UnSummer

Ok, look, I know it's technically spring. I'm cool with that, really I am, but the thing is, there's early spring and late spring, and late spring is supposed to feel more like summer. There's a progression that happens, where between January and June the temperature goes up.

Except not in Reno, not in 2011. It's still windy and 50s and sporadically snowing. And it's totally harshing my vibe. It's not like I really want to be back home, where it's like a sauna - humid and 90s. I'm just saying I'd like some warmer days and no more damn snow.

Dixie agrees.

Dixie is mad about the Memorial Day weekend snowstorm from Funder on Vimeo.

Anyway. G came home for the holiday weekend, and that was cool. I'm getting ready for NASTR this weekend, and that's equally cool. My tomato plants died over the weekend, which is not so cool. I swapped out some light fixtures in the house and my house looks way cooler than before. I am woefully uninspired to blog; I blame PMS and this ridiculous weather. No guesses when I'll get my mojo back, but I'll definitely take lots of pictures at NASTR for yall :)

I forgot

what it feels like when it's below zero.



This was entirely unexpected. The forecast low was in the high teens, and we usually run up to 10 degrees colder out here in the valley, so I was expecting low teens. Not -1 at 7:30. My poor critters - I'd have thrown them an extra flake last night, and I'd have gotten up and fed them when I first woke up at 5:30.

It was really luxurious to sleep in this morning :)

I have lost all sense of what temperature it is in the house. I guess it's because of the wood stove - the den is hot, and the other rooms are usually cold. It doesn't feel like it's in the 50s in the den right now, as I try to get the fire roaring again.

I did have one story I wanted to tell yall. You know I'm big on clicker training - I don't see any negative aspects to working a little clicker training in to your ground work. (Unless you inadvertently teach the horse to paw. Don't do that. It gets old fast.) One of the really neat things about c/t is that you don't have to have clicker sessions with the animal very frequently - they never seem to forget this stuff. You have to be consistent while you've got the clicker and the treats, but it doesn't matter if you train once a day or once a month.

Wednesday I wanted to touch up Dixie's feet before the weekend snowstorm. I clipped her haybag to the feeding area to give her something to munch on, and I got three feet rolled. Then she acted like a cow about her right rear - yanked it out of my hands, sidepassed as far away from me as possible. I moved her back into place, told her to quit being a fool, and asked her to pick it up again. She sidepassed away again so I yanked the lead untied, backed her up about 5 steps, and made her move her butt away from me. Then I decided we should go get the mail. We walked down the driveway, got the mail (hello Schneider's!) and I noticed the trash bin. The garbage had run that day and I needed to wheel the bin back to the house.

Dixie used to flee in terror from big green wheelie bins. The first time I tried to ride her past one, she backed up a 100' driveway in a panic. Eventually we got over the fear of that bin, but all other bins on the road were met with equal suspicion. She'd skitter wildly across the road to get away from one. So I clicker trained her. I'd hand-walk her to the trash bin and c/t for thinking about touching it. Then I'd make her touch the bin with her nose - I think wheelie bins are the first thing I taught her to "touch it!" with. It's also one of the few things I c/t for under saddle - Wednesdays in the fall of '09 we'd work our way down a mile of country road, zigzagging along touching every trash bin on the street.

So she's had a dramatic relationship with trash bins. I had absolutely nothing to use as a treat with me. I decided to pretend like this was no big deal and we did it all the time. I grabbed the bin and tipped it back onto its wheels, paused just a second so she could see it moving, and dragged it up the gravel driveway to the house. Dixie alternated between skittering at the end of her lead, rolling her eyes at it, and coming up and touching it with her "curious" ears on. When we got the bin back to the house, I told her she was a good horse, thumped her on the neck, and led her back to her feeding area. She ate some more hay and held up that last foot like a perfect angel.

The point of this story is that clicker training "sticks" as well as conventional training. She hasn't gotten a c/t for touching a trash bin in months, and we haven't done a real session re: trash bins in over a year. In the past, I had flapped the lids on them and made her touch them, but I'd never shown her that they move.

Yes, it went so well partially because we have a good relationship now. But it's also proof that clicker training sticks with them. I didn't ask Dixie to interact with the trash bin, just to stay with me as I dragged the bin up the driveway. On her own, she kept "touching it" because she remembers she sometimes gets a treat for touching big scary noisy trash bins.

One of the things I was scared of when I started clicker training was that I'd end up with a spoiled horse who would only perform if she knew I had treats. (Honestly, that's one of the reasons I don't do very much clicker under saddle. That, and poor coordination.) You really do need to reinforce a behavior with a lot of treats at first, but once you get a behavior down, you don't have to have treats.

edit
I haven't had enough coffee yet. I had this written out better in my head yesterday, but of course it didn't come out as smoothly as I'd like this morning. Cheyenne was the first to comment, and I started to write this as a comment but decided to just add it to the main post instead.

Chey, my problem with c/t is that a lot of people seem to treat it like it's a goal unto itself. Kinda like a lot of natural horsemanship people end up just perfecting their NH games and never actually riding the horse? But my point is that it is a good adjunct to your normal horse activities, too. If you want to do lots of clicker training, more power to you - but if you just want to c/t that one tiny problem you have and then go back to your normal pressure/release training, it still works just fine. Can't get the horse to back up smoothly? Or maybe she rushes through a dressage cue? Or you want him to stand up perfectly square for a show but he likes to cock a back leg? Stuff like that is where clicker training really shines.

And it makes you a better trainer, too. You will get, errr, unexpected results if your timing isn't absolutely perfect. Clicker training definitely made me a better "regular" trainer - I am much sharper at rewarding the try now.


I also wanted to point yall to Aarene's old post about Story and the helicopter. When Dixie boldly planted her nose on the bin as I was dragging it over the rocks and stared at me, I thought of Aarene's story. :)

It's melting!

You will note in the following pictures that I am still a lazy southerner. I had to shovel the gate to the paddock, but other than that, I firmly believe snow will melt faster than I can shovel it.

Look at how beautiful this place is when it's not actively snowing!


And how gloomy it is when it's overcast at dawn :(


Some little critter lives under my deck


Maybe a rabbit? I'm not good with snow prints.


Cersei thinks snow is awesome. She lives her life in all caps with three exclamation marks.


WHERE'S THE BALL!!! The camera couldn't handle all the white - the sky is actually bright blue.


HERE IT IS! IT'S GOT SNOW ON IT!!!


Here's a snow dog video :)

Snow dog! from Funder on Vimeo.

All woah, no go

This morning I decided it'd be a great time to go to town. It snowed yesterday, and today was supposed to be pretty clear til the afternoon, then more snow was coming. I wanted some paint, some primer, and better caulk. And then the truck wouldn't start. FUCK!

I will admit that I texted G to see WTF to do. When the brakes went out, I snapped into my "what's the next rational step" crisis mode, but today? WAAAAHHHH. Hands flapping in the air, totally helpless. G was like "call the dealership and they'll send a tow truck" and I got back on track.

I thought maybe it was the battery, but that truck was dead like a dead thing. The window I'd left half-down two days ago wouldn't roll up, the doors wouldn't lock or unlock, and it was clicking. There was a strange clicking noise coming from behind the freakin' glove box when the key was not being turned. As soon as I turned the key, the truck got quiet as a grave.

Anyway, it was weird. I so desperately wish this was a "hahah Funder is bad at trucks" story, but it's not. I called the dealership, who gave me the number for Ford Roadside Assistance. Once I got through the "are you in danger do you want us to call 911!" voice tree, a pleasant dispatcher confirmed all my info and gave me a 45 minute estimate. I ate some scrambled eggs, sulked briefly, and packed the iPad and some crap in a bag.

The tow truck showed up in 30 minutes. The truck was so dead he couldn't get it out of park, so he had to disconnect the linkage (?) to yank the truck out of the garage, but he was pretty pro. We rolled out through the snow (yes, it was snowing) and headed to the dealership. The service guy at the dealership is from Middle Tennessee so we got along great, and he thought maybe the alternator had died. He plopped me down in the waiting room and I reread most of the latest Dresden Files novel.

About 3 the service guy came and got me. There is something worse wrong with the truck - they can't get it out of park. They hooked the linkage thing back up, and got power to it to crank it, but it's stuck in park. WTF. Truck. I had your woah fixed less than a week ago. You are two years old, which is entirely too young even in planned-obsolecence 21st century America for you to die. You have not even reached 27,000 miles (as far as I remember, because you wouldn't light up at all this morning.) I'd like for you to both go forward and stop, when I ask, within the laws of physics.

Anyway, Middle Tennessee gave me a loaner car. Hah! Stupid Future Ford gave me a lame Yaris rental; this dealership gave me one of their very own Fusions. At least the turn signals and stuff are in the right place, but it's still a car and I don't like it. It's like a foot off the ground with tiny windows and front wheel drive and I bet it won't tow more than 1500 lbs and it sucks.

Still, I was so grateful to have wheels again that I went straight to my favorite pizza place and bought a pepperoni and pancetta pizza, then stopped at a grocery store for a bottle of bourbon. Then I drove home in my tiny perilous car and had pizza and a drink and life is not so frustrating or bad right now. :)

They've changed the forecast every 30 minutes since I got home. It looks like tonight's forecast is "a hell of a lot" south of Reno and "quite a bit" up here north of Reno. They won't get my precious truck fixed before the roads get plowed, but it's still pretty annoying.

A note on the difficulty of moving around the US and buying liquor:

So I'm from Mississippi, which has some of the most regressive liquor laws that I'm aware of. You can get beer anywhere (unless it's a dry county), but wine and liquor have to come from package stores (see above re: dry counties) - and package stores only sold liquor, no mixers or cups or ice. I lived in Virginia, which had state-owned ABC (alcoholic beverage c-something) stores - same idea. Tennessee was downright progressive - the liquor stores also sold "big" beers, and, IIRC, grocery stores sold wine. When we moved to Ohio we were hysterically amused by the shockingly liberal liquor laws - Kroger had a liquor aisle! And you could buy liquor on Sundays! So we were kind of expecting it when we headed west to Nevada - you can buy any kind of drink you want, any time of any day, from any store at all here. I used to go a hairdresser who'd offer me beer or wine while she cut my hair!

So after years of "if you want to drink, you have to go to the package store for the liquor and then next door to the grocery store for the mixers," you'd think it'd be really easy to pick up some whiskey in Reno. It's technically simpler, but there's a whole new level of complexity - if everyone sells everything, you're basing your decision primarily on price and quantity. I could get airline bottles of Maker's Mark for $7 a pop at the gas station, or I could get a 1.75 liter at Costco for $35, or I could find a grocery store and get something in between for an in-between value. I ended up stopping at a grocery store and paying $45 for a 1.75. It was worth it to get home quicker in the snow - everybody else had the same idea, and 395 was horribly backed up and slushy.

I won a thing! plus snow and cat

I got a package today!



Look at this cool stuff I won! Girls with Guns went to a gun convention and had a giveaway and I actually won swag! The bumper sticker will go on my crew box - I have some nerdy stickers earmarked for it too. Now I just need to decide which size box I want for my crew box. Eek! Endurance buddies, I've got two sizes: ones that will hold one 50 lb bag of grain, and ones that are about twice that big. I could go measure, but yall know how much space 50 lbs of grain occupies :) I suspect the larger one would be annoyingly big and hard to pack and tote around.

So there's a tiny keychain, the big shopping bag, the sticker, and bullet-shaped earplugs on a string. The earplugs are the most useful, followed closely by the tote - I have a refrigerated one I use, but not a small size.

I missed GWG in the great sidebar revamping of 2011, but I went in today and added them. Guns are not scary evil death machines, any more than horses are evil broncos who will stomp your head in. GWG says it much better than I do, with more words and stuff :)

It kinda blizzarded overnight. The weak section of the backyard fence blew further over. :( I really need to fix that as soon as it warms up again.


It snowed off and on all day, but it was also pretty warm, so most of the snow on the roof melted. Icicles are pretty - all snow is pretty if you know it's going to melt soon!


Banders claimed the new Costco box. Can you see the total lack of sanity in those eyes?

Windy

It's day two of the insane windstorm. At this point in my Nevada residency, I could pretend to be blase about the weather, and in fact I'm often unsurprised by the extremes out here. But this wind is something else!

Crazy wind from Funder on Vimeo.

The power keeps flickering, because trucks are blowing over onto power lines and the lines themselves are just blowing down. It's 50 and sunny, at least - it's quite nice. Aside from the whole house shaking and the wind howling and doors being impossible to open and close! Also, I've got to put the trash bin out tonight, but the damn thing keeps blowing over and skidding around out there. Maybe I'll wake up really early and run it out.

It'll stay warm and windy tonight, then tomorrow it'll be slightly less windy and turn colder and start to snow. 3-6" possible up here. It'll be a baby blizzard! It'll stay cold and gross for the forecastable future. I probably need another cord of wood.

Balmy

My parents will never believe this, but I kinda like the super cold snaps of Reno. (Not the super cold snaps of further north, thank you very much!) When it's just kinda winter for weeks, I get complacent and whiny. Ugh, gotta get up and make a fire and go kick the ice out of the buckets and it's cooooold. Then it'll get really cold - keep the fire going all day! thaw the pipes! break water in the afternoon too!

It "warmed back up" yesterday, into the low 40s, and... it feels warm. I didn't wear coveralls once. I didn't even wear gloves! I got a raging fire going in the morning, then had to flee to fight with the floor because it was 75 in the den.

Beautiful sunset today.

Where's Dixie?

For some reason, this post by Mel made me think of this cool picture I took of my camo pony yesterday. Click to embiggen - there's a snoozing horse in there, I promise.

Betrayed again!

The shit-ass NeverKink hose has done me wrong again. I hate it SO much more now. You only thought I hated it before - now I detest it with every fiber of my soaking wet being.

I'm still sick (achoo!) so I've been putting off refilling the 100 gallon tank, but this morning I had to. I think something dire happens if the de-icer sticks up out of the surface of the water, and there was only an inch of water over it, so even though it was 10 degrees I had to refill. I unplugged the de-icer, bailed the tank, dumped the tank, and hooked up the hose.

Ok, the hose wasn't in the house. But I've been religiously draining the hose as I coil it into its bucket, and it's been just fine. I coil it starting at the spigot end, so the black Goodyear hose is on the bottom and the 15' piece of shit-ass hose is on top - which should mean the shit-ass hose has extra time to drain, right? WRONG.

I turned on the water and a geyser burst forth from the connection. There's no little rubber O-ring in the connection, cause I can't find them (and never think to look except while I'm filling the trough). The black hose was fine and the neverkink hose had a little iceberg in it. I spent 5 minutes flexing the whole length of the shit-ass hose, getting sprayed all over my face, gloves, coveralls, etc. before I gave up and unhooked the horrible hose. Then I had to spray out the tank from 5' away, then stand the tank back up (and rearrange the de-icer cord) and stand for 10 freakin minutes pointing the water into the tank.

Did you know (Alaska people, of course yall know this!) that when it's 10, the fog coming off of a stream of water actually crystalizes in midair? It was really pretty, watching the fog billow off the water and turn into little rainbow fairy crystals and drift toward the ground. That was about the only good thing I got out of the whole experience. That, and I suppose the deep ongoing moral satisfaction of taking care of your own horse in all seasons. There is deep moral satisfaction there, right? I'm so cold I can't feel my morals.

Oh, and I got two still-warm eggs. The hens were doing the "OMG something came out of my BUTT" squawks, so I stopped by the henhouse as I sogged back inside. Two warm eggs! I'm sure G will be all squicked out reading that - more for me! ;)

achoo

I'm home again from SF! I did a pretty good job lining up posts for while I was gone - now I just need to respond to yall's comments and catch up on what you did. I also came down with a cold - I think that thick gooey wet air down there did me no favors. Clearly thin dry air is superior. (Yes, a year and a half ago I was gasping for breath from walking across a parking lot - but once you get used to it, you really get used to it.)

So. Chain controls on interstates aren't that big of a deal if you have 4WD and snow tires. I still don't think I'd try it at night, but we didn't leave til 10 am on Wednesday. Instead of being terrified of sliding off an embankment or getting bumper car'd by some idiot, we were just bored to death in the Sierras.

We had to stop in Truckee to pee and get some food, then it took a solid 30 minutes to get back up the onramp.


Truckee to Donner Pass took a solid hour of creeping along imperceptibly slowly. Once we were over the pass, we sped up to endurance speeds (5 mph) then FEI speeds (10! 12! 15 mph!).

The mountains are beautiful, even at 5 mph.


4 wheel drive going uphill very slowly rapes your gas mileage.


Finally we made Auburn, had glorious In N Out, then put the hammer down and got to SF. The 220 mile trip took seven and a half hours. Still, this trip was much easier for me - I didn't feel like I couldn't cram the truck into the tiny lanes, the traffic was much lighter, and I knew what was coming. Dragging stuff up to the apartment wasn't even that bad. Paying $35/day to park - that was bad. I only paid $25 to board the dog at a first-rate kennel! These assholes didn't even walk and play with the truck.

The apartment has an outlet by a lightswitch, so of course that's where we installed the blue canary to watch over G.


There's a nice view - you can even see the ocean out of the left-most bay window.


It's very small.


That's the front door on the right of the picture. The bathroom and closet are off of the front door. I was standing in the bay windows, so there's only a few more inches behind me. Everything fits though - it's big enough. It's laid out very well.

We ate like royalty. Well, Asian royalty, if you want to be specific - Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Korean fried chicken, and Indian. Crepes for dessert one night (nutella and whipped cream!!), crab cakes eggs benedict for breakfast one morning. The coffee was outstanding, everywhere we went (except one completely average diner that had completely average diner-coffee).

We rode the bus to the Whole Foods by G's work and on the way back saw a flaming Christmas tree in a housing project.

It was a grand adventure. Aside from getting sick, that sort of took away from the grandness. I was yearning for thin dry air so I decided to head home on Saturday. Traffic in the mountains was less awful, and the return trip took me 4:30.

Cersei was legitimately glad to see me. Dixie and the goats just wanted alfalfa, and the angry chickens wanted people food, and the cats puked on stuff to show their affection. ~C is trying to talk me into riding today, but I think that's a bad idea. I am still only halfway sick, but I think a brisk two hour ride would do me in.

I do miss G already. I hope his job is exciting and challenging so he doesn't miss me too much. If we both stay busy, the time will FLY by - I think I'll go up for Valentine's Day. Now - time to read blogs and vegetate and possibly go to the grocery store.

White Death part deux

OMG YALL! It's seriously fucked up out there!

We hadn't checked the weather for a couple of days, because it's been the same (high of 40-50, chance of rain or snow) for 10 days. So there was no food here except eggs and frozen hamburgers, and my husband's kinda squicked out about eggs that come out of chickens, so I needed to go to the store. He needs the truck this afternoon so I had a small window to get it done. I couldn't even make it into town to my regular store - they haven't even started plowing the highways. Bumper to bumper 15 mph slush in pouring snow. I got off at the next exit and backtracked to the groceries by the house.

Of course the better grocery is on a hill. The truck in front of me went woop-woop making the left onto the hill road so I went extra slow and gave him a lot of room, which was good cause he had to stop for 5 minutes because the tiny car in front of HIM just couldn't make the hill. They had to slide sideways and back out of the way and then crawl around chaining up. All of us cowperson badasses in trucks just put it in 4 low and crept up the hill.

Getting snowed in calls for good food so I got a little prime rib roast (on sale!) and a liter of coke. If you're snowed in you might as well be drunk, right? And of course I got bananas for the four-leggers and some corn and broccoli for the angry chickens - if they're gonna feed me I gotta feed them.

Getting home wasn't too bad, except the dude who almost ate ditch behind me. The highway toward my house is 4 lane divided part of the way, with a ridiculously big ditch separating the lanes. I was easing along following the tracks in the snow at about 25, when the tracks dropped off the pavement to the right. I bumped off the road, swung left, went woop-woop left and right just a wee bit, and straightened up. The big work truck behind me bumped off the road going too fast, went woooop sliding left toward the big ditch, jammed his wheels to the right, got enough traction to hit the gas, went woooooop sliding toward the road signs on the right, and finally slammed on his brakes and stopped for a while a couple inches away from the signs.

He went much slower when he started up again.

Now I'm home and my brave/stupid husband is off to lunch with his ex-work peeps and then a meeting with his ex-manager. He called while I was writing this to say he saw the tip of the trunk of a Camry in the same ditch, but they've finally plowed the highway and started plowing the road out to our place.

Dixie appears perfectly content. When I got home, they'd eaten about half their breakfast hay. The goats were in the run-in complaining miserably and Dixie was standing in one of her usual corners of the pasture getting snowed on. She looks wet and snowy to me but she doesn't feel or act cold. I'll keep the hay topped up all day and I think she'll be fine.

Curlies! and prejudice

I fed the horses this morning. Grabbed Dixie and tied her up next to a wheelbarrow full of hay, then tossed everybody else's hay. I spent at least an hour grooming her - she's shedding, so she needs the extra attention. She does not want the extra attention - she really is the most "don't touch me, I do what I want!" beast. Her mane is a total disaster - it's so dirty it's almost impossible to brush, and it's way too cold to wash it, and I don't want to put more ShowSheen on it! I suspect the Showsheen residue makes the dirt stick better or something :( I brushed half of her mane before she got seriously outdone with me, then fingercombed half her tail. For all the good it does. :rolleyes:

It was cooooold up there! The wind was whipping and storm clouds were rolling down off all the mountains. Fun to watch them.

Eventually I released her from the torture and Cersei and I headed over to scout out that next valley. I guess it's Palomino Valley proper - where the BLM horses are, local readers? The roads are horribly washboarded sand, but they're wide with wide verges, so it'll be good riding if the pass over the hill isn't too bad.

I saw curlies! Real live curly horses. Two people were out riding their curlies on the road and I stopped and talked to them for a minute. They really are curly as all get out - pictures don't do them justice. The two I saw looked real big-boned - drafty almost.

Everybody likes blog posts where you get to say something. I was thinking about my irrational attachment to Dixie's enormous amount of hair, and I wondered what your irrational horse prejudices are?

Mine are:

Lots of hair = a better horse. Horses with short scraggly manes and tails just don't do it for me. That's part of the reason I don't like Appies - sorry Appy people, but I did admit it's totally irrational!

Blue eyes are evil. I've mentioned this before, but blue-eyed horses give me the willies. I know that this is totally contrary to most people's opinion, but they creep me out!

Spotted horses are crazy. Yes, I did think this even before I bought a spotted horse, and I still think it even in the face of all the super laid back paints I've met. Plain wrappers = saner.

What's your silly horse likes and dislikes?

Snowmygod

You know how I mentioned it was snowing? Yeah, it's still snowing.

Snow Pix

The airport's open, so we're headed out soon.

Horse fashion

I forgot to post it, but Dixie got her first clothes earlier this week! Schneiders had some good sales on blankets, so I ordered a fleece blanket and a waterproof blanket. The waterproof one is on backorder til March, but they went ahead and shipped the fleece one. Yes, I know, it's a very tasteful color which is very unlike me - it was on sale! I have no other excuse.

They're just for when she's at rides tied to the trailer. She has more than enough hair to keep her warm in the pasture.

Coy:


Showing off all that mane:


Butt shot:


I think it fits perfectly. I had to go with a closed-front blanket (the buckle front fleeces were also out of stock til March, and hopefully I won't even need it by March!) and she was totally fine with me slipping a huge blue thing over her head. It seems like her personal motto has changed from "aaaaa don't touch me, you're trying to kill me!" to "oh ok." What a good girl!

Persistence pays off

Today was another of those days where I felt like all these slow miles and all this planning and worrying IS actually paying off. I can look at my spreadsheet of distance/time/pace info, and I can look at my horse, and I can really tell she's getting fitter. This is so cool!

I only had an hour to ride, so we did trot/rack sets up and down the short gravel road, then one loop behind the pueblo house. Total was 4.11 miles in 52 minutes, at a pretty respectable 4.6 mph average. I kept the trot/rack sets fairly slow, at about 7 mph, and kept the walk sets fairly fast, around 3.5 or 4 mph. When we got back to the pasture, she wasn't sweaty! YAY!

I stuck with the new plan of keeping Dixie moving and not letting her think about the invisible monsters. When she'd get really nervous and reluctant, I'd let her stop just til she twitched an ear back at me - under 30 seconds - then I pushed her forward again. It worked very, very well - last night it snowed, so we were back in that scary white alternate reality.

After we got back, we worked on trot-out again. She is still all bug eyed about me holding that whip and making her move out, but she's starting to get the idea.

Today was one of those exceptionally beautiful days. The sky was pale blue with tons of huge puffy dramatic clouds, the mountains were beautiful with their patches of fresh new snow, and the roads were mostly dry. As AareneX says, it's good to be alive. And it's very good to be in Nevada.

I eat my words

It didn't snow all morning, so I went to town for groceries. Then it started to snow, but it was more like snow drizzle. I called it lame Memphis snow and kicked at the slush and headed home. The snow gods got very angry indeed and it began pouring down snow. They closed Donner Pass so there was tons of traffic on the highway headed north, and it took me like 25 minutes to go 5 miles. Then I stopped at another grocery store (I'm picky, what can I say?) and watched people spin out like retards.

I have decided driving on snow isn't much harder than driving in the rain. I spent about 10 years driving tiny lightweight ricer sports cars, with no ABS, usually with bad tires, and those things will hydroplane and slide with any amount of water on the road. Driving a medium weight truck on a couple inches of snow is pretty similar... except that (almost) everybody around me is also going very slow.

We have plenty of food, and we're home safe, so whatever happens is ok with me :)

Trot, hooves, snow

The forecasted snow for yesterday never appeared. I stayed home because the weather sites were so insistent about that 100% chance of 3-5". Today they said the same thing - no, really, 2-4" of snow, 100% chance. I couldn't stay home another day, so snow be damned, off I went to visit Dixie.

The wind was howling at S's, so I'm glad I wasn't planning on riding. I picked Dixie's hooves, then worked on AareneX's method of teaching the trot out. It took a while to get a trot on the longe, but eventually we got it, from both sides. Then I had her start off on a circle but kept her going straight, just for a couple of strides. Lots of praise and we were done.

She had one very "good" spook, too. I never hard tie her to my truck; I just loop the lead around the cleats on the side of the bed. Yeah, she could get loose, but where's she going to go? Straight back to her buddies or straight over to the hay barn. There's a small risk that she'll get loose and totally lose her mind and hurt herself, but I'll take the chance.

I've got a plastic bin in the bed of the truck, with horse treats and beet pulp stored in it. I was rustling around in there (like she's seen a million times) and a piece of ICE fell off the lid while I had it raised. Dixie got all bug-eyed and bolted backwards about 10 feet, taking the rope with her. Then she stopped and snorted, and I told her what a good girl she was and slowly lowered the lid and walked around the side of the truck. She looked at me and at the bin for a while, then, all on her own, she sighed and dropped her head. I clicked and slowly walked over and gave her a treat. I'm so proud :) She saw a scary, got spooked, then calmed herself down.

Then I took hoof pics. I measured her feet, too, but I'm not sure if I measured right. I think I will measure them again next time I go up there.

The wonky foot (LF) still looks really weird and lopsided to me, but I am just not worrying about it. I've never had a horse that would fearlessly trot on gravel before. I've never had a horse with such a tight white line, and so little flare, and such round feet. The LF is asymmetrical, but it seems to work for her. It's endlessly amazing to me how her feet went from horrible to mediocre by going barefoot, then mediocre to amazing by living and riding a bazillion miles in the desert. Horses are remarkable!

Ok, pictures. Click to embiggen.

Right front is the high-heel hoof. I rasped a bit at the heels, but that looks like live sole in the buttresses so I left it alone. After I took these, I went back and rolled the toe wall a bit more. And her frog looks puny, but it just peeled off a layer last week.


The whole capsule looks long, but I am certainly not going to carve at her sole to make her hoof shorter.


Left front is the wonky one. This is after I trimmed a bit of the medial toe to maybe help with the breakover. I've been trimming a smidge of medial toe about once a week, but I haven't noticed a huge improvement.


The whole foot looks very weird in this picture. I don't know if it's the dirty walls, the way she was standing, the gravel, or if her foot IS weird. Shrug.



After I got pics and measurements, I headed back for home. Right as I got off the highway at our exit, it started snowing. I am such a southerner, I got the giggles about it. SNOW! Eeeee! Now it's pouring down snow and I'm trying to decide if I want to go to town tonight for the BCH meeting.

Snow stings!

Well I got a ride in, barely. S was off work for MLK Day, so I headed out just before noon and rode with her. The wind was whipping when I got there, and it started snowing on us a few minutes after we set out. We rode for about an hour total - we got cold and the horses stayed dry. The wind was flinging tiny little snowballs in my face and it kind of stung.

I can't get Dixie to trot out (or gait out, for that matter!) I've been trying for a couple of days now, and she gives me the most WTF look when I kiss and jog ahead of her and try to get her to trot with me. Maybe I should longe her in a circle to remind her that kissy-noises mean "speed up!" then kiss and run in a straight line?

I keep meaning to get pics of her lovely feet. That white line is tight, tight, tight. She's keeping her walls worn down too - I'd be worried but it's picture-perfect for just-trimmed feet. Except that she hasn't been trimmed for five weeks! Maybe the ground will freeze again this week and I can get some clean foot pictures. Everything's muddy right now and it's hard to get a clean shot.

BLAH!

White/Grey Death '10

The storms from California are starting to roll into Nevada. Stead, where I live, is catching it worse than Spanish Springs, where Dixie lives, so I think I'll be able to ride regardless. And of course Truckee, up where Zach lives, is probably getting buried under snow right now, so I'm not complaining at all!

Yesterday I rode with S. We did the canyon - about 6 miles in 2 hours. (I don't feel like plugging in the GPS for the exact numbers!) Dixie behaved, the humans had a nice chat, and I didn't see anything new or noteworthy. Kind of boring, but very good stuff.

Then I made a huge batch of chocolate chip cookies and went to the NNGHC meeting. It was a potluck, shared with the local CW re-enactor club - I can't remember their name, but they were pretty cool! I met some really nice people, and talked to a few kind of weird people, and ate very well indeed. Then I drank a lot of coffee, because it was 9 pm and I was 30 miles from home. When I got home I couldn't fall asleep. I think I laid in bed, half-awake, til 3 am.

Oddly enough I did not feel like riding today, and it's a good day to give her a break. I rode Friday and Saturday, and as long as there's not a ton of rain forecasted I'll ride tomorrow and Tuesday and maybe Wednesday too.