to Houston, my family gave me a GPS.
They were afraid, I suspect, that I’d head out for work one day and end up in Peru. Or Greenland.
Their fears were not totally unjustified. I once got lost in Palmer. Palmer, for those of you who have never been there, has a population of Not Very Many and less streets than letters in its name.
Behold Palmer:
A person who could get lost in Palmer could get lost anywhere. The GPS was sort of a necessity. I will say, in my defense, that at least when I got off the plane I knew I was in Houston, Texas. When I punched the address for my hotel into my GPS, it thought for a long, long time and then told me it would take a week to drive to the hotel, and I would have to pass through Canada. I was halfway to the hotel before the thing realized we were no longer in Alaska.
I had reason to believe, in other words, that I was not hopelessly incompetent when driving. Getting lost in Palmer, I thought, would be the highlight of my navigational Comedy of Errors.
Wrong. So, so wrong.
When I bought Ro, a friend recommended a particular lumber yard for shavings. She told me how to get there. She drew a map. She showed me what everything on the map meant.
All I had to do, I kid you not, was make two right turns.
Got it, I said.
The next day, I set out for the lumber yard, humming We’re going to the wood works and we’re gonna get shaaaavings… we’re going to the wood works of love!
Stuff like that is reason #682 that I decline to sing in public.
An hour later, I texted my friend: There is no lumber yard on Telge.
There was a pause, and she texted back something to the effect of: No, it’s on 2920. Next to the feed store.
A flurry of texts and phone calls later, and I was at the lumber yard.
I blame the episode on my exhaustion (I was burnt out at work, and barely functional out of work). Certainly my friend had done everything she could for me, sort of driving me there herself. And, actually, I had ridden with her to the feed store before. I have no real excuse for being unable to find the lumber yard.
Today I had to go back to pick up more shavings.
No problem. I was confident of the exit: Spring Cypress/Cypress Rosehill.
I got the exit right. I forgot that the road I wanted was Cypress Rosehill, not Spring Cypress. About the time Spring Cypress ended at Telge, I realized I had made the wrong choice.
Anyone else in the world would have thought Hey! Telge! That’s the street the lumber yard is NOT on, but it intersects with the street the lumber yard IS on! (Reference above, about being lost on Telge on the previous attempt to get to the feed store.)
In the end, this is how I got to the lumber yard:
Twice now I have failed to find a place that only requires two right turns to reach. Twice!
This is worse than being lost in Palmer. This is worse than the time I got lost walking down Vesuvius (for all those people who think you can’t get lost going down a mountain, a very kind cab driver somewhere in Italy is still probably regaling his fellow cabbies with stories of the Stupidest American Ever; he would be happy to set you straight on that particular misconception).
Really, the only way I could top this incident would be to get lost driving on a straight line.
I might be tempting fate by saying that kind of thing out loud.
Always Be Prepared, Young Grasshopper
I still have no news on the Houston front, but I tell you what: I’ve come up with a program to prepare myself just in case:
- Visualize the horse population in Houston by driving around the city, which has about as many people as Houston has horses. Mumble to self, “You’re a horse. And you’re a horse. And you. You’re [a donkey]. You’re a horse…”
- Pile thirty six blankets on the bed at night and sleep under them. It’s important to begin acclimating for the heat early.
- Simulate humidity by taking all clothes into the bathroom and taking a hot shower with the fan off. Practice dressing in the fogged-up, steamy bathroom.
- Store a bridle in the bathroom. Figure out how to keep it from growing mold what with all the hot, steamy showers going on.
- Set up a lawn chair in the snow on the front yard. Spend time every day laying out on the chair and building
sandsnow castles. - Buy packages of plastic bugs and ask roommate to hide them creatively throughout the house. Periodically find one in an unexpected place. Continue the hiding/finding procedure until the initial bloodcurdling scream becomes a yelp and eventually a whimper. Note to self: adopt a cat who will kill the bugs instead of racing across the room and climbing up the highest piece of furniture to get away form them.
- Approximate the transition from air conditioning to the hot outdoors by standing outside in the snow and then running inside and standing by the fire.
- Spend as much time driving around town during and after a snowfall as possible. It is not possible to prepare for Houston’s traffic, but the general stupidity of even resident northerners during a snowstorm is probably close to the general stupidity of rush hour traffic in a large city.
- If any of the other riders’ horses get hot and sweaty during the lesson, offer to untack and put the horse away for them. Might as well get used to cooling out the horses now…
- Buy a bikini and hang it on the wall, like in that yogurt commercial. Throw darts at it because, really, how useless is a bikini? You can’t do serious swimming in a bikini.
A couple months of this, and I’ll be all set for Houston. Or the loony bin.
Changing Seasons
So, the official word is that I’m buying a horse next fall.
Except… I learned of a potential job in Houston today. I’d have to move halfway across the country, but with Winter starting to kick down the door here (already! We’ve had snow on the ground!), the thought of heat and humidity is actually quite appealing.
I’m sure that’s not what I’d be saying if I were in the heat and humidity, but from a distance it sounds pretty good. Like an all-day steam bath. Toasty!
So it appears my immediate options are “cold, dry climate with brutal winters” or “hot, humid climate with brutal summers.” Fantastic. I suspect I’m going to stay where I am, because when all is said and done, if I put on extra clothes to deal with the cold, no one throws me in jail for public indecency. In hot climates, on the other hand… the least of my worries is that I’ll blind everyone in a 50 mile radius the first time I put on shorts and show off my sun-shy calves.
But—if you happen to live in Houston, or anywhere relatively close in Texas, and want to convince me I should move—that the humidity is not as oppressive or long lasting as I’ve heard it is, or that the bugs are not big enough to eat my cat—please do. I could use any information you have, because if it turned out I could better afford a horse in Houston than I can here, I’d move in a heartbeat.
Unless the bugs really are huge and pervasive. That would be a deal breaker.