Champ the playa

When I went out to hay my guys this afternoon, I gave everybody the once-over eyeballing. I noticed Quinn had some weird dirt ruffles on her flanks - she's a mostly white horse with a thick underlayment of dust, so anything that disurbs her fur leaves dirt marks on her. I petted her briefly to make sure she wasn't cut or bruised, then went back to putting out hay. Dumped everybody's hay, played with Cersei for a while, and as I went to leave I noticed Champ had white fuzz stuck to the insides of his front legs. I looked at the white fur and realized in about two seconds that he'd been hittin' it with Quinn.

I've always suspected that he's proud-cut because he is so possessive of Silky. He gets really agitated if I take her away from him for any reason, pacing the fence and hollering, and when I put her back out with him he runs up and smells her all over, like he's making sure she wasn't out dallying with another stud.

Honestly, I suspect that most geldings are, to some extent, proud cut. In the spring when the mares come into season really strongly, lots of otherwise "normal" geldings are seen gettin' it on. I think the mares tease the normally uninterested geldings into givin them a little lovin. And really, as long as Champ isn't making a spectacle of himself or mounting other people's mares, that's fine with me.

I didn't get to do anything fun with the horses today. Thursday Cersei chewed through the stereo wiring in my truck - she ate the ipod cable and the speaker cable for the subwoofer. Last year when I installed the stereo, I'd meant to hide those cables under the floorboard somehow but I never got around to it. Sigh. Well, today I got to solder all the wires together and hide them under the floorboard like I should've done orginally. The subwoofer wire wasn't hard, just two strands of twisted copper and one separate ground wire. The ipod cable - ugh. One thick black cable with an inner sheathing of woven wire, a layer of paper insulation, and 12 separate very small colored wires. Two of the small wires were actually double wires.

I got all the inner wires soldered and wrapped and plugged it in for a test-drive, and the ipod would play for 20-30 seconds at a time and then the display would say "error-1" and quit. If I unplugged it and plugged it back in, it'd play.

Got mad and went to a local car stereo place to buy a new cable. The (really nice!) owner said he didn't deal in Alpine, but he could probably order one. Then he unwrapped a few of my soldered wires and checked them. He said I did a good job (yaaa!). He thought about it for a minute, then suggested that the woven wire sheathing might actually be the ground wire - try running a separate ground connected to the sheathing. He gave me a length of wire and off I went.

More soldering, more wrapping, and one more test - and it worked! It's as good as new - I can play, pause, skip tracks, skip playlists, everything! I'm so very happy. I fixed something, all by myself, and I did it right.

I cut a slit in the floorboard cover and ran the wires under it, too. I haven't figured out how I'm going to close the slit. Probably duct tape, ghetto as that will look.