Action-packed day

Ok, not really. I finished stacking my hardwood then I sat down with the Kindle and read. I polished off Changes, again, then absolutely wailed on Ghost Story. I thought it was awesome. I've read a little discussion about it and I think other discussors are idiots and it ruled. Yeah, you could look at it as a placeholder novel full of boring character development, but it was really important character development. Of course I had some wild hypotheses after reading Changes when it first came out, and I was actually half-right about them. I'm glad I was wrong about the ones I was wrong about! Really impressed with the long term story arc that Jim Butcher has going here.

I know that's utterly cryptic if you don't read Dresden, but it's non spoilery if you do. (Email me if you want to talk after you read it!)

Better than Dance with Dragons and I only had to wait an extra six months for it. As opposed to five damn years for GRRM's doorstopper.


ANYWAY. In between my marathon of reading I did my food shopping for Lake Almanor and (drumroll please) I washed that horse. Somebody had asked about the Flappy Lip Thing, so I took a video for yall. Yeah, Dixie's sunburned, but not too badly, and my general horse philosophy is to treat her as a free agent as much as possible. She hates the sunscreen (and I sympathize, I hate that crap too) so I don't usually smear it on her.

Flappy Lip Face from Funder on Vimeo.

Today was Day One of working on her mane. It's really more than we deserve. I think it took 12 pumps of the shampoo bottle to suds it up and scrub it, then I used a good six ounces of conditioner on it, then I let it dry for a while and sprayed Show Sheen on it. I let it get mostly dry before I turned her out again. Tomorrow I will use like half a bottle of Cowboy Magic on it and brush it out into a glistening two foot long halo of silver. Thursday she'll have scrubbed dirt and branches back into it and we'll be back where we were Monday. Futility, thy name is horse.

I measured, and it's 27" long at the longest point.


Obviously she's standing facing downhill and she's a little stretched out, but she looks good! The stall rest lardiness has melted right off of her as soon as I started riding again.


If it looks like I didn't even wash her body, well, I didn't. It's futile. See?

So much for being clean from Funder on Vimeo.

So there's a Southern tongue-in-cheek horse myth that a horse is worth an extra $500 for every time it rolls completely over. Anybody else heard that one? Dixie's only +500 here, but I've seen her get up to +1500. ;)