http://quoquomodo.com/index.php en sarah.antoinette.miller@gmail.com Copyright 2010 2010-08-26T02:31:34+00:00 http://halt-near-x.com/blog/archive/revisiting-the-padded-stall http://halt-near-x.com/blog/archive/revisiting-the-padded-stall#When:02:31:34Z For some reference, the barn we are in has stalls with attached runs. The stalls have wood walls, but the stall doors and the runs are pipe. I padded (duct tape over pool noodles) a couple parts of Ro’s run. First, the top rail of her stall door. The pipe is rough and she was rubbing her chest raw against it. Easy fix: It looks good, right? Here’s the problem. I firmly believe home improvement type things should be Somebody Else’s Problem. I am awesome with words. Hammer and nails? Not so much. So when I padded the rail, I was standing on the outside of the stall and my non-engineering brain did not quite catch on to the inevitable issue caused by working on that side of the door: That’s right. I padded the outside of the rail, not the inside. My pool noodle was not nearly as wide as I thought it was. Despite my error, it’s working just fine—the rubs on her chest have disappeared. I probably could have skipped the pool noodle and just taped over the rail. I can’t take credit for the idea. You can see the colored tape in the distance where some other people have already done similar things to their stalls. Some of them have also taped up one of the vertical support rails, but Ro isn’t rubbing on that so I haven’t bothered. The other part of the stall that needed padding are the ends of the pipes where the run meets the stall: The pipe ends aren’t capped, which you can see from the bottom rail. You can see my temporary fix on the middle rail; I still need to get to the home improvement store and find some more durable caps. But first I need to remember to measure the diameter of the pipes. General Topics, Probably Horse Related, 2010-08-26T02:31:34+00:00 http://halt-near-x.com/blog/archive/grounded http://halt-near-x.com/blog/archive/grounded#When:06:12:33Z I am off from work this week. To my coworkers’ utter confusion, I am remaining in town. I mean, who wouldn’t want to stay in hot and humid Houston in August when they could get away? Actually, I hadn’t thought this through. I see where they are coming from now. What I was thinking was “hey, cool, boot camp!” I’m getting extra lessons on a schoolmaster so that I stop flapping around like a monkey in canter transitions. Ro is getting extra work sessions so (hopefully) she will start to realize she is a horse and not a giraffe. Since she’s working hard, I thought I’d be nice and also give her some extra hand grazing time. I’ve been letting her run free on the property for a little while each day, since her idea of “run free” is to graze in place for an hour. Today? Not so much. She saw an opportunity and started ping-ponging around the property. In deference to the heat, she stayed at the trot. She made it clear, however, that she had no intention of being caught. You know how they say people can run faster than horses over short distances, because people only have two legs to coordinate? The people running those tests clearly never tried to catch a horse that doesn’t want to be caught. If I were being brutally honest, I’d admit that it was the slowest chase in history, with Ro only trotting as far as she had to go to snatch some grass while I caught up (at a walk). And I’d admit that it only lasted about ten minutes before she decided even trotting in the heat was too much work. But that would be a rather sad chase indeed, so imagine something spectacular, would you? After I caught her and the horse she coaxed to trot along with her, cooled them out, and put them up, I went into her stall to explain the consequences of her actions. “You’re grounded,” I said. “Hand grazing only from now on. On a lead rope. And only for as long as I want to stand in the sun, which is much less time than I was willing to sit in the shade and watch.” “So we’ll do it again tomorrow?” she asked. “No, grounded. No more. Ever again.” “Tomorrow?” “No!” And then I realized I was trying to reason with a horse. I blame the heat. The sun. Whatever mental defect caused me to stay in Houston in August instead of going someplace cool, like the Sahara. Horses I Have Known, Ro, General Topics, Probably Horse Related, 2010-08-25T06:12:33+00:00 http://halt-near-x.com/blog/archive/how-to-teach-your-horse-to-ground-tie http://halt-near-x.com/blog/archive/how-to-teach-your-horse-to-ground-tie#When:17:57:26Z Make sure your horse’s ground manners are generally good. She should halt immediately when you say “Whoa! WHOA! Good gir—no, don’t move! Don’t mov—good girl. Stand there. Just stand. No, WHOA!” Pick a strategic location to start her training. Avoid the barn aisle outside her buddy’s stall or a place in sight of the feed room/hay shed. Place your brushes, saddle, bridle, and everything else you need to tack up nearby. Lead her to the location where you want her to ground tie. Halt her and tell her she’s a good girl and feed her a treat. Move away a step or two to grab a brush. Remove horse from back pocket and return her to the location where you want her to ground tie. Repeat Step 5. Repeat Step 5. Move away a step or two to grab your saddle. Fetch horse from the far end of the barn aisle and return her to the location where you want her to ground tie. Repeat Step 8, this time fetching horse from the hay shed. Give up, tie horse, and finish tacking up. Go ride. Repeat above process after your ride, in reverse. Turn horse out. Watch her immediately bury her head in the grass/hay and not move for the next half hour. Success! Progress of Sorts, Training the Horse, 2010-08-22T17:57:26+00:00 http://halt-near-x.com/blog/archive/brief-progress-report http://halt-near-x.com/blog/archive/brief-progress-report#When:21:09:49Z The barn is located near a firing range. Ro could care less about random gun shots at this point. That barn camp that was going on? Ro is now unfazed by soccer nets, swimming pools, slip-n-slides, horseshoe pits, and newly-painted barrels. She will walk over a wooden bride (of sorts) and practically fall asleep in the scary wash rack. She stands quietly to have her legs wrapped and can work calmly in the arena alone, with horses she knows, or with horses she doesn’t know. A dirt bike was running up and down the road yesterday, and after one spook she went right back to work on the lunge like it was nothing at all to worry about. In the dark—I’m not sure I’ve ever worked her in the dark before. She’s learning to back up under saddle, lengthen or shorten her stride at the walk, and do turns on the forehand. And she still thinks the port-a-potty will kill her, unless I walk between her and it. I’m starting to wonder if she knows something about the port-a-potty that I don’t know. Progress of Sorts, Training the Horse, Horses I Have Known, Ro, 2010-08-15T21:09:49+00:00 http://halt-near-x.com/blog/archive/when-stock-in-bubble-wrap-is-not-enough http://halt-near-x.com/blog/archive/when-stock-in-bubble-wrap-is-not-enough#When:02:57:15Z The plan for today: Get up at an ungodly hour, run out to the barn, wrap Ro, work from home for a couple hours, go back to the barn to meet the vet for some routine stuff (Coggins, vaccs, hand-holding about the stocked-up leg), finish work. No big deal, right? Everything went well, up until the “wrap Ro” bit. I wrapped the left, stocked-up leg, and then thought about the right leg. It’s 100+ degrees here during the day. Her right leg is not stocking up. She’s not favoring either leg. I’d be back in a couple hours to unwrap for the vet anyway. Despite having been drilled that you always wrap the opposite leg if you’re going to wrap at all, I figured she’d be fine with just the left leg wrapped. I wrapped and left. I had barely settled in to work when the vet called to say he was running early. I called another owner who was sharing the farm call to let her know the vet was on his way and headed out to the barn. The other owner met me as I was walking in, looking worried. “I don’t know what Ro did… she was fine a minute ago…” My brain shut off a little, because “I don’t know what she did” probably meant “there’s blood involved.” I can handle blood, as long as I don’t think too hard about it. And, you know, it’s not mine. Somehow Ro managed to scrape a big chunk of hide off her right hind cannon. I stared at it, nicely insulated from the blood (not very much, actually) by my shut-down brain. Then my brain woke up just enough to remind me that if I had wrapped the right leg like I should have, this wouldn’t have happened at all. Thanks, Brain. Where were you at Ungodly Hour of the Morning when I was making bad decisions? I still don’t know what she did—kicked herself, scraped it on the pipes in her run, spontaneously shed skin to remind me that horses are expensive and vet bills inevitable? I hosed her off, verified it was pretty superficial, slapped some gauze and vet wrap on it, and waited for the vet. On the one hand: I’ve owned her for a week and she’s spent most of that tormenting me with minor injuries. Horses shouldn’t do that to owners inclined to be paranoid. It gets expensive. The vet, I’m sure, has already figured out that Ro + me = a new car for him in the near future. On the other hand: if she has to be a goofball and scrape herself up like this, isn’t it nice of her to do so when the vet is already on the way? I mean, her timing is pretty awesome. To be honest, I probably wouldn’t have called the vet if he hadn’t already been on the way. But since he was there… Added to the routine vaccinations she was getting: tetanus booster. Ro got tucked away again (both legs wrapped this time) and I went off to work. However, Ro’s ability to apparently hurt herself on thin air inspired me to do what horse owners are always threatening to do: put their horse in a padded stall. After work, I stopped by Big Box Store and picked up supplies. In case you weren’t getting enough funny looks buying routine horse health care stuff at the grocery store, try walking around in breeches and chaps while carrying a pool noodle and black duct tape. I’ve padded the parts of the stall that she is most likely to hurt herself on. I’ll have to pick up another noodle to pad the less likely spots. Really. Seriously. I am for-real making a padded stall for her. Someone ought to make a padded room for me. Horses I Have Known, Ro, 2010-08-11T02:57:15+00:00 http://halt-near-x.com/blog/archive/this-was-not-in-the-brochure http://halt-near-x.com/blog/archive/this-was-not-in-the-brochure#When:21:43:10Z In all fairness, I knew Texas was hot before I moved here. And I knew that it was dangerous: Texas has killer bees and fire ants and other demonic creepy-crawly things. I bought stock in sunscreen and Raid and moved anyway. But I am sure the tourist brochure did not mention that it was so hot that you could hurt yourself opening your mail. To be specific, when my sparkly engraved stirrups were delivered, I pulled them out of the box without thinking—and promptly dropped them because they were so hot that I thought I’d burned myself. And it’s not like they were sitting in direct sun, either. They got that hot in their box, sitting in the delivery truck. Unfortunately, they are virtually unused as yet—the heat is playing a number on Ro, and she’s been stocking up excessively. We’ve been hosing, hand-walking, and bonding instead. And torturing—there was a summer camp going on at the barn, which meant slip-n-slides, soccer nets, painted barrels… all sorts of fun things to spook at investigate. (Also not in the brochure: the mind-boggling number of showers and changes of clothes you can go through when you are running out to the barn multiple times a day. I should have bought stock in laundry detergent.) Her legs are looking better, though—good enough to start working again. I should be back in the saddle soon, and then I can find out if my sparkly stirrups have magic powers. I hope so. I’d hate to think I risked burning myself for nothing. Horses I Have Known, Ro, 2010-08-08T21:43:10+00:00 http://halt-near-x.com/blog/archive/the-twelfth-of-never http://halt-near-x.com/blog/archive/the-twelfth-of-never#When:02:47:04Z Two news flashes. First, Ro has a show name now. Her owner and I took in all the suggestions, bounced a few others off each other, and nothing was quite hitting home. Then one night while I was randomly crawling the web, I came across this video: And I went hmmm. Actually, I thought Corny! and then I went hmmm. I emailed Ro’s owner and suggested The Twelfth of Never. She went hmmm, and we let the name sit for a while. I can say definitively now that Ro’s show name will be The Twelfth of Never. I can say this definitively because I bought her today. That’s the second news flash—or not. I’m sure you’ve been reading between the lines and knew I was considering this. Of course, if you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know I am always considering buying, but it was starting to look like I wasn’t going to actually buy until, well, the twelfth of never. Well, the Twelfth of Never is here. What happens next is anyone’s guess, but I am sure it’s going to be an adventure! Horses I Have Known, Ro, 2010-08-01T02:47:04+00:00 http://halt-near-x.com/blog/archive/over-the-river-and-through-the-woods http://halt-near-x.com/blog/archive/over-the-river-and-through-the-woods#When:20:16:29Z Everything is settling down at the new barn and we are developing something like a routine. It goes like this: show up, clean stalls and refill water buckets, work Ro, torture Ro, work Dezi, feed, turn out. We don’t torture Dezi because he’d just roll his eyes at us and do whatever was asked. Ro, on the other hand, gets offended. I’ve figured out, for example, that she will walk past the port-a-potty all day long—as long as I walk between her and the port-a-potty. If I walk on the outside? The thing could kill her. She’s sure of it, and she does not understand why I can’t comprehend that. But she seems to be coming to terms with the horse-eating port-a-potty, so when I saw a temporary bridge (some planks across a little muddy ditch) had been set up, I asked her to walk over it. It took a few false starts, but she went—and then gave me a There, I did it. Now hose me off and let me eat dinner. look. I’m mean. I made her walk over it again. And then, after hosing her off at the non-scary hose, I took her over to the scary wash rack. It’s set against the tree line and is really dark. She hasn’t been thrilled about it since we got there, and I hadn’t pushed the issue yet since there was another hose we could use to rinse her off. The wash rack took a little more convincing than the bridge, but the same technique that works to get her on the trailer got her in the wash rack. Once she made up her mind to enter the wash rack, she was really calm about the entire thing. We hung out for a minute and then left. At which point she gave me an omg wtf was the point of that? look. Anticlimactic, much? Tomorrow: the wash rack again, and then… the swimming pool. It’s even bigger and blue-er than the port-a-potty. Progress of Sorts, Training the Horse, 2010-07-29T20:16:29+00:00 http://halt-near-x.com/blog/archive/the-world-is-ending http://halt-near-x.com/blog/archive/the-world-is-ending#When:03:48:09Z I am such a hypocrite. Today I ordered engraved, blingy stirrup irons. With blue sparkly things. I was going to buy just the engraved version, because I do not have a deep-seated aversion to engraving like I do to sparkly things, but I couldn’t resist the blue sparkly things. I don’t know what came over me. I am no longer allowed to mock anyone’s choice of bling ever again. Meanwhile, I had a good lesson this weekend. We made a couple adjustments to my position, although it turns out I can only maintain one of them at a time right now. But the good news is that my sitting trot is definitely improving; I saw some of the video on the camera right after the lesson, and it’s all coming along nicely. If I can get the other position adjustment to stick, lateral movements should really start popping. I’m sure the blingy stirrup irons are going to make that happen much, much faster. If not, I can always strategically twist my ankle and blind the onlookers: No, really, it was awesome! You couldn’t see past my magnificent sparkling stirrups? What a shame… General Topics, Probably Horse Related, 2010-07-26T03:48:09+00:00 http://halt-near-x.com/blog/archive/not-really-awarding-the-web http://halt-near-x.com/blog/archive/not-really-awarding-the-web#When:17:00:41Z This morning, I opened an email that had way too many exclamation marks for before-noon reading: Congratulations! Emma Lee here, and your blog, Halt Near, has received our 2010 Top 40 Horses Blogs award! I am sure some of my readers have received this email as well, because I recognized some of your blogs in the list of the Top 40. Also in the Top 40: at least three blogs that haven’t posted a thing in 2010. Not in the Top 40: awesome blogs like Behind the Bit and The Literary Horse. [This was true when I viewed the page, at least.] Even if they hadn’t managed to get my blog’s name wrong in both the email and on their Top 40 list, the above issues would have been enough to flag the entire situation as something less than legitimate. But wait! There’s more! Apparently, awards are given out based on reader nominations. Again, I point to the differences between my little corner of egoism, with my twelve dearly loved but, still, not numerous, readers, and Behind the Bit, who recently logged 1,000 readers. I’m not buying rotten fish from Denmark, thanks. A little more investigation pulled up a widely-reposted blog about why Awarding the Web is a scam. The author’s main contention is with the requirement that you post the award’s linked badge “or else.” I agree with him—conditional awards suck and are not really awards at all. You can find a full version of his post here. But I’d like to add something else. Links are the crack cocaine of the web. They are still a very influential factor in determining search engine rankings and, therefor, highly coveted by everyone. However, search engines have become more discriminatory in how they handle links, due to massive link farming abuse. Lots of incoming links are valuable. Outgoing links not so much. So let’s say I accept this supposed award and put it on my site. Where will it link to? The Awarding the Web site (which actually exists)? Nope. Onlineschools.org. Mmm-kay. Go to onlineschools.org. Go all through that site. Find the page(s) that link this wonderful, pretigious award list, and all the other wonderful, prestigious awards being given out by Awarding the Web. I’ll wait. ... No? Yeah, there are no links from the hosting site at all. You have to know the blog award page exists to find it. So then I went looking for other blog categories. But they are the same—you have to know they exist to find them. There’s certainly no list of the varied awards being given out, not even on the Awarding the Web site itself. Think about it. Awarding the Web is so gosh-darn-proud of blogs and so gee-golly eager to recognize great bloggers that they do. not. provide. any. way. to. find. their. awards. And why are they hosting their award pages on some unrelated “online schools” website, anyway? According to the Disclaimer page at awardingtheweb.com: We here at Awarding The Web work hard to find the best blogs, and to distribute our awards to those we find with the help of sponsor sites. Our affiliation with any of our sponsor sites are only in this regard. We are not employed by any of our sponsor sites, nor do we receive any financial payments from them. If that’s true, the people behind Awarding the Web are even bigger suckers than the ones who think this is a legitimate award. Here’s what the sponsor sites get: hundreds (at least) of inbound links to their domains. Here’s what it costs the sponsor sites: [long pause] Bandwith? Meh. Something like this is not going to generate bandwidth worth talking about. If you actually find one of the so-called award pages, take the time to notice the links. Or lack of links. The award pages list the URLs but don’t hyperlink them. What’s more, the URLs are images, so you can’t even copy/paste them. Not only are they making it hard as hell for visitors to go view the blogs, they have set the page up so that it absolutely denies the blogs any benefit from being referenced on the host site. Awesome. So I can link to a completely irrelevant site and increase their page ranking, and they will make it hard as hell for people to visit my site while denying me any page ranking at all. That’s my reward? Let me get right on it. [It occurs to me, belatedly, that TLH and BTB may already have been offered and declined this less than amazing opportunity, which is why they are not on the list. If so, good for them. Everyone else should decline as well—whatever the intentions of the creators of this “award” were, the fact is that the so-called awards are structured in such a way that your blogs are being used to promote the “sponsor” sites in the search engines. I hate when people abuse bloggers like this. Don’t fall for it.] General Topics, The Wide, Weird Web, 2010-07-21T17:00:41+00:00