Squaring The Circle

Training Journal

If you’re riding a horse, you’ve already won.

 
Rodney is sensitive.

I know this. I keep relearning it.

He’s not sensitive in the ‘twitch your eyebrow, horse explodes’ manner. This is good. I don’t ride hot horses well. He does what I ask. All of it. No matter how subtle. I’m sure I’ve said this before. Probably will again.

We were in the round pen at Stepping Stone Farm. Working on cantering. (Yay! Go us!) Cannot get around the entire circle without coming down to a trot.

I put my leg on. Doesn’t work. No matter how much I support, he breaks. I have a strong leg. It’s hard to ignore. Just ask Sam, my favorite ASB lesson horse.

Rodney always breaks at the same spot, right as the very slight slope levels out. In the first direction (ASB term, i.e. counterclockwise), this happens at 8 o’clock. In the second direction (clockwise), we trot at 4 o’clock.

Does he have trouble with the downhill, minor though it is? He gets on his forehand and can’t maintain the canter? Leg should’ve helped that.

I think about the geometry. Could he be making a straight line from 12 to 4, and then has to come back to the trot to course correct?

Or it could be me.

Or both. As he comes across at 12, he drops his shoulder to the inside. He slouches, for the same reason we all do. It’s easier. I follow his weight &/or fail to suggest otherwise. We thunder straight ahead instead of turning. At the bottom of the “hill”, I look around the rest of the circle. Instead of letting him sort out his own feet, my weightshift asks him to turn a corner. He can’t canter a corner. At least, not yet.

So, I sit up. Drop my heels. Keep my inside shoulder back. I concentrate on asking for the same degree of arc all the way around the circle. Voila. We make it all the way around the ring. Smooth circle. No feeling of going downhill. Flawless. Whoever started it, I was not helping by being mushy with my directions.

Rodney responds to aids I don’t even know I’m giving. This could be good. As long as I remember to ride.
~~~

 

Unrelated video from earlier in the ride. Our first step into a larger world? Music usage investigated and deemed to be legit, as best we can tell. Tune. Fan wisdom says the company is cool with short, fan-related uses, abwct.

Thank you for reading,
Katherine Walcott

Holding The Reins

Adventures in Saddle Seat

Enjoy the ride.

 
Schooling session at Full Circle Horse Park. Rodney and I are walking toward the ring to use the mounting block. Woman and horse walking at us. I notice that she has leading her horse in the approved fashion: right hand on the reins near the bit; left hand holding the excess. If the horse acts up, she has close control with one hand and a second chance to keep long-range control if the horse shakes off the first hand.

I realize I am not leading my horse in the approved fashion. The reins are flipped over Rodney’s head, laying on his neck. I have one hand lying loosely on a curve of one rein. If he spins away, I’m toast. He’s gone for a good gallop.

Hmmm.

Not very Pony Club of me.

I blame saddle seat.

For a few years in there, the only bridled horses I dealt with were lesson horses at Stepping Stone Farm. Most of the horses wear a work bridle, which comes with two reins and a running martingale or one rein and a German martingale. There’s no flipping those reins back down. You’d end up with a snarl of leather straps. In the vanishingly small number of cases that my mount had a double bridle, I tacked up – or more likely someone tack up for me – and then left the heap of reins in place to walk the short distance over to the mounting block.

At home, I’m less worried about control and more concerned with possible breakage. We groom in the run-in shed and ride in a flat area of their pasture. They are never outside of an well-enclosed space. If a horse goes walkabout, they just run back to the barn. If the reins are trailing on the ground, they risk stepping on the them and hurting themselves and/or snapping the reins.

Rodney and I need to brush up our manners for going out in public.

Thank you for reading,
Katherine Walcott

Milton’s Holiday Rides

Training Journal

If you’re riding a horse, you’ve already won.

 

 
I talked about Rodney last week [Holiday Rides]. What of Milton? He’s been doing great.

Groundwork
Milton has become quite the long-line star. He’s doing enough work that he’s starting to put on weight somewhere other than his hay belly. There might be a topline in there somewhere.

Future Driving Practice
Milton likes to drive. It’s hitching that upsets him. To address this, we have broken the process down to into tiny increments. First step, stand between the shafts. That’s it. Nothing connected. Just stand while someone rolls up the cart and holds it in place. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

We had a chance to practice often during the holidays. Milton is up to three minutes without shifting. His eyelids have been know to drift semi-shut on occasion.

Will he ever drive? Will he ever compete? No idea. My driver says that if Milton only pulls a cart around the ring at Stepping Stone Farm that will be fine. Between me as the worrywart and Coach Courtney as the supervisor, we won’t do anything that puts horse or human in jeopardy.

Pasture Walks
Milton participated in several holiday trail walks around the pasture [Team Ride]. One of the days, we ended early because Rodney was too wound-up to focus. We did enough to declare victory and stopped. Milton’s stood quietly, walked calmly, and mostly wondered, ‘What’s up with him?’ Good boy.

Riding
I even hopped on for a short stroll around the side field during a trip to SSF.

Where is all of this going? No idea. We’ll keep moving forward and see where we get.

Thank you for reading,
Katherine Walcott

Gift Theory and Blogger Gift Exchange Follow Up

Blogging About Blogging

Let’s Get Meta

 

 
I have been traumatize by Christmas gifts in the past. I’m sure you know the ones. The gifts you get from a friend or relative or co-worker who means well but doesn’t know you well enough to have a clue.

The footed china cake stand decorated with frolicking cats because you like cats, and we all need single-purpose hunks of porcelain cluttering up our kitchen counters. The collection of a dozen, guest-quality, hand-towels embroidered with Welsh sayings because you once mentioned that you might someday want to go to Wales. (Specifics have been changed to protect well-intentioned givers.)

When I signed up for a blogger gift exchange run by the Printable Pony, I was nervous. I had visions of picture frames covered with glittery gold horse shoes because I like horses and we all need picture frames, right? I hemmed and hawed and hedged in my introduction message.

I should not have worried. I have already posted on the high quality of my haul [Don Me Now My Gay Apparel]. I have read what others bloggers received, The Printable Pony: Thank You 2019 Gift Exchange Participants! Not a dud in the bunch. Next year, no conditions. Although, I did like asking for the oversized shirt.

I should have trusted horse folks to be practical.

Post with the story behind my shirt, Equinpilot: Flying High.

Thank you for reading,
Katherine Walcott

City Letters

Celebrating Art

 

 

The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper
Kate Ascher, BuroHappold, Columbia
(Penguin 2011)
Those interested in such topics will be glad to note that Heights has a segment on sustainability. Cover from the web.

While we are in this drawer of the card catalogue:
Built: The Hidden Stories Behind our Structures
Roma Agrawal
(Bloomsbury 2018)

Process Notes
I was having trouble with artistic – if I may use that term – decisions versus reality.

The original plan was to have a classic skyline with little squares of color representing windows in each building. I could NOT get this to happen. The guides wouldn’t line up with the letters. Big squares looked wrong. Small squares would take forever to place individually. Would the spaces between the windows be a different size than the windows? Looking at the cover, I decided to try a grid to represent the steel beams. It came together in a snap for a result was less cliché and more on point.

So, my question for any real artists out there, if you are struggling to make something happen, does that mean it is the wrong approach? Conversely, if an element is right for the image/product/work, does it come together happily? Or am I seeing patterns that don’t exist?

In a similar vein, I was bothered by the unfinished bottom corners on each letter. Because of the way Inkscape draws lines, vertical lines stop at the top and bottom of the box and the horizontal lines stop at the sides, leaving spaces on the outside corners of a square. This bothered the completeist in me. Then I decided it actually worked better to represent steel scaffolding. If ya can’t change it, make it a feature rather than a bug.

Thank you for reading.
Katherine Walcott

Faces In The Crowd, A Fiction Exercise

Random Words

Writing & Writing About Writing

Procedure
In the post Big City, The Errant Moon daydreams about passersby. Two tradesmen become supervillians. Policemen being polite to tourists are really scanning for stalkers. That woman? Well, you’ll have to click over to see what she is about to do. Update, blog rehomed, The Errant Moon: Big City.

I was impressed – and a bit cowed – by that much gratuitous imagination being flung about. I’m so flipping literal. Great for journalistic accuracy. Less great for flights of fiction. Despair. How will I ever write a novel without that kind of creative thinking?

Well, if it doesn’t come naturally to me, maybe I can get better with practice. So, I went to a local mall to stare at people.

Product
The dude filming his grandson on the Zoo Scoot is a cover for recording entrances, exits, security cameras, etc.

The woman at the eyebrow kiosk doesn’t care that there is no traffic. She is writing her novel.

The three women with babies are lesbian sister wives.

The guy walking along staring at his phone just found out that he won $500 on a Las Vegas bet.

The angry-looking, goth chick is coming off 24 hours as a NICU nurse and just wants to pick up a package of clean underwear for the laundry she doesn’t have time to do and then go home & go to bed.

The man walking about with a spray bottle and janitor gloves and a belt of keys is a sociology professor doing a study on labor perception in the retail setting. He will return tomorrow in suit and tie holding a clipboard and posing as a survey taker.

The carousel used to be a dead drop but 30 year old spies on the ride by themselves were too much of a giveaway. It never pays to be cute in international espionage.

The freestanding TV crawl has embedded subliminal advertising. But no one looks at the surface ads long enough to receive the subliminal messages. #poorplanning

Office workers overlooking the atrium play mall bingo: woman with double stroller, 6 or more teens in one group, a kiosk making a sale. Some squares are harder than others. If you win three times in a row, you have to take an advanced card the next time.

The man in multi-colored leggings lost a bet.

The man in multi-colored leggings is a dancer with a visiting ballet troop staying in a mall hotel. He is making a Starbucks run for the troupe’s artistic director.

Process
I found it easy to go negative, i.e. robbers, undercover spies, etc. Once I realized this, I tried for positive spins.

I fell into copying TEM instead of being original, i.e. robbers, novelists. I tried to stop.

A famous book about first impressions, or possibly about marketing, tells of a study wherein a man in different sets of clothes asks for money in a subway station. Wearing a suit outperformed the other clothes by a large margin. He was assumed to be a businessman who didn’t have change for a token. (This was before subway cards, ubiquitous ATMs, and/or paying with your phone.) One person even gave him a copy of the paper to read on the train. I think that is where the janitor/suit came from. I remember the study but am having trouble recalling the book it came from … it’s a well known book … it’s right on the tip of my fingers … Google has failed me … it’s … nope …ring any bells with anyone?

Update on the update. Saving you the click & storing it here in case the page goes away. “That middle-aged woman, shyly smiling as she passed you, obviously proud of her re-usable coffee mug? She is really a world famous, yet reclusive, author about to sign an 60 million pound publishing contract.” The Errant Moon: Big City.

Thank you for reading,
Katherine Walcott