Virtual Brush Box

🐎🐎🐎

Awareness of the outside world. St. Louis National Charity Horse Show Saddlebred Week starts tomorrow. Per program, no Jumpers? No Working Hunter? Sad face. Even if I have no way of doing it, it’s nice to see it being done.

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Walking continues. [The Conversation]

Feet continue to be good. Seven weeks again. [Circulation Considerations]

Rodney appreciates predictability. [The Routine]

Milton insists on it.

Milton has been know to go along, by himself, in the lead, if the rest of us get disarranged. He is obviously muttering to himself, ‘I’m the only one here doing this right’. Stomp. Mutter. Stomp. Mutter.

Regroup at the turn-around. On we go.

Not a bad way to start the day.

St. Louis Posts

I may never have ridden there, but that doesn’t keep me from blogging about it. Came close one year. Was gonna ride Sam. They cancelled Academy. More sad face.

[Saddlebred Versatility, Jumpers] 2019

“Would I drive all the way to St. Louis for the chance at one jumper class? In a heartbeat.” [Picking Classes For My Imaginary Horse] 2020

[Helmet Watch and Show Stalking, St. Louis 2021] 2021

Onwards!
Katherine

Awareness of the outside world. Yes, it’s amusing. It’s also important. “It also means we’re allocating the wrong amounts of money to plan hospitals to take care of old people in the future. Your insurance premiums are based on this stuff.” The Conversation: ‘The data on extreme human ageing is rotten from the inside out’ – Ig Nobel winner Saul Justin Newman. Newman, September 13, 2024. Hat tip to V.

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You are looking at a bucket with 30 pounds of salt, that’s 8 months for one horse, or 4 months for two.

Remember when I said that the mail order process left us without supplement Y? [Subscription Service Surplus]

It was electrolytes, i.e. salt.

We bought more from a brick-and-mortar location.

Then, our online order arrived.

Milton is big on salt. No harm, no foul

However.

Our standing order is a five-pound bucket.

When I picked that up, I also picked up the above bucket.

I thought the ordering algorithm had scrambled its code.

Turns out the barn minion in charge of online ordering had gotten tired of running out of salt and decided to fix the problem.

So now we are well-supplied for electrolytes.

It’s salt. We’ll use it. It won’t spoil.

Onwards!
Katherine

Art of the outside world. The Guardian: Lace-inspired murals celebrating European folk traditions – in pictures, Ahmed 2023.

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Addendum to a previous post. [Repeating Nine Patch]

Original image.

When I saw the published post, I realized that this one was missing some of the internal lines. While it was not consistent with the other images, I didn’t hate the way it looked. Decided to keep this and show the alternative rather than replace the original. At first, this was going to be an update on the original post. I thought the differences were interesting enough for separate post.

Much quiltier looking. Wait, still missing a set of internal lines.

Nine patch all the way down.

Fascinating.

Onwards!
Katherine

Books of the outside world. Reading is “bringing ink to life in your imagination.” Full Speed to a Crash Landing, by Beth Revis, (Daw 2024). The author is thanking the reader. Full quote, “I truly appreciate your magic in bringing ink to life in your imagination.” Acknowledgements.

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I signed up for a class.

First Person: Personal Narrative Writing
UAB Art, ArtPlay
Teaching Artist – Javacia Harris Bowser
six 1-&-1/2-hour weekly sessions

Description, “First Person: Personal Narrative Writing Workshop for adults will cover the basics of creative non-fiction with a focus on memoir. Participants will learn how to turn their life experiences into captivating stories and we’ll cover how to get the narratives published.” UAB: First Person

What Is Personal Narrative

Aptitude #1. Reading. I read a lot of non-fiction books written in the first person. A lot. Are these personal narrative? I tend to prefer ones that emphasize narrative over personal. People in weird or notable or exotic (to me) places doing interesting things. Either they do the thing & then write about it, example Raven Master by Skaife (Farrar 2018) [Surrounded By Stories, GWSE Logo], OR they do the thing in order to write about it, example most travel writing. But I digress.

TRAVEL

Road Fever, by Tim Cahill (Random House 1991)

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster, by Jon Krakauer (Villard 1997)

Crusader: By Horse to Jerusalem, Tim Severin (Hutchinson 1989)

[Have You Read This? Travel]

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players, by Stephan Fatsis (Houghton Mifflin 2001) [Writing Rules, Which Ones?]

Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City by Robin Nagle (Farrar 2013) [Have You Read This? Graphic Novel Edition]

All the Beauty in the World, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me, by Patrick Bringley (‎Simon & Schuster 2023) [Fractal Alphabet S]

And so on.

Concern (limitation, opportunity, teachable moment, lack of Venn diagram intersection, whatever) #1. I don’t have a repertoire of newsworthy activities of the sort I like to read about. Quotidian experience can make for riveting stories, but not ones I want to read.

Aptitude #2. Writing, POV. I can write in the first person. Points to blog.

Concern #2. Personal narrative is probably more than rambly blog posts.

Aptitude #3 Writing, content. I know my strengths. “You come here for horses and entertainment and shared schaudenfreude and celebration and other reasons that are your own.” [Speaking Out]. “If I have a gift to give the Internet, it is to be witty and amusing.” [Awareness of the Outside World]

Concern #3. Will there be an emphasis on portraying a meaningful interior life? I’m sure I have one. Not sure where it is.

Specific Aims

What I hope to accomplish.

1) Go somewhere, do something. Get out among the three-dimensional people. Success is simply showing up. As with photography & art classes. [In Which I Make Bad Art]

2) Generate blog posts. Off to a good start.

3) Professional development. Working on one aspect of my writing should improve my professional writing, even if personal narrative is not directly involved in an assignment. No direct metric for this.

4) Write a full-blown story. Note to self. This one is way down in the order for a reason.

5) Submit same. Not a problem. If I write something, I can submit it. Marketing chops, I got. I’m not saying I can convince someone to publish it, just that I can send it out.

Coda

Those are my thoughts beforehand. We’ll see what changes over time.

Onwards!
Katherine

Photography of the outside world. Royal Museums Greenwich, Astronomy Photographer of the Year. Hat tip to L.

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Dock at Beeswax Creek
Shelby County AL USA
September 2024

Technical Details

Dock, f/8.0, 1/100 sec., 66.0 mm, ISO 100. Manual mode & auto-focus. Post production: resized, border, & watermark. No cropping.

Border colors. Gray for project, yellow for Nikon. [Photo Safari The First], [Quarry, Photography, Things]

Onwards!
Katherine

Awareness of the outside world. “It says something about our world that we seldom remember the person who came up with an idea, but canonize the pragmatist who made it commercially viable.” The author is referring to Gutenberg, Fulton, & Edison, then points out, “Already we have forgotten the people who created most of the important computer concepts and instead celebrate the people who became rich on them.” Paper: Paging Through History, by Mark Kurlansky (Norton 2016), prologue. [Before, intro]

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tl,dr: I tried to have a lesson and failed to live up to my own minimal standards.

I even drew a frog on my hand, to remind me to feel froggy. It did not help.

My message to me, last week.

“Promise to self, in return for taking the easy route, once the show was over, I would at least attempt new things, i.e. put on my big girl jods & ride new horses.” [Before The Show, In Which I Dither And Decide To Go To A Horse Show]

My message to Coach Courtney, Saturday after the show.

Putting this out there while I still have horse show frogginess. I will ride whatever horse you name on Monday. I will not guarantee to do anything more than walk in the round pen. (Oh dear, I can feel the frogs hopping away. Come back!) 🐸

Monday came. I arrived at barn.

Taking me at my word, Coach Courtney announced that I would be riding Cosmo.

Deep breath. I can do this. Look at hand. Think froggy. All I promised was to walk.

Well.

Earthwork being done off in the distance. Jumpy about that due to my terrible, terrible lesson with Milton, wherein he objected to construction noise, among other things. [Milton’s Missing Lesson]

To ease into a lesson, I will sometimes walk the horse in-hand in the round pen and then get on there, instead of getting on in the barn. Reduce all variables to their simplest element.

Well.

As Coach Courtney and Cosmo circled the round pen, one of the field horses decided to go walkabout. Zip this way. Zing that way. Pasture mate sang the song of abandonment.

Cosmo was having a big time.

Mind you, this is a horse who generally needs help getting motivated. So I’m told.

I went over, opened a gate. Cavorting horse now behind a fence. Pasture mate still screaming. Construction noises still rattling.

Cosmo had his head up, showing the whites of his eyes. What is this? What is that? What is that over there?

While this was all going on, I tried. I stood on the mounting block. I walked him around the ring. We chatted. I watched him chill. I knew – rationally – that Cosmo wasn’t likely to do much more more than look about himself with alertness. If he did act up, it wouldn’t be much.

Didn’t help.

Nope. Nope. Noppity nope.

It’s not a confidence issue. It’s a trust issue. Unless my mount is the quietest of school ponies, I harbor the suspicion that the horse is a heartbeat away from a having a meltdown and hopping across the ring. I wonder why. (Gives hard side-eye to home team.) If one starts a ride with that attitude, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. [Cumulative Effect]

I never did get on.

Were does this leave me? I have no idea.

First photo attempt. Where did this old lady hand come from?

Onwards!
Katherine