Got 'er done

Well, I went and rode. I was in a complete tizzy about it all day, and I finally just settled on a plan and did it without thinking too hard about it. I hauled Dixie 9 miles up the road to the end of Antelope Valley - it's a little different from our usual trails, and there's a couple miles of mostly flat packed sand roads. We did 4.8 miles in 53 minutes.

It's been a while since I really rode Dixie, so it was a good chance for me to notice what a good horse she is. Her "I don't wanna you can't make me" dead slow dog walk is 4 mph. Her super easy smooth jog, the one that's almost easier to sit than to post, is 8 mph. She gaited a bit for me but I didn't try to get her to stay in it. She's pretty bored with the trails right around the house and she's awfully barn sour if I ride her away from home, which is why I wanted to trailer out - but out in a new place she was alert but not spooky. I rode the whole hour on a loose rein.

We rode up a road about half a mile to a T, turned right and rode another mile to a cattle guard, turned back to the T intersection and kept going up the road for another mile, then turned around for the trailer. I really thought the poor horse was lost again (bless her heart) because she wasn't at all excited to turn back for the trailer. But she didn't perk up at all when she saw the trailer, and in fact she tried to duck onto a side road when we were just a few hundred feet from the trailer. I really think she wanted to keep going. How cool is that?

I brought the butterball, aka Cersei, with me. Poor Cers, I didn't ride with her much this spring and then this summer Dixie's been out of work so this was her first ride in months. You have never seen a dog so excited to fling herself into heat exhaustion. I should've brought some water for her, but I honestly didn't think she'd need it on such a short ride. Bless your heart, fat dog! She's sacked out on her couch now.

I kinda haven't mentioned our weather because I don't want anyone living east of me to hunt me down and kill me, but... I went in the hottest part of the day and it was a scorching 85 degrees with a soggy 29% humidity. When we got back, I hosed Cers down, then Dixie, then Cers again. I have decided that Dixie needs her face sprayed more. It's just not that unpleasant on a hot summer day. She makes horrible faces and flings her giraffe head up in the air, but when I quit rinsing her face and point the hose at her lips, she does the flappy lip thing. :)


Endurance stuff:

Yall, I need a new pad. The stupid woolback bunches up under the saddle when I ride hills. It's completely unacceptable. I've had a couple of recommendations for Haf Pads so I'm thinking about one of them. Here's my criteria:

Dixie has skin like an elephant and thick hair.
She's round with medium withers.
Saddle is western-type so it's got fleece underneath.
Saddle fits fine with minimal padding - the Woolback is maybe 3/4" or 1" thick.

Any suggestions?

Lake Almanor, hopefully!

I've finished all the new/new-to-me books and I'm just waiting for the new Dresden Files, so I might as well try to post. I really have started working through the backlog of unread blog posts, I promise!

Barring calamity, I'm off to Lake Almanor at the end of the month... on an Arab! I've ridden this super fun, all heart, great recoveries grey mare twice now, and I'll probably ride her in the 50. Her owner has two horses ready for the 50, and we might swap last minute, but I really do think the grey is fun so I'll probably ride her if I get the chance. She reminds me a lot of Dixie, without the extra gaits. Trotting downhill is weird, yall. So is trotting at 12 mph! When are you going to break into a rack, horse?? She's skinny and jiggy, and she's got a nasty habit of stumbling hard on level ground when she's daydreaming about whatever Arabs think about, but I like her anyway.

I am trying so hard to get my nerve up to ride Dixie again. We went out on Thursday or Friday for a couple miles of easy neighborhood walking and a bit of sand gaiting. She was totally sound, totally fresh, no heat or swelling since then.. but I'm so scared of breaking her. Nobody can tell me the magic formula of X miles Y times per week, and I desperately want that. I rehabbed her exactly like I was supposed to, and she looks great, and what do I do now? For once in my life I desperately want an Authority Figure that I can believe in 100% for guaranteed perfect results.

Tomorrow I'm going to do the pit loop. It's about five miles, easy, flat. I'm reaching out to people in town to hopefully get some company for some easy 5-10 mile rides later this week and next week. This is so hard - harder, in a different way, than when she first came up lame, and even harder than riding her when she terrified me.

The Kindle calls

I'm such a bad blogger!

A couple weeks ago, I finally decided to read Harry Potter. I guess the ads for Deathly Hollows made me remember it? I tried, when they first came out, but I didn't want to read kids' books at the time. If you remember that far back (oh god I'm old), A Game of Thrones had come out the year after the first HP book, and I was really in love with dark gritty fantasy then. If you've read them both (or even seen the movies/series) you will understand what polar opposites they are. But people kept telling me HP gets better as he gets older, so I settled down and started slogging through the series.

I'd gotten to the point where they weren't so bad when I went camping with Mel. When I came back I reclaimed the house, then got sucked back into them over the weekend. I read 4 on Saturday, 5 and 6 on Sunday, and polished off the last one yesterday. They really are pretty good! I am kind of jealous of the kids who got to grow up reading them.

Then I got up this morning and half of Facebook was showing off their copies of A Dance With Dragons, so I had to get that for the Kindle immediately. Honestly I'd given up on that bastard GRRM ever finishing DWD, much less the series. It took him six years to write it, and he kept writing other crap I don't care about in the meantime and going to cons and blogging about sports and I got immensely frustrated with him. Honestly, I'm pretty sure he delayed the damn thing til AGOT finished on HBO - which is no doubt a shrewd business move and all but SIX YEARS? Ridiculous.

Other media: Torchwood USA looks even goofier than Torchwood UK was but I'm willing to forgive a lot to see Jack and Gwen again. True Blood continues to make me howl with laughter. In two weeks we get new Dresden Files!

Other stuff: Dixie's rehab is still going uneventfully. The banty managed to hatch out three (full size) chicks so far. She took off to set on infertile eggs right before the roosters started crowing and doin' their thing so I shoved some fertile eggs from the big hens in there with her. At least one of the chicks has feathered feet - SO CUTE. They're not moving around yet, but better pics will come.

I am really dreading cleaning out the stinkbomb eggs from her nest.

Anyway. I have now flung myself into DWD. See you in a couple of days.

Camping gear roundup

Gear:
I was pretty sure my feet were going to blister. It was close - they were super hot and sweaty - but they didn't. Go go wool socks! I've had the same hiking boots for two years and they're getting pretty beaten up/broken down, so I give all the credit to the socks. I just bought some new knockoff smartwool-type socks at Sierra Trading Post.

My new women's Camelbak backpack worked just fine and fit much better than my old men's camelbak. It came with a reservoir with a baffle! You know how good water tanks and waterbeds have baffles to keep the sloshing to a minimum? The reservoir in the new Camelbak had a baffle. I guess it worked, but honestly sloshing never bothered me that much.

I bought Cersei a self-inflating roll-up travel dog bed at Costco, and she seemed to think it was acceptable. My summerweight sleeping bag was perfect, and I actually brought my own pillow from home - I slept amazingly well.

I last-minute splurged on a nonstick camping skillet. I'm glad I did - those eggs would've stuck like MAD on my existing steel camping skillet - but I have to get used to how thin camping stuff is and how hot propane travel stoves are. I am considering bringing my flame tamer next time! Any camping cooking tips?

I also bought a big cooler at Costco earlier this year. I dithered a lot about it - I had a perfectly useable small cooler - but it was only $30 and seemed like it would make my life a lot easier. I'm glad I did - a 7 lb block of ice kept a six pack of beer and a ton of random food cool for three full days with no problem. And I could bring the small cooler with Cersei's chicken in it without worrying about nasty chicken salmonella on my good people food.

Camping without horses, with bonus horses!

Over the holiday weekend I went camping with Mel and her adorable puppy. We're both horse campers who are temporarily without camping horses, so we set off into the wilderness with just our dogs for company.

Well, not really wilderness. We met up at Nevada City, which is doubly misnamed - it's in California, and it's hardly a city. Skillman Campground, the site of the Wild West ride, was reserved that weekend, so we stayed a couple miles down the road at White Cloud.


I got there first and got my truck tent set up. I love that thing, and I'm on the verge of recommending it - I want to see how it does in a real rainstorm and in colder weather before I gush its praises.


It's a little lower down than Reno, only three or four thousand feet. A little more humid, but with all the lovely trees you'd ever want to see. We just chilled out and talked the first night. We ate my lettuce with dinner. I grew something, and it tasted really good!! Saturday we got up, drank coffee and talked for a couple hours, then briskly hiked over to Skillman.


Part of the trail to Skillman is the Wild West trail, so it was cool to hike it and think about riding it. I haven't done a forest endurance ride yet, but I did a lot of forest trail riding in Memphis. It was similar - the trail was much nicer, because it's a hiking/biking/horse trail and not an outlaw trail cut out by four-wheelers. Definitely single track, but there were spots where you could edge a horse off the trail to let people pass.

The most awesome thing was the lack of spiderwebs. In Memphis we'd dutifully take turns riding first in line - the first person eats all the spiderwebs. There just weren't many in the Sierras.

We found a mysterious little concrete tank beside the trail! It looked like a stock tank, but I don't think anyone's ever run stock in that forest. I guess it was some kind of catchment system for the snowmelt. But Cersei knows a good thing when she sees it, and she immediately plunged right in and got a big drink and cooled off. Mel's puppy Tess got a dainty little drink, and we continued on our way.


There's a day-use trailer parking area about halfway between White Cloud and Skillman, and that's where we saw the poker ride signs. When we started seeing horses, I put Cers back on the leash and we kept making our way very slowly toward Skillman.

We were, of course, model dog-owning citizens. We got our mutts off the trail, on leash, and spoke loudly to the riders as they approached. The first few groups went by without a problem, then we came to The Wreck.

There were three horses tied to trees off the trails, with one guy watching the horses. We edged past them, a little confused, and came upon an injured rider and a woman keeping him company. We talked to them for a few minutes while more riders slowly came past. He'd come off his horse somehow, but when he tried to stand up his knees buckled, so he sat down to wait for help. It didn't look like a major injury, but of course I thought of Kate and wondered if there was something worse happening. But someone had gone back for help, so there wasn't much for us to do except keep hiking.

I don't think either of us really realized just how big that poker ride was. We were only a mile or so from Skillman, and that was our completely arbitrary goal, and if there's one thing endurance riders do, it's get to the arbitrary goal. So we kept on - we'd hike as fast as possible for a hundred feet or less, then duck off the trail and loudly greet the horses as yet another group came by.

It took forever! We nodded knowingly at the endurance riders. I ID'd a cute little Paso - they are so distinctive with their paddling gait. The dogs behaved very well. Neither of them barked or put up a fuss.

About halfway through that part of the trail, I decided poker rides are just Not My Thing. Dixie would be utterly unsuited to standing in a long line of other horses on a singletrack forest trail, and I would be bored senseless. Where's the trotting? No one was trotting!

The whole thing was a classic case of shockwave congestion. I don't mean that in a ghoulish stare-at-the-wreck way, but I think every single rider who came upon the injured fellow had to stop and ask if he was ok and if help was on the way. There was just a huge bottleneck behind him.


Eventually, we hit Skillman. We found more water for the dogs and ate our snacks and I cooled my feet off. Mel was wearing crazy minimalist Vibram shoes so she didn't need cooling off. But I got a good look at Skillman, and I see why entries are limited, trailerpooling encouraged, etc. Beautiful site, but not very expansive.

We thought about hiking on, but decided if we headed back to White Cloud we'd avoid the poker traffic. So away we went, talking and walking.

Cersei had a blast at the tank on the way back. She was tired and hot, but she perked right up and leapt into the water and brought me sticks. Little Tess jumped in the water, paddled around, then jumped out and curled up in Mel's arms. Puppies are so cute when they're tired and cold and wet.

We saw so many new things on the way back! I showed Mel what Evil Cheatgrass looks like, and she showed me Evil Poison Oak. Everything was very young, if that makes sense - it looked like May but it was really July. The Sierras had an amazing winter and the snow took months longer to melt. (Squaw Valley was still open for skiing that weekend!)

I found a magnolia. I have no idea what a freakin magnolia tree was doing growing in the California Sierras, but there it was. And we saw these pretty blue flowers - lupines, I think?


The trail opened out and there was an amazing view of Scotts Flat lake, too!


Eventually we realized that we weren't just seeing the same trail with new eyes, we weren't seeing the same trail at all. We'd missed a turn. I cussed my dog, who was ranging ahead of us and had clearly led us astray. We discussed how Dixie would also have led us astray, but Farley actually has functioning trailer radar and would've urged us onto the right trail.


My feet were hot and I slurped the last of my elyte water out of my camelbak while Mel consulted the GPS. She figured out how far back the turn was and we set back off. We took a rather obvious (in retrospect) fork in the road, climbed one more steep hill, and were suddenly back on familiar ground.


When we got back the dogs collapsed together and put off such major Z's that we decided it was nap time. I slouched down in my chair and went to sleep for a bit, then woke up enough to stagger off to bed. I think Mel did the same but I was too busy snoozing to notice her! One glorious nap later and I was ready to face the world again. The GPS reported that our hike was 10 miles - pretty impressive (to me) on foot, but really makes you appreciate the horse/bike/car as a mode of transportation.


I built a fire and sadly overcooked our steaks. Camping cooking is hard, yall! I burned the eggs both mornings - stupid 1 millimeter thick camping cookware - and totally misjudged my fire for the steaks. It wasn't hot enough to really sear the steaks, but it was hotter than I thought, so I ended up on the well done side of things. :( The nice thing is that if you're tired, anything tastes great!

Sunday we woke up early, drank coffee and talked still more! then packed up and headed out. If you're keeping track at home, that's more talking than I usually do in two weeks - but it was FUN! No really awkward silences, lots of good conversation ranging far and wide. I can't wait to do it again, with or without horses.

Vacationing muse

I have so much to tell yall but I can't get it together to write a decent post!

I went camping with Mel. Camping is fun! Believe it or not, I'd only been (horseless) camping once before in my life, and it rained and the WWII tent leaked so we walked home in the middle of the night, which wasn't hard because we'd only walked a mile into a cow field in the first place. And I've blogged every time I've been horse camping - it's been a rapid learning curve but I'm getting it figured out. Camping without a horse is much easier than horse camping and (I suppose) almost as much fun. Anyway, I've got lots of pictures and I swear I'll try and get up a real post soon.

Then I went to SFO. Of course I had Korean fried chicken and watched surreal k-pop MTV, and I went to a fun Fourth party, and I melted my new food processor. G needs to email me the picture of the damage!

The Mystery Plant turned out to be a turnip. A three pound turnip. That's on the house site. Then today I dug out two more beds beside the house, added compost, topped them with straw-mulch, and edged them with rocks - I'll put pics of that on the house site too.

Dixie has proclaimed herself healed and acted like a dumbass two days in a row - spooky and hot on the ground, cantering in place in horse jail. I figure extra riding can't do more harm than airs above ground, so today I rode her a whole block down a new street. I don't think the exercise will help as much as the mental stimulation from novel things. She's been content all evening, so if her leg stays tight we'll just walk further down different blocks of my neighborhood.

Yall may be on to something with the bareback thing. I actually put a saddle on her today - I wanted some stirrups in case she spooked - and it was kinda weird.

Saturday I'm off to ride crazy ay-rabs again! Plotting my return to endurance with A - she has plenty of horses that need 25s and 50s, so maybe we'll go off to a ride soon.

I was planning on taking Dixie in for a recheck in two weeks, but I might take her in next week. I don't really know how to restart her - mentally. I am just terrified that she'll reinjure because I pushed it too soon. Even if she trots out 100% sound for a lameness vet and there's no tendon disruption on u/s, how do I get up the nerve to ask my horse to do that again? Right now I'm thinking I'll just restart slowly - we'll sign up for two days of 25s and I'll see how she feels after the first day, and if that goes well maybe gulp a 50 again? No idea on a timetable yet.

So - everybody else has had a horse that hurt itself and went back to regular work. How do you deal with the fear of Doing It Again?

Everybody loves prosopagnosia stories

I've mentioned before that I have face blindness. It's a real thing - I am awfully lazy about a lot of things, but it's not that I'm just too lazy to pay attention to faces. The part of my brain that is supposed to store people's faces just doesn't work very well, so I have a lot of coping strategies. People seem pretty fascinated by this, so I thought I'd tell you a little more about it.

G and I went to a 4th of July party yesterday. It was small, thank god; I just give up completely if I go to a large gathering. I've met the hosts before, so I was pretty sure I was good with them. Another couple showed up and I quickly noted the differences - black dress instead of blue and white dress, bearded instead of clean shaven. A's dad was in town, so he was easy as the oldest guy there. A single guy showed up - shit, he's got a beard too - but his hair was redder than anyone else's so I could pick him out too. Then another couple showed up and the man was also an older white guy. Shit! But he had a soul patch, and A's dad did not, so all I had to do was pay attention to the facial hair there.

I think normal people don't even think twice when they meet people. If you meet someone and talk to him for a while, you just remember his face, right? And you can imagine what he looks like the next day? I can't do that, at all. I have to memorize faces the way I memorize anything else - the shape and markings of a horse's face, or where I parked the truck in that parking garage, or what the new box of tea looks like. It takes a surprising amount of effort for me.

It's easiest if I remember externalities, like clothing, hair, and accessories. That doesn't help day to day, and it's why I'm so utterly awful at recognizing people out of context. No, I won't know you if I run into you at the grocery store - but I'll definitely pretend to!

Before I realized that I am fundamentally different from normal people, I honestly did not understand why they put missing kids on milk cartons and wanted criminals on the 5 o'clock news. How the hell do yall see a grainy mug shot on America's Most Wanted and then recognize that person in line at the grocery store? I will never understand it.

Anyway, it was a fun party, made more so because I could tell people apart. Larger parties are fun too, but in a much different way, because I'm often not quite sure if I've talked to a given person before that evening. My life is always an adventure. :)