Virtual Brush Box

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.

Support Your Local Blogger

Been There, Done That has jumped in with both feet. Since last we checked, there a have been three more horse posts.

The Worst Test

The worst dressage test I ever rode was on the same horse who gave me the best dressage ride I ever put in. Odd, isn’t it!

In his second-level work, “Moses was very good at canter-halt, not quite so good at halt-canter.” My favorite canter-to-halt story happened years back when I rode a friend’s horse in a sidesaddle flat class. George was the perfect Victorian-style horse, if he were pulling a milk cart. A fine ladies hunter he was not. He moved through the other competitors like an elephant moving through a coalition of cheetahs.

Since it was a pleasure class, we had to hand-gallop. George was not amused. Since it was side-saddle, I had my legs to the outside. The judge was to the inside in the middle of the ring. I thumped for all I was worth with both legs. George lumbered into a fractionally faster canter. When they called, as they inevitable do, for a halt, I merely stopped kicking. George locked all four legs and screeched to a stop. As the Thoroughbreds adjusted to the loss of velocity, I dropped the reins, sat aboard my immobile mount, and looked smug. FTW.

What’s in a Name?
&
More Names

The wittiest use of ancestry in a horse-name I’ve ever heard of was a racehorse I encountered when I worked at the track. His sire was The Axe II, and his dam was Top O’ The Morning. They registered him as Splitting Headache. Also creative was Prince John X Platinum Blond: Stage Door Johnny.

In the comments for What’s, I told the story of Previous Horse’s well-deserved barn name. I’ve blogged about Rodney’s various names [Square One, Contest Winner]. Mathilda is named for one of my Dungeons & Dragons characters. There have to be serious geek points in that.

Click over to find out how she jazzed up an uninspiring stable name.

Upcoming
I may have a new blog to announce soon. A friend just asked for some advice on starting one.

A while back, Hubby and I traveled to Shanghai. Our group was taken out to dinner by an friend of mine who had married a Chinese woman. He claimed to know very little about local customs, but he sure knew more than we did. He enjoyed spending the evening playing Old China Hand.

I know how he feels. My blog may not have taken the blogosphere by storm, but I’m happy to dispense whatever advice I can muster to anyone who will listen. I love playing the Old Blogging Hand.

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Title: on the information superhighway (there’s an old term), everyone is local. I, for one, think that makes right now a cool time to be alive.

Show Report #3: A Hot Mess

Using the John Deere wheelbarrow to unload.

Third show in the winter series last Saturday. Same ribbons, reverse order. The bad news: I was a basketcase about riding a horse other than Sam. I had ridden Casey the previous week to good effect. There was no reason to think I would ride all that much worse at the show.

Casey is a special butterfly around the mounting block. Many ASBs don’t stand still for the rider. Casey’s particular wrinkle is that no one can touch his reins. Not the person on the ground, not the rider getting on. Get on, walk a few steps, then pick up the reins and you are good to go. I got the first part of this message but failed to retain the second part about riding him normally once we got going. I also knew that if you took a death grip on the reins and continued to pull, Casey would object rather vehemently. This all came together in my show-addled head as Must. Not. Touch. Reins.

I larked about the ring with my reins luffing like badly-managed sails in a high wind. Casey threw in a few canter steps, flipped his head, and asked, ‘Excuse me, isn’t there supposed to be a rider back there? Am I on my own out here?’ Either other riders had worse rounds or I was awarded horsemanship points for sitting through it all. I won.

My instructor was prepared to give me a sternly raised eyebrow over my riding, only to have me take the class. It’s hard to argue with a blue ribbon.

Second class, second place. Some canter steps, probably a bad diagonal in the confusion. My eyebrow-raising move for this class was to forget my gloves. I left them sticking out of my pocket. They sat there, waving at the crowd as I lolloped past.

Lesson for the day. The riding ability is there. My mental game is completely shot. In retrospect, I feel okay about riding in Beginner. The three blues (first place for you foreigners) were good for my ego. The three reds (second place when you do the ribbon colors in the correct order) meant I did not dominate the competition. I am assuming the marbles are recoverable rather than lost. Therefore, if I ride in the Winter Tournament next year, I would like to skip Intermediate and move straight to Advanced in order to practice patterns with an eye to cantering at National Academy Finals 2014.

I say if to the next Winter Tournament. I have every intention of staying with saddleseat, at least as a diversion. Even if Rodney and potential New Horse are thundering along, it would be good to keep new things in the mix. However, I could die, the king could die, the horse could learn to fly. Which is by way of an old family joke about a fellow who arranged a year-long stay of execution to teach a horse to fly. Which is by way of saying Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.

My next scheduled show for 2013 is the 26th Annual ASAC Horse Show in Clemson, SC. This will be the start of the show season for the big-time horses and riders. It will an open show with performance classes rather than a fun show for lesson students. It will be at held a show facility rather than at a local barn. In the Academy division, that means shirt, vest & tie rather than collared shirt/sweater. Adult Walk Trot will not have a beginner/intermediate split.

I appreciate everyone’s high opinion of my fighting spirit [Greed comments]. Walk Trot is gonna be enough of a challenge for a while. I still have a lot to learn about riding saddleseat & showing saddlebreds. Might as well learn it at a trot.

Saddleseat posts, including reports from shows 1 & 2.
Speaking of ribbon placings, Wiki has a colorful chart showing the international differences.
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Emergency Rations

Horsekeeping Tip #3

If you are ever short on carrots, try a slice of bread as a treat. Mathilda loves it. She’s always been a carb-chowhound. Last time Hubby used bread to pay the mare toll, he was feeding a slice in pieces. When he went to give some to Rodney, she stole the rest of the slice from his coat pocket. Rodney still isn’t sure that bread is on his list of approved food substances.
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