It’s All Grist for the Mill, Spotted at Kymulga Grist Mill

Art Photography

I went to the Kymulga Grist Mill, Childersburg, AL, as the final outing for my photo class. I made sure to bring Spotted so I could squeeze in a blog post. Proving that everything is grist for the blogging mill. Spotted is standing in one of the turbines used at Kymulga. The mill used horizontal underwater turbines rather than the picturesque vertical water wheel I was expecting. More efficient.

The assignment was 4-6 unedited photos. I went one over b/c I couldn’t decide among the 3 door pix. For class, the photos were submitted straight out of the camera. For the blog, I renamed, resized, watermarked, and added a border. No other editing.

Thank you for reading,
Katherine Walcott

Hello Dr. Jekyll

Combined Driving

Okay, Milton, what’s up?

We took you to a perfectly nice show in Tennessee. You had an epic, Technicolor, hissy fit [Not a Post].

We took you back to Stepping Stone Farm. You loved it. We hitched you to the 2-wheel cart. You were a star. After a suitable period of reacclimation, we hooked you to the 4-wheel once more. You were a star.

You’ve been getting rave reviews from Coach Courtney. You trot around the ring like a dressage king. You do a roll-back to your cones that would cause envy in a jump rider.

Sure, that one time you ran off on the lunge line and that one time you spooked with the cart and for a moment under saddle you refused to walk past the enormous horse-eating shavings pile of doom. Those are no big deal. You stopped running. You got over yourself. You bravely walked forward. Those are normal training discussion points. We are trying to understand when you forgotten how to horse.

It’s not that we WANT you to have a meltdown. If the sea is always calm, one never learns to sail the rough weather. Tell us what demons haunt your psyche. We need to figure out how to deal with Mr. Hyde before he appears again.

What’s the deal, Dude?

Thank you for reading,
Katherine Walcott

Road to the World Cup, Do I Miss Equitation? Guest Post

Adventures in Saddle Seat

Stepping Stone Farm rider Reagan Upton is on the U.S. Saddle Seat World Cup Team. She is sharing her story. Welcome Reagan.

Part 1 [Have Saddle, Will Travel]
Part 2 [First Team Practice]
Part 3 [Three-Gaited & Five-Gaited]

Not many of us have the opportunity to represent our country in international competition. Anyone have topics for Reagan to address in future posts?
~~~

For the overwhelming majority of my saddle seat career I have shown and excelled in the equitation division. This year, I decided it was finally time to hang up the equitation hat and retire. I have won all three equitation finals, completing the triple crown, so there isn’t much left for me to accomplish in that discipline.

All winter I figured I would be miserable not showing in equitation this year and would hate watching other people at shows showing in “my” class while I just sat on the rail trying to relive the glory days. I imagined the thought of someone else claiming the national title this year would get under my skin.

In all honestly, I have been completely okay with it. It has been very refreshing not to have 2 leg lessons a week, ride with weights, or drill myself on patterns. I also don’t have the mental pressure on myself to be perfect. Equitation is stressful and I guess now that I am not showing in it anymore I realize just how stressful it was. Preparing for shows and sitting in the warm-up waiting to enter my class doesn’t have my stomach in knots anymore.

I have a new challenge this year that is a six-year-old spunky black gelding named Hendrix, also known as “Jimi.”  Jimi is quite the handful but in a fun way. Jimi is learning a new division, Country Pleasure, so it’s like we are trying to master the performance division together. I do miss all the blue ribbons I won in equitation, that is taking some adjusting, but Jimi and I have done surprising well so far this first half of the season. We have shown in 15 classes and have been 1st six times and 2nd five times.

This time last year showing equitation, I was undefeated, so the 5 blue ribbon tally is a little humbling. Jimi and I are working hard to become a team so when we do finally get called to the winner’s circle it is very gratifying. The adrenaline rush of equitation was addicting but the high stakes meant high pressure. This year is about learning my new horse and enjoying the journey and I am just fine with that.

Jimi’s classes are performance so they don’t prepare me for the World Cup. I’ve honestly been too busy traveling for shows to think about WC at the moment. The competition is five weeks away so I will get to focusing on WC here in the near future. I need to get back practicing five gaited patterns and do a few leg lessons. I’m not too worried about my equitation. Most of that is muscle memory by now. It won’t take long to get my form back in order.

A Walk on the Mild Side

Home Team

That moment when you decide to put on your big girl britches and take your horse on a walk all the way around the pasture despite that fact that the two of you have not been that far from the barn by yourselves in forever and your horse is so calm that he decides to rub his face on his leg while on a downhill slope and you feel as if a somersault is immanent and you try not to remember the time you fell off when his head was down by his knees and you make a gentle, totally non-panicking request for your horse to raise his head, which causes him to curl his neck like a shrimp, making you feel pitched even further forward, so you gulp deeply, drop the reins and ask him to walk on. Yeah, that moment.

The rest of the ride was a piece of cake.

Thank you for reading,
Katherine Walcott

Milton & I Level Up

Home Team

Achievements Unlocked

SSF small, covered ring: walk, trot, canter

SSF big ring: walk, trot

Home: walk

Cavaletti: jump on a lunge line, trot under saddle

Granted, Milton & I have only started our climb to 99. We are still on the newbie section of the game where you can gain a level with a handful of gold coins, a striped candy, and three edge pieces. There is more to do. With horses, there is always more to do: transition power-ups, gaits upgrade, contact XPs, the 20-meter stretchy circle dungeon crawl, the warm-up ring rampage, the gymnastics zone, jumping cooperative gameplay wherein Milton and I join forces against the NPC course designer, and so on.

For now, I’m enjoying all the low-hanging firsts we’ve collected since pony rides for the old lady at the end of last year [I Ride Milton!].

First Canter
Photo by Courtney Huguley

Thank you for reading,
Katherine Walcott

Bright-Eyed, Bushy-Tailed, & Back to Blogging

Writing & Blogging

Welcome to Blog 2.0, or as I like to think of it The Saga of Milton and That Other Horse.

What’s New, What’s Not
New title for the blog.
Blog subtitle stays the same.
New post titles daily, as before.
New category subtitles for posts.
New theme, that’s WordPress-speak for a new visual arrangement.

Same content.
Same schedule.

Monday – Home Team
Tuesday – Home Team
Wednesday – Adventures in Saddle Seat
Thursday – Combined Driving. ASB Pleasure Driving
Friday – Photography on Manual, with my Nikon, in manual mode. Instagram archives.
Saturday – Writing & Blogging. Other Writing. Writing Exercises. State of the Blog.
Sunday – Graphic Design. AlphaBooks. Stamps.

Daily deadlines keep me motivated. A weekly schedule keeps me organized. Rotating through the various activities keeps one subject from taking over the blog, e.g. saddleseat [Whither Now], and gently forces me to keep up with others, e.g. photography.

I have created three non-time sensitive categories for days when I need to distance my life from the blog.
Horsekeeping – Details not tied to a particular horse or discipline.
Tack Box Tales – The stories told while sitting around the barn aisle.
Random Snaps – Amusing photographs, such as Spotted at or Horses Of.

Is all this categorization necessary? No. Could I put up a pretty photo on Monday, skip a day, talk about Milton for the rest of the week and then take a month off? Yes. Provided I was a totally different person. Even considering the idea makes my brain itch.

Upgrades That Didn’t Happen
Printing the blog. If it is not written down, it does not exist. Creating a permanent form for 6+ years of posts turned out to be more of a hairball than I anticipated. Two thousand posts (this is #2254) make an enormous book. My tech support suggested a PDF. More hairball.

Switching from WordPress.com to the self-hosted WordPress.org. Read the directions. Didn’t understand the first step. Since I am switching for giggles rather than for any compelling reason, I have tabled the idea for the moment.

Changing the name. Changing the title was the work of seconds. Changing the url, i.e. rodneyssaga.com, is more complicated. Particularly as I want to maintain continuity. Put on the same table as the WordPress changeover.

I’ve decide to turn a technical issue into a metaphysical sign. I can say what I want. I can fiddle as much as I want. Rodney will remain at the heart of all of this. It has always been the case that my feelings of success or failure with my horse color everything I do. Well, my feelings color riding other horses and writing about horses, which is pretty much everything I do. As goes my horse, so goes my life, so goes the blog. Therefore, new title; same url. New approach; same life.

The changes ended up being window dressing. I’m hoping they will be useful window dressing, reminding me to stay with a sustainable approach to the blog.

What to Expect
More labels. I want to be understandable to new readers without belaboring the point for returning readers. One way is to introduce people and horses by their roles in the narrative in addition to their names. I already do this for Previous Horse, Coach Courtney, Coach Kate. It feels awkward to type Husband Greg, but so did typing Coach Courtney & Coach Kate when I started. We’ll see.

More photos & graphics, as possible. Would love to have a visual each day. Even more so now that the theme uses a photo from the post as background on the landing page.

More commentary, for example, when posting the previous month’s Instagram [February 2018], I will try to annotate the entry rather than simply archiving the photos.

Overall, more entertainment. I promised myself not to restart the blog until I could be entertaining. I don’t want to simply disembowel myself. That is the writing equivalent of being on the forehand. I wanted to get my haunches underneath me and disembowel myself cleverly, or at least try. No reason I can’t tell my story and being amusing at the same time. I want to provide value in return for the courtesy of your attention.

I intend to think of this as more of a performance space (term from Scalzi, Notes For New (and Potential) Twitter Followers). I still plan to fret & whine, but in a fun way. No worries about me twisting the truth to match the tale. I am obsessed with accuracy, to a problematic degree. I’d be a better storyteller if I could loosen up.

Psycho-Social Issues
Why I Left. Back in March, I thought I found the key to Rodney. I was wrong. He continued to be his gorgeous, useless, flaky self. I was DONE. I’d been doing this riding gig for too much time, for too little result. FINIT. I would ride Greg’s driving horse b/c I said I would. I would take saddle seat lessons b/c why not. I was done trying to climb the insurmountable riding mountain.

Of course it didn’t last. I knew it wouldn’t. Even before my departure post went live [Getting Off the Struggle Bus], I was planning the reboot. I knew the blog wasn’t going anywhere.

Why I Came Back. Short answer, I missed having someone to talk to. Basically, I returned to blogging b/c I need to get out of the house/off the farm more often.

Looking Forward. How will I keep myself from getting frustrated? Well, I will get frustrated. This is inevitable. More to the point, how will I keep the blog from exacerbating my frustration? My deal with myself is that I will write about Rodney & Milton when they do something interesting. Otherwise, I will write about something else. I spend enough time with horses, surely I can find something to talk about? I can, and don’t call me Shirley.

Ba-dum-ching.

But seriously folks. I need to remember that all expectations are self-imposed. There is no call for any particular content. There is no call for comprehensive content. There is no earthly reason that I need to document each step of the process and my feelings on same. I’ll hit the high points. You’re smart, you’ll figure out the rest.

If I don’t want to write yet another post about my ongoing failure with a certain horse … Tailspin alert! Tailspin alert! Pull Up! Pull Up! … well then, I won’t. We’ll all take it as read and move on.

All of this has IRL implications. As I said in my interim post [I am not back.], Husband Greg thinks the blog was adding to my stress level with the horses. Having to write about my ongoing lack of progress was making me feel worse about my ongoing lack of progress. In future posts, I have no intention of avoiding bad news. Ups and downs are part of life. But I will try to stop perservating on things I cannot change, or can only change slowly.

So, that’s expanded goal for Blog 2.0. While the blog is keeping me from going batshit crazy [I’m Baaaaaack], make sure the blog itself is not adding to the crazy.

Thank you for reading,
Katherine Walcott