20 Saturday Jul 2013
Want to know something great about horses?
When you’re walking down the barn aisle singing Queen at the top of your lungs and they all stick their heads out to stare at you, it’s easy to pretend they’re staring because they want to admire your vocal stylings.
Their big, observant eyes seem to be saying, “You rock.”
Yes I do, unwilling audience. Yes I do.
19 Friday Jul 2013
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I love horses. I’m sure this is shocking considering my first post included a picture of a horse wearing a hat but I wanted to say it out loud. Horses are awesome and I love them.
That being said I sometimes wonder at how the equestrian lifestyle has a certain aura of glamor about it. Mitt Romney didn’t help that during the last election. And by the way, I really want to figure out how I can claim my horses as an expense on my taxes. That would be super.
For me personally I often think that being a horse person means paying a premium for a consistent layer of dirt, horse drool and screaming muscles that you didn’t realize existed. After a while the last one fades away, although God help you if you take a lengthy break from riding. Riding utilizes muscles that you just don’t use in daily life. And they secretly want to kill you.
Surely there exists barns where everything is spotless and the riders do not get so much as a flake of dust upon their pristine britches. Maybe the Olympics. Who knows? I just know that I have never ever been to that barn. The horse tribe is a grungy tribe but when you love something you forget about the dirt. You also sort out the shirts that you don’t mind getting filthy on a regular basis.
Look, if I came back to horses after my precious baby Brego stepped on my spine then a little dirt is not going to deter me. More on that story at a later date.
No day at the ranch with the horses is a day wasted, even if not all that much riding gets done. Speaking of which, the day before I left for Atlanta I had just such a day.
The vet was coming out to the ranch for vaccines so it wasn’t going to be a particularly heavy day anyway because he prefers us to work the horses lightly after the injections, which, yeah, fair enough. His day wasn’t great either as he ended up being an hour late because one of his tires got intimate with a nail. That threw us a bit off schedule but you accept delays as a given when horses are involved.
My first ride of the day was Benny. Sadly he’s no longer with us.
Not dead! Sorry, that was seriously bad wording. He’s been sold and has a new, happy home with a very nice lady. I’ll miss working with him but he was my substitute horse and since Brego is no longer spine-stepping I’m okay with Benny moving on to new and better things.
That’s Benny. Isn’t he handsome?
Anyway, first thing I’m on Benny for our usual workout. He feels a little strange at first but Benny can get a little jiggly and stubborn. Also he was recently ridden by a man who shouldn’t be allowed within five miles of horses, much less on top of them. He’s gone now, apart from the semi-stalking, and Benny got better. But that day something felt a little off.
We were making a twenty metre circle a few times at a trot when I looked down and noticed a shiny horseshoe in the dirt. I hadn’t seen it before and I knew I would have noticed. You don’t want chunks of metal hanging about in the arena where horses do their work. So I stopped Benny, had his hooves checked and sure enough he’d thrown a shoe. Well, that was the end of that ride. We put Benny away and I waited to find out whether I would be put on Brego. It hadn’t been decided whether Brego would need his sheathe cleaned with the other boys and the vet had the final word.
As it turned out the vet decided Brego needed a sheathe cleaning after all. So there was no way I was riding Brego that day. You see, to get the sheathe properly cleaned you have to administer a drug that makes the horses a wee bit… loopy.
There’s the vet setting up the bucket and sorting out the elbow-length gloves.
Ah, possibly I should clarify about what I mean by ‘sheathe’.
Penis. I mean penis.
Feelin’ the glamor, yet?
This is the point where Brego was really feeling the drugs. It was his second time experiencing this procedure so he wasn’t nearly as out of it.
I briefly thought about taking a few more pictures of him with my hat but Mom talked me out of it. She was right. It’s one thing when he’s a conscious participant but coercing him while he’s in a weakened state is wrong.
His bottom lip was so floppy!
Anyway, his sheathe got squeaky clean and I hung out with Brego until he was steady enough to walk back to his stall. He only tripped twice on the way. I was very proud.
Sadly he had to wait a while before having lunch because it isn’t safe for a horse to eat under the influence. He was very happy once we finally deemed him adequately recovered.
Days like that are useful for life lessons. See, some days you get sweaty and covered in dirt but on other days you sit back and watch your horse get his penis cleaned.
It’s all a part of being a horse person.
09 Tuesday Jul 2013
Posted in Technology Issues
What…?
No, wait, what is this doing here? What is it? Why is this image on my desktop? I don’t think I recognize it.
Wait… No. I do recognize this. What do I recognize this from? It’s the back of a card but why would it be here? I haven’t deliberately put anything like this on my desktop so why…
Oh God. I do know what this card is. It’s the back of the online solitaire card.
WHY. WHAT.
Okay, so apparently I’ve dragged this unintentionally from my solitaire game online to my desktop only for it to wait quietly in a corner for me to notice it. That is the only explanation I can give.
Mostly I can give that explanation because after noticing one card image and deleting it I proceeded to drag the card image several more times onto my desktop inadvertently. Mystery solved!
I miss the time when this was just a technical mystery instead of being a tale of how ridiculously unobservant I was on my computer.
05 Friday Jul 2013
Posted in Social Issues, Travel
Have you ever felt unsafe in a sort of nebulous, widespread way that you couldn’t exactly explain? You go somewhere unfamiliar, look around and know deep in your bones that you are being threatened. There’s nothing to fight and nothing to do except feel that fear. It sours your perception. Lord knows it’s pretty hard to play tourist feeling that way.
The more states that pass bills limiting reproductive freedom, the more I get that feeling any time I leave my ‘safe’ states. Wanda Sykes joked once about how great it would be if you could leave your vagina at home, go out jogging in the dark and when a rapist jumped out of the bushes you could just shrug and say, “Sorry, left it at home.” I’ve been wanting to do that while here in Atlanta but not because I was afraid of being attacked. No, overall I’ve felt physically safe here in downtown Atlanta. Chalk it up to the Skybridges.
I’ve wanted to travel without my vagina so I could comfortably move around here in Georgia and should the topic ever come up I could say, “Sorry, I left what makes me subhuman in your eyes at home.”
I hadn’t thought about it in a while but after a little digging I realized I was in the state where one of its representatives had compared women to pigs and cows. I’d heard that sentiment on the news ages ago and I remember wondering what on earth was wrong with that man. His thought process was that if livestock has to deliver their dead offspring then obviously women should. And doesn’t that just say everything? Women shouldn’t have more rights than livestock. Meaning that we are livestock. At least to this elected representative in the state of Georgia.
In California that kind of talk outrages me but I’ll admit there’s a distance to it. The threat has not come to live with me. Being in Georgia, where that representative’s thinking has real power, imbues me with anxiety. And I’m going to be gone in a day! I can’t imagine living like this, knowing my individual choices about my life and body mean so little.
Unfortunately my imagination has become increasingly more able to picture just such a situation. It’s 2013 and lawmakers in this country are still attacking my rights. Seeing state after state crumble, infringing inch by inch on the rights of women is downright terrifying. And honestly, I have no idea what to do. Aside from voting, that is. I intend to keep voting for the people who will fight for my rights.
This thought may be alarmist but I think it anyway. If they manage to take away a woman’s right to make decisions about her body then when do they try to take away her right to vote?
It’s just another kind of choice.
Cheerier posts later. Needed this out of my system.
28 Friday Jun 2013
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My post about Georgia is coming. I’ve been here at least a day and have made enough inane observations to make a relatively interesting point but my internet is tenuous and I’m hoarding until I have a better connection. Also there’s a whole post about how glamorous horses are, emphasis on the sarcasm, coming once I download the pictures. A vet and indignity is involved, but that’s all I’m tellin’.
Right now I have a really inane thought to share. It became a tangent and I decided I might as well post.
Today I read the line, “I want to ride you hard and put you away wet.”
Don’t ask me why I read that. You don’t need to know.
Anyway, I immediately thought about how being involved with horses has limited some of the sexy talk I could use while engaging in intimacy. For instance, I could never say that. Or have it said to me. My immediate reaction to that line was, I swear, “How irresponsible.”
And it is! I’m not crazy. If you ride a horse hard and put it away wet you are a terrible person. That isn’t to say riding a horse hard is bad. Sometimes a horse needs a good, hard ride and that’s perfectly reasonable. But putting it away wet? Er, no. Not unless there’s some kind of emergency and even then I’m dubious.
First of all, are we talking about putting the horse away wet with sweat? Because that’s pretty bad. Do you want to be stuck in a stall dripping with sweat? Does that sound fun to you? The sweat will harden and it’s seriously unpleasant for the horse. Ick. Would a bath really take that much time out of your day? Just hose the horse down!
That brings me to my second point. If you have hosed the horse down and put him away wet, then what is wrong with you? Again, emergencies aside, I am giving you the side eye. Fungus will pop up on horses when you don’t dry them properly and put them back in their stall. No one wants a horse to have to deal with fungus. If it goes septic you will have serious health problems on your hands. It’s just not right.
Oh, brain, why must you kill something that sounded so sexy in the abstract?
But hey, if its sexiness has been killed for me I might as well kill it for anyone who stumbles on this blog. Have a great day, everyone!
25 Tuesday Jun 2013
On Wednesday I will be heading off to Atlanta for a few education conferences. Not that I participate in them in any real way, that is the job of my travel companion. I generally hear about all the details in the evening when the day’s work is done. Every summer for the past four years I’ve been going to various cities in these United States for these conferences but this is my first time in Atlanta.
I have been to Atlanta before in a technical sense but I don’t think a lay over in an airport really counts as having been somewhere. At most you’ve been to an airport. And oh boy, have I been to a lot of airports.
I used to be crazy in love with airports. They were always exciting because if you were going to an airport it meant you were leaving your existence as you knew it and venturing elsewhere. It was like cracking open a book but with more security.
Admittedly, some of the glow around airports has faded over the years. I don’t dislike them but I do see them in a considerably less glamorous way. They’re more like waypoints where you need to be able to take your shoes off and get your laptop out in a timely manner or everyone behind you is quietly resenting your existence.
Now that I’ve got that airport tangent out of the way, back to the point. I’m going to a town I know very little about but it should be fun. According to what I’ve heard about the weather there’s going to be a lot of storms while I’m there and if there’s anything I love it’s a good downpour. Aside from the weather I have my eye on trying out a double bypass burger at The Vortex, mostly because instead of buns they use two grilled cheese sandwiches. That is both insane and amazing. Just the way my hat likes it.
….
No, I’m not blaming my bad decisions on my hat. That would not be like me at all.
Ahem.
23 Sunday Jun 2013
Posted in Uncategorized
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Well… this is different.
I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time. It just takes me forever and a day to actually get moving on a project I want to do. In my defense, when I finally did make this blog I was immediately spooked by the activation message.
So yeah, that’s how all my plans for a profound and moving first post explaining my mission statement and goals got scrapped in favor of freaking out about how apparently WordPress already knew all about my plans to make a blog with a cowboy hat theme. That or it’s a generic greeting everyone receives and I am overreacting.
…..
Nope, it’s definitely that WordPress is psychic.
I’m watching you, WordPress. I’m watching you.
Mostly I’m watching you as I try to figure out all these fancy blogging gadgets but still! Watching.
Beneath the Hat 