It's like a brand new saddle

It really feels completely different with the stirrups tied back. I think it feels better, but it's so wildly different that I can't honestly say I love it yet.

This looks correct, though, right?


Here's a closeup of what I did.


Here's my February Appreciation Photos.

The moon's technically more than half full right now, but in daylight it looks pretty small. I don't like this photo as much as I thought I would've, but it was too cold to take lots of pictures today!


Yellow Dawg, snuffling around.


Headed back.

Sharecropping and a WTF?

First, the WTF. What are these weird tracks? Right now I'm thinking ... deer, but somehow they're hitting with two feet in almost exactly the same spot.



But the actual indentations don't show two cloven hooves! Or pad/claw indentations, like a canid. Way too small to be horse prints. Very deeply indented into the ground.

Ok, sharecroppers. Wikipedia has a typically dry explanation. Sharecropping was our very own rigid class system. Some families owned a lot of land, but didn't have enough cash to pay people to farm it for them. Instead they'd sublease plots of land and collect rent as a percentage of the crops grown, usually dictating what crops and how many acres had to be truck crops. Back then (both before and after the Civil War, up to about WWII), the cash crop was mostly cotton but could've been soybeans.

It's not like anybody had a really easy life back then, but being a sharecropper was a particularly shitty life. They lived in truly terrible houses - best they could build, and better than a lot of the world lives in today, but MAN. We're talking 50 or 60 years ago people lived in tarpaper shacks, drank from cisterns, used outhouses.

I've seen quite a few of them. My dad makes birdhouses from their old wood (from houses, barns, corncribs, whatever) and I've helped him tear down a few. I think the birdhouse thing is cool; at least the wood is getting re-used and remembered.

Anyway, here's the remains of someone's home. It was used til pretty recently; they had electricity!

View approaching it.


Power box outside, and the exterior of the house. The wood is almost certainly cypress, 1 inch thick by however wide the log was, fairly rough-hewn.


Here's the inside view of the fuse box. They had TWO 15 amp circuits! Livin' large.
They covered up the cracks in the boards with a couple layers of cardboard, then put some wallpaper on top of that to make it look prettier. For some reason the little "pretty" touches just break my heart. Every woman wants her house to look pretty.



Something made a cozy den under the floor. Look at that heinous linoleum! I bet this room was the kitchen - easy enough to sweep an unfinished wood floor clean, but you can't keep a kitchen clean with just a broom.



This is a pretty cool shot if I do say so myself. :) It's pretty obviously the bedroom.



This kind of stuff really moves me in a lot of different ways. Somebody really lived there. Kids grew up in that house who are near retirement age, but they're still alive. It's surreal to me that the world has changed so much in their lifetimes, but it's also surreal to me that 20th century Americans lived like that!

I haven't mentioned race. Most sharecroppers were black, but not all of them. It's much more of a class thing than a race thing.

That's all the pictures I had time for. I'd left T to hold both the horses while I went in to take pictures, and she was a little "oh god where'd you go" freaked out. I'm planning on going back with a halter on under Champ's bridle and tying him to a tree and getting all the cool pics of that house that I could ever want.

Oh, housekeeping. I dewormed with pyrantel today!

Orienteering

Champ and I took T and Goblin on a cool new ride today!

During today's ramblings, I found a sharecropper's shack and took a few pictures of it. But the camera's in the car, and I am supremely lazy, so I made some maps (thank you, Google Earth!) of where I ride. Perhaps those of you playing at home can keep up with my vague country descriptions better now.


Here is a pretty little aerial photo of my horses' pasture. Keep that lake in mind; it'll help orient you later.



Click any of these pics for the bigger version if you'd like. In this next picture, the purple outline is the back field, but the fence is down there so the horses aren't roaming back there right now. The baby blue outline is the paddock - there's a gate between the main field and the paddock, and another gate which is usually open leading back to the rest of the fields. The red lines represent most of the trails - some of them are as nice as anything you'd find in a top-notch state park; some of them are actually just deer trails that I use.

The blue dot lake has some good fishing. The orange dot lake is where those redneck kids go skeet shooting - they set up the skeet machine at the north edge of the lake and shoot from the south end. There's a levee on the ESE side of the skeet lake, but a large tree has partially fallen on the levee and blocked that trail. If you want to circle the skeet lake, you have to go waaaay to the SE around the little hidden lake.




This map shows how I went wandering on Tuesday and found that deer hunting field. The purple line is my path out to the deer field; the orange dot is the tree stand. There's two houses visible in the picture - east of the deer stand and NNE of the stand. I rode close enough to the houses to realize they were in fact houses then turned around. Google Earth says it's about a 4 or 5 mile roundtrip.




Here's today's ride. T has been buggin me to go explore the big soybean field, so that's exactly what we did. The cut through the woods where our red line went west and east is a power line easement - we went west first, but there's an unbridged ditch. The ditch would've been easy enough to jump... except the ground was very spongy and none of us (horses included) know how to jump. We could have just galloped the horses at the lil baby ditch and tried to redneck foxhunt our way over it, but I actually do try to be a responsible adult when I'm out with the minor T. (Also, I don't want to get catapulted off of my horse onto my head in muddy water, but shhhhh - let's blame it on the kid being with me!)

After we were stymied to the west, we headed to the northernmost point you can see and investigated a mysterious white thing. It looked like a barrel; it was, in fact, a barrel. Then we headed back and detoured to the east down the power lines.

The sharecropper shack is in the woods, right off the power line clearing, about halfway down. Pictures tomorrow, I promise.

We rode all the way to the subdivision and snuck our horses all the way up to the paved road. Then we turned around and snuck right back out - we didn't want to talk to anybody, just explore a little!



After we got back, I rode Dixie. I'll write a separate post about that - perhaps one day I can look back on the Dixie posts and actually see some logical improvement in our work together!

I really *should* know better...

... than to call any horse I plan to ride ever again "bombproof."

Yep, it's Crazyday. There's a day, every fall, where the horses all go NUTS. Either it cools off and a cold storm front moves in, or it just stays calm and gets so cold that all the horses in the area come back to life. Today was that day.

It never hit 60 today and I rode near dusk so I wore my Carhartt coveralls. I hope you northerners all spewed beverages on your keyboard laughing at that, but it's true. :arms crossed glaring:

Anyway, it was a totally fun ride. Champ was downright crazy, snorting a lot and ears going everywhere and very forward. He was clearly trying to warn me about the lions and wolves lurking everywhere. We did not see lions and wolves, but we were trotting quietly along through the pine forest and spooked a doe from about 20 feet away. She jumped and ran away, and Champ levitated sideways. Levitating sideways is a major spook for him!

It was a nice fast fun ride. At the end, in our cooldown loop, I worked on getting any impulsion at all at the walk. I met with mixed success.

It's gonna be a good riding season. Yay for cold clear weather!

Fish fear me! Ok well they fear my friend, but whatever.

(With apologies to Se7en)
What's in the box? WHAT'S IN THE BOX!!!



That's my ominous looking fish cooler. Here's what's inside!



11 trout and 2 hybrids! o.O I froze them in serving-size packages. My husband, who is fairly disapproving of this "eat fish you caught yourself" idea, insists I freeze them for a while to kill any parasites. Freezer-ready:



One of them was truly a large fish. Imagine it with its head still on!



Now, on to the sad truth: I only caught two of them. The second-biggest bass, and a smallish bass. My kid-friend Taylor landed two, I think, and our master baiter Mark caught all the rest. Taylor's mom, Kelly (Poppy's new human) tried her hardest and didn't catch a damn thing. Kelly and Taylor headed home while Mark helped me dispatch the fish... then Mark gave me the whole box of cleaned scaled gutted fish. I suppose when you can just walk out and catch 10 fish in an afternoon you can be so generous!

Our secret bass weapon: Minnows. We had crickets, too, but the bream just weren't biting. I spent about an hour, off and on, fishing the shallows with crickets for bream, but nada. Mark stuck to minnows and the dead-tree-fish-paradise in the middle of the lake and cleaned up.


Yesterday I took some tree and horse pictures. Look, I found COLOR! This is a little sweet gum in front of a little sycamore, and it's about as colorful as we get around here.




And here's mah dawg, cause I never get tired of taking pictures of her.



Dixie



Mr. Hateful



Fat Old Thing


None of them get any grain to speak of. Whoever gets ridden - usually Champ, sometimes Dixie - gets about a scoop of oats or alfalfa after the ride, but other than that, they just eat hay. I think I mentioned Silky was kinda congested earlier this week? She seems fine now, YAY.

I had a lesson, too, but I am going to cook dinner and I'll post about that later on.

Freedom and fall and more PICTURES

One of the blogs I really like is Mugwump Chronicles. She posted about kids and horses the other day. I don't have kids, and wasn't lucky enough to have a horse when I was a kid, so I don't have much to say about the main point of the post. But I have been thinking about this quote for a couple days:

The biggest gift I wanted my daughter to get from horses is the sense of power and control they give. Young girls don't feel in control of their lives much.

I know what she's saying, and I don't entirely disagree, but the thing that I love about horses is the sense of freedom. Really, the thrill of getting a horse to do what I say isn't the exciting part. It's the sense of riding away from everything, being free as a bird or a spirit of the wind or a woodland elf or something.

ANYWAY. Pictures! Of horses, and Mississippi on the cusp of November. It was downright cold earlier this week - we had FROST on the morning of my birthday - but it's warmed back up nicely. It was 72 at 4 pm when I went out.

I like this weird washed-out picture of Champ. I was sitting in my truck (wearing a red shirt, you can see it in his eyeball and reflected off his cheek) and he was sure I had more treats somewhere.



Champ got bored and Dixie came up. Champ stalked off and Dixie cautiously came up to beg.



This is her "good" eye. I really think she looks crazier from her off side, with all the white, so I call her near side her good normal sensible side.



Here's the "crazy" side. She always looks like she's about to jump out of her skin. I love her dark eyeliner and frosted eyelashes, and her half medicine hat, and the way you can see she's a bay roan paint. But mainly I love her brown eye. I don't know if I've told yall this, but blue-eyed horses FREAK ME OUT. I would not have bought her if she had a blue eye cause they just give me the willies. It's bizarre, I know!



Here's some pictures of green trees for Sara. :) The reddish ones are sweetgums, they're the only local trees that turn red. Most of the rest you see are just scrubby baby elms, which are worthless trees because that Dutch Elm Disease will kill them about the time they get tree-sized.



This is a sycamore, I'm pretty sure. They turn a pretty yellow in the fall. Look at how the plague of locusts, err, horses destroyed the grass!



But the barn owners bring hay now. There's two hay rings, so they drop off two or three rolls every ...? couple of days? Week? They drop hay about like I would - wait til the horses eat almost all the hay, then wait one more day because there's always some scraps left, then deliver some more. We get a hay surcharge on our bills based on the number of rolls that month and the number of horses each person owns.



I didn't take boring body shots, but all three horses are looking great. Champ isn't ribby, Dixie looks fine, and Silky is pleasantly plump. Silky sounded really snotty today, though, which makes me a little worried.

And I dewormed everybody with ivermectin. I know, I used ivermectin last time, but I sure do have a lot of it and I'm hoping I timed it right to nuke the botfly larvae.

A lesson, a lightbulb, and a deer.

My dad's pretty cool. Generally, he supports whatever I want to do - from "let me actually physically help you with this" to "I don't understand it, but I'm right behind ya!" Horses are definitely in the latter category. They're big, he doesn't understand their behavior, they're expensive, and they're dangerous. He'll ask about them, but it's more out of bemused politeness than any real desire to hear the answer.

And he really doesn't understand the whole lesson thing. It's not snobbiness about dressage, it's just that he plain doesn't understand what else I could possibly have to learn. I don't fall off (much), the horses do (roughly) what I want, end of story. About every ten days he asks if I'm through with my lessons yet. I keep telling him it's something you can keep learning your entire life, but he has no frame of reference and you can tell whatever I say doesn't really sink in. Ahh, well.

I'm certainly not "through" taking lessons. I was thinking about it Sunday - not in a "am I really getting my money's worth out of this" sense, but more of a "I wonder what I am learning" sense. Then I had my lesson, and I learned two things.

The first thing we did - the VERY FIRST THING after I got on Clipper - was a turn to the left at a walk around Hardy, the instructor. I'm always odd and clumsy when I first start a lesson, and I muddled up the first turn. I activated my left rein, looked to the left, and asked for a walk. My right rein was flappin in space, probably so loose it was banging Clipper's neck. Clipper started wobbing off in a strange oval, Hardy said "pick up your outside rein!," I picked up my outside rein, and KA-BLAM!, Clipper started bending perfectly.

It was a lightbulb moment. More like a lightning bolt moment, really. It was exactly what I've been reading about for what, two years now? The outside rein contains the energy of the horse and supports the bend. The outside rein supports the bend. I can't tell you how many times I've read that, or something like it, and puzzled over it and mentally shrugged my shoulders. There's a thousand more little lightbulbs waiting for me - reading dressage without ever doing it is like reading fiction - but there's one down. Too cool.

Then we walked and trotted in a bunch of circles in one half of the arena. I still make mostly wobbly circles, or lose my impulsion, or my legs start flapping around like a barrel rider, but I'm improving. And again, since I was noticing it, I could tell that when I got it all together and asked for a bend with my reins and legs just so we'd bend, me and Clipper, smoothly. I can even kind of almost feel when my outside leg is right, how it helps contain his butt. Yay!

We were working in half the arena because a kid on a pony was having a lesson in the other half. The pony in question doesn't like other horses and apparently will kick any horse that comes near her. Anyway, the kid's lesson finished a little before mine and Hardy wanted me to trot around the entire arena and do voltes in the corners or something. So off we went!

I swear to god I didn't ask for a canter depart. I just squeezed no harder than I'd been doing all morning and asked for a TROT. Clipper, for whatever reason known only to horses, took off like greased lightning. As soon as we hit the first turn, he settled down into a canter, but I was trying to grab reins and sit down and not lose stirrups or fall off or whatnot and it took two laps before I could even hear what the instructors were saying. "Sit DOWN" was the gist of it, but then we were on the long side and Hardy yelled "outside rein!" and I just barely pulled the outside rein and we skidded to a halt.

I scratched Clipper's neck and apologized for whatever I'd said to him that made him decide to do THAT and we turned and walked quite sedately to the middle of the arena, where all the instructors were standing trying not to turn white or purple or green. I just kinda laughed and said "told you I don't fall off much!" and we started trying to figure out what brought that on. Hardy didn't think I'd done anything wrong, per se. He thinks maybe it was just suddenly having the whole arena, plus that we were pointing towards the gate and going past some trees. I privately suspect that Clipper just wanted to see if I'd fall off or get the lesson over with any faster, cause that's how horses roll.

Anyway, my calves aren't perfect but they're getting there. My hips are still waaay too stiff and thus the bouncing. Bouncing is no good. "Must quit bouncing" is the second thing I learned in my lesson. Obviously I still haven't gotten off my ass and done any yoga. Swear to god, tonight I will.

After all that excitement, I went over to the field and grabbed Champ and we went on a nice sedate trail ride. Found some more trails leading off to a different pond. It's SO pretty back there - next time I'll bring my camera and take more pictures. On our way back out, we flushed a good sized doe. She went bouncing off while we sedately admired her. Cersei smelled her trail and thought it was pretty exciting but came right back when she realized Champ and I weren't going to chase the deer with her. She's a wonderful dog.

And Champ's a wonderful horse. He gave me some "what the hell are you doing that for, woman?" ears when I practiced riding with my calves wrapped around him, but he quickly realized I wasn't expecting anything different from him. I think it is easier to post with more leg contact.

I love Mississippi

I went and got the ball rolling on the new apartment in Olive Branch today. Then, since I HAPPENED to be out there I went to the horses.

I needed some horse time. I don't usually bitch about "real life" here and I don't really intend to.. but this waiting-on-bar-results looking-for-job stuff totally sucks and is stressing me out majorly.

So it was Champ day. I get along so well with him. He is an annoying horse in many ways, very opinionated, but he also calms me down. I can get on him pretty upset, ride for a while, and get off feeling great. The other horses I hesitate to ride when I'm upset, because I don't want to "ride angry," but Champ always mellows me out.

I brought the camera and took some pictures. Mississippi for all its problems is a wonderful place. It's September, and I have with any luck two more months of really pleasant riding. At least a month, probably two, before the first frost and the grass thinks about maybe going dormant. It won't snow til January, if it snows at all, and the ground will only be frozen for maybe two months. I feel sorry for yall up there in the frozen north!

So it's a picture post. Here we go - lovely new (very short) trails! This is the "trailhead," right behind the horse pasture.




Here's one of the ponds.


The ripples are Cersei. She's swimming around somewhere.


This one's a little blurry because Champ was jigging around. He is also giving me the "WTF?! Why have we stopped!" ear. Obviously I am stupid and he is just trying to protect me from the wolves in the forest.



These next few pictures are on the way back. The part of the property near the road has a double fence - barbed wire near the road, about 12' of mowed grass, and hot wire for the interior fence. I love the setup - hotwire works and all, but Poppy is like a force of nature and if he ever decides to lumber on thru that one puny hotwire, he'll probably pull up at the big tall barbed wire fence. Anyway, Champ and I were in the alley between the two fences, looking left.


A little further down the road:


The rest of the herd had come up to us on the right, inside the hotwire.

Champ and Poppy

Well, I almost rode two horses today.

I got out to the field pretty early, around 8 am. I walked back to the run-in, whistling and calling softly. My horses were in the (large) run in, along with the other horses. My four were off in their own little section, but sure enough, they'd settled in well enough to want to nap in the run in. Anyway, all the horses were in that half-asleep horse trance. I walked in quietly, gave everybody a scritch, and headed back out. All four came trailing out after me.

I got Champ saddled and bridled, then spent a good hour working with him. He was all jittery - in a new place, with me asking him to leave his beloved Silky? He kept trying to circle around and calling for his buddies and generally being a pitiful nervous wreck. It was pretty uncharacteristic behavior, but moving fields has to be a huge upheaval in a horse's life. I worked him through it, I think - we'd explore out from the run-in, then stop for a few minutes, then go back. I'd let him stand near Silky til he calmed down, then we'd turn around and head out again. The first few trips out were the worst, of course, with nonstop whinnying and jiggling and trying to wheel around and run "home," but he calmed down more on every trip. By 8:45 or so, I was just running Champ through his gaits and thinking more about my riding than his state of mind. We finished up with some slow calm walking to cool down, then I untacked him and hung out with all the horses for a while.

I killed all the big horseflies I could find. Must've squashed five or six of those cicada-sized monster horseflies. I worked my way from horse to horse, scratching itchy spots and whacking flies. Again, I was impressed with how calm Dixie has become. She lets me walk right up to her with "normal" body language, scratch most anywhere, and even smash horseflies. Anyway, once I felt like I'd given them enough "hanging-out" time, Cersei and I left.

We drove across the county to Tractor Supply. I needed a helmet and Centered Riding for lessons, and I wanted to get a bag of oats as a treat for whichever horse got ridden. I found a helmet, and settled on alfalfa pellets for treats, and... well... there was a clearance sale on some English tack. I ended up getting another Collegiate bridle, exactly the same as Dixie's, for $24 instead of $99. And a spare pair of reins for $14, instead of $40. I usually manage to resist the temptation to buy stuff just because it's on sale - but that was seriously too cheap to pass up!

TSC didn't have the book. I headed north into Memphis and hit the closest bookstore, which actually DID have the book. Looped back south and back to Olive Branch. It was only noon, and it wasn't all that hot and I was tired of making excuses about Poppy.

He's not actually going to flip out and kill me. He's not even that tall - maybe 16.1? I don't know why I'm so vaguely intimidated by Poppy - he is one of the sweetest and most honest horses I've ever met. And he loves attention. Yes, I don't have a saddle for him, but he's not such a sensitive little darling that being ridden in my normal western-ish saddle would scar him for life.

First, a bit and bridle. I have a 5.5" full cheek single jointed snaffle and a 5.5" low port pelham, and I figured either would work. (And Poppy came with a 6" mullen mouth snaffle, but he absolutely detests that bit, so it's just gathering dust in a box.) I noticed that the new Collegiate bridle was actually a "full" size, but the almost-too-large bridle I'd been using on Dixie was an "xtra full." Hmmm. I fiddled around with bits and buckles for a few minutes and cobbled together a rig for Pops.

Turns out the bridle fits just fine, but Poppy has outgrown the damn bit. Sigh.

Next, I tried my saddle on him. It fits ok, but looks somewhat ridiculous. Like a toy saddle. He's at least 12" larger in the girth than Champ. Anyway, unsurprisingly, Poppy didn't mind the saddle at ALL. I gave him lots of brushing and scritching as a thank-you for putting up with saddle fitting and a too-small bit, then packed everything back up and went to my parents' for the afternoon.

I ordered a 6" hanging cheek french link snaffle from drafttack.com. Poppy seems to like jointed snaffles better than solid ones. Hopefully it'll show up soon, fit my horse, and help me communicate with the big lug. I'm actually really excited about riding him! (Yeah, nervous too, but definitely excited as well!)

Move completed!

Sometimes they're just angel horses.

I got to my uncle's around 7:30. Drove around their field til I found the horses, then slipped a halter on each one just in case. I saddled up Champ, hooked a lead rope to Dixie (cause she was the closest), and ponied over to the gate. Champ was not thrilled but he didn't kick Dixie's head in. Dixie was not thrilled but she didn't try to bolt. We got to the gate and I noticed that both Poppy and Silky had followed us, curious about this new bizarre game.

I opened the gate, walked both horses through, and left the gate open while I remounted. I got the horses moving again, then leaned over and unclipped the lead from Dixie. Dixie and Poppy were both wide-eyed at being in a different field and were too busy staying as close as possible the Great Leader Champ to even notice ropes or the lack thereof. Silky was shadowing along about 25 yards behind us. We uneventfully made our way through that field and into the corral field.

I called the two young dingbat horses as I turned Champ into the corral. But they are dingbats, so they missed the gate and got confused and ran up and down the outside of the corral fence. Then Silky appeared, like an old and dignified matriarch, and walked right through the gate into the corral with me and Champ. The two dingbats bolted in right behind her, just bubbling over with excitement about how this amazing day had progressed so far. I hopped off Champ, untacked him, and slipped out of the corral and shut the gate.

Then I walked back to my truck.

It really is a long way. And you know what? I haven't tromped around meadows early in the morning for a very long time, so I forgot about the dew. My feet got soaked. Worn out wet boots, soaked holey socks, and soaked-to-the-knees jeans. Yuck. Cersei and I eventually got back to the truck, though, and we drove over, picked up the tack where I'd left it outside of the corral, and drove to the house.

We checked in with my uncle, set up a game plan, and drove out to the highway to wait for Bill. He showed up, right on time. My cousin (the second hauler, for Poppy) was also on time. We all convoyed back to the corral, I started grabbing horses, and we got them loaded like we were just walking them into stalls. It was picture-perfect loading. (No credit to me, my horses came to me loading well and I've just never traumatized them about trailers.) Everybody convoyed on over to the new field.

My feet, snugly wrapped in sodden cotton and soaked leather, felt like I'd dipped them in pure poison ivy juice. Seriously, yall, waterboarding is probably horrible and most definitely torture. But wet booted feet? I'd tell an interrogator all my deepest darkest secrets AND spit on a picture of my momma if he'd just dry my poor soaked feet off. :(

I tried to ignore my tortured feet as we got the horses unloaded into the round pen in the middle of the pasture. My guys got to get reunited with Poppy and get their legs back on terra firma. Champ didn't like the looks of the already resident horses, so there was a bit of fence-charging and squealing. Champ, of course, looked really truly angry and hateful - ears back, every bit of his body language warning the other mares that he was about to go postal and KILL them. The mares squealed and pawed and generally looked just as evil right back at him. Then Poppy wanted some of that action, so he charged at the mares on the other side of the fence. It was a spectacular threat display - he had the arched neck, the impulsion, the sliding stop at the fence - but he'd forgotten to pin his ears. He looked like an intensely curious retard-horse instead of an intensely dominant wild herd stallion. Sigh. I've been watching Poppy for what, over a year now? and I'm quite certain that there is not a dominant bone in his body. He started off being pretty socially awkward, and he's slowly learned how to boss other horses around by watching and copying Champ's movements. But he's copying, so sometimes he forgets things. Like pinning his ears. Sigh.

Then I realized that my feet STILL ITCHED. Enough is enough. I drove into town and went to the dollar store. I purchased a pair of super-cheap hiking shoes and a bag of socks, peeled off the ruins of my boots and socks, and carefully dried my pale white prunefeet before wrapping them in new footwear.

With happy feet, I went back out and let my guys out of the round pen. They stuck together as a herd, exploring near the round pen for a bit. They pranced up to the other horses, Champ and a mare squealed and pawed at each other, then my horses spun away and trotted off. It was breathtaking. I hope they enjoy exploring :)

Tomorrow I'm going to do some exploring of my own - Champ or Dixie on the trails, then maybe I'll see how Poppy feels about the Aussie and actual WORK. I'll post tomorrow night, unless Poppy kills me or I'm too tired.