Virtual Brush Box

Rodney Update

How has our intrepid hero fared while I have been stepping out with other horses? He’s missing a shoe at the moment but overall he is bouncy and happy. I might have good news about his mental state.

With her newly floated teeth, Mathilda is likely to get more from each bite and therefore to require less food. With any luck, a reduced diet will allow us to cut out her lunch meal, freeing us – mostly me – from having to be around the house every day at 2 pm. Can I get a hallelujah!

While we were changing diets, I decided to reduce Rodney’s stomach meds [Say Aaaah!] to see if whatever ailed him had been cured. Around that time, Rodney was seen chewing on the boards and even gnawing on the roof of the barn. I put it down to wanting to be out of the rain &/or simple Thoroughbred weirdness. My crack in-house medical staff realized that equine mouth activity can signal stomach upset. He upped the meds beyond previous levels.

Astoundingly. after 2 1/2 years Rodney has finally relaxed to the point where he is reacting like a normal horse. Monday morning he escorted me to his feed bucket to make sure I was serving correctly. Gone was the lingering trace of frantic that has been his lietmotif. He still spooks at this and that. He will always be a TB. His change in attitude has revitalized mine. It is the slight but enormous shift from ‘This horse is a wingnut. What now?’ to ‘This horse is a wingnut. I got it covered.’ I find myself looking forward to working with him.

In raising his meds to therapeutic levels, Hubby switched Rodney to 3 times a day. Mathilda’s lunch is safe. I don’t mind. If getting Rodney to be the horse I think he can be equals being around to give him a dose of equine Zantac (R) three times a day for the rest of his life, sign me up.

He has been on his stomach meds since October 2011. His behavior had massively improved since then. Adding a third dose shouldn’t have made this much difference. However, it would be consistent with what we are learning about his attitude. Back when Hubby was lunging him, Rodney had to be coated with flyspray lest he go mad from the torment. We know liniment makes him nuts [EEEE-ouch!]. My first horse was a hypochondriac. Previous Horse flat out made s**t up. This is different. This is sensitivity with the receptors dialed up to eleven.

Maybe. Possibly. It could all be wishful thinking intersecting coincidence. Check back with me next week.

Off-Topic: Fiction

I aim to keep an equine focus, but some days you just wanna stray outside the pasture. When writing the Versatile Blogger entry, I trolled my brain for an evocative turn of phrase. The search algorithm returned ‘share a lifeboat’. Here’s why.

In October of 2011, Esquire had a 78-word fiction contest. (Winners.) My entry:

Alone
I am by myself in the lifeboat. We were four when we started. Sam realized he did not want to live without his wife. He swam back to the ship. Maureen thought she saw a helicopter. She stood to wave, overbalanced, and fell in the water. Jean leaned over the side to look for sharks. He fell in too.

I see people bobbing in the water but no one comes near my lifeboat. I prefer to be alone.

Alternative Uses For A Hayroll

My Second Blog Award

southfortyrocks: The crazy adventures of South Forty Farms has nominated Rodney’s Saga for a blog award.

With the versatile blogger award comes the responsibility to share some information about yourself and pay it forward:
•Display the Award Certificate on your website
•Announce your win with a post and link to whoever presented your award
•Present 15 awards to deserving bloggers
•Drop them a comment to tip them off after you’ve linked them in the post
•Post 7 interesting things about yourself.

Part of me wants to dissolve into a Sally-Fieldesque puddle, mumbling, “They like me. They really like me.” However, I am afraid I must decline the honor. I can fulfill less than 40% of the requirements.

Display The Image
Here ya go

For today anyway. If I add another widget to my sidebar, the entire blog will tip over.

Announce & Link
I am happy and grateful to link to the originating blog. She has a big heart. When she found out she couldn’t have children, she turned to foster care:

I found out that I couldn’t conceive when I was 28…2 years into a wonderful marriage. Devastation much??? Yes, devastated and shocked that life had dealt me another wonderful card. I would not be able to risk failing with infertility treatments, came to the realization in about two minutes. So, I spent two years researching every avenue of adoption. Our choice, foster care/adoption through the state. The Looking Glass

I have too much trouble letting go to foster a dog. I can’t imagine fostering a child. (More here.)

I’ll go one better and link back up the chain,
southfortyrocks
nominated by
A New Path For Old Hooves
nominated by
Misadventures with Mel
nominated by
Mucking Moms
nominated by
The Foodie Farmer
nominated by
The Matticus Kingdom
nominated by
Mama Bear Musings
nominated by
The Tarot Alchemist
after which
the path bifurcates and we stop.

Which leads my next point …

Nominate 15 Blogs
If each blog nominates fifteen more blogs, the numbers quickly spin out of control. With eight iterations, we have already overshot the US population and are one step from overshooting the world population.
Generation 0 – 1
Gen 1 – 15
Gen 2 – 225
Gen 3 – 3,375
Gen 4 – 50,625
Gen 5 – 759,375
Gen 6 – 11,390,625
Gen 7 – 170,859,375
US pop. – 315,335,816 (as of 2/15/13 21:19 UTC)
Gen 8 – 2,562,890,625
World pop. – 7,066,465,549
Gen 9 – 38,443,359,375
Where does the madness end?

Mathematical persnickeyness aside, what blogs do I read? Not enough. There are days when I can barely get my own blog out, much less read and comment on the avalanche of incoming blogs.

Instead of 15 individual blogs, allow me to gather the love into one place and refer readers to Haynet: Social Blogging For The Equine & Country Life World. Apparently, I go over well in the UK. Even WordPress has decided I speak British English and scolds me when I drop the u from honor or add a superfluous l to fulfill.

Tell The Winners
Since I’m Bogarting the award, there is no one to notify.

Say Seven Interesting Things
There are no interesting things about me. That is not to say I am not a lovely, decent person, with whom you would be delighted to share a lifeboat. However, after publicly disemboweling myself monthly since August 2010 [How I Won] and daily since December 2011 [We Begin], there are no secrets left.

In my life, surprise works the other way around, I come up with a bit of revelatory self-knowledge, tell a friend, and get back, ‘Yeah, I’ve known that about you since the late ’70s.’ You’d think a journalist would be more observant, but no.

First win with subsequent curmudgeoning here.

Foto Friday: 7

The Sunday Stills challenge for this week is 7. Not seven items but the number 7. Extra points for the roman numeral VII. I foresee many clock faces and license plates.

The second 7 is the back number from my last A-rated show. I don’t even want to contemplate how long ago that was.

Pleased with the content. Lower marks for technical merit. Rainy, dark days equalled mismanaged flash.

Goal for 2013: replace expired SLR and learn how to use it on something other than automatic.

Echoes

A hunter/jumper trainer is leasing space at the saddleseat barn where last weekend’s show was held [Report]. Not just any h/j trainer but one who had taught Previous Horse and with whom I had hoped to continue on Rodney. Back when, I had talked with him about shipping in &/or what it would cost to come to our barn. Needless to say, that never happened.

If all had gone according to plan, I would have been shipping to that very barn and jumping over those very jumps. This did not pass unnoticed by the screaming monkeys in my head on Saturday.

I am enjoying my new life. Still, it was hard to watch remnants of my old life, wearing boots & britches and riding Thoroughbreds, passing through the crowd while I was wearing jodhpurs and holding a Saddlebred.
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Lights, Camera, Canter

I hate the way I look in photos and I loathe how I ride in videos. However, So you’re feeling too fat to be photographed . . . by Teresa Porter points out that we are our own harshest critics. Our friends & family are interested in what we have been doing and how we look right now. To that end, I present my latest saddleseat video. This is the horse I rode at the show four days later [Report]. We did not look anywhere near this good in the show ring. (Thanks to Images by Ceci for the tweet on the article.)

In my mind’s eye, my hands are up around my ears, Casey’s head is in my lap, and we are zooming around like the Five Gaited Class at Louisville. In reality. we have adequate animation for a low-grade Academy class.

In the video it looks as if I am hauling on his mouth. In truth, I have – from a dressage perspective – nothing in my hands. Heretofore, my hands have been light to the point of ineffectiveness. All my life, instructors have told me to shorten my reins, take a hold of the horses mouth, pick up a contact. Now, I’m told my hands are just fine the way they are, even to lighten up on occasion. (Although not so much at the show.)

Hubby arranged this from a hunter perspective, grouping the gaits together. In reality, every saddleseat session, lesson, class, etc. goes the same way: enter on the right rein at a trot, canter, reverse, repeat, line up, with a bit of optional walking sprinkled in. Yes, the horses know what comes next. They get excited. This appears to be the point. The practice is diametrically opposed to the dressage/eventing wisdom of never schooling a full test lest the horse anticipate the next movement.

This post is dedicated to the friend who asked if I was going to blog about my next lesson. Here ya go.