Rock star parade horse

I rode Dixie in the Nevada Day parade in Carson City this morning. I hitched the trailer last night so I only had to get up at 5:30. It was 22 degrees and pitch dark and I really doubted my sanity. I had to wake my horse up to load her!

She was awesome. Totally amazing. We got to the parking area at the finish at 7:30 and I mounted up at 8. At 8:30 half of my group slowly made our way to the start line then chilled out til the 10 am start. It took about an hour before she decided to stand still and doze off, and she did skitter sideways once when a float shaped like a giant cannon went by us, but in general she was pretty chilled out about all the stuff we saw and heard today. There was a mass hot air balloon race/flight/ascension thing at about 8. Then two WWII jeeps got unloaded from a trailer, and one pull-started the other in the parking lot. The cannons went off at 10, and shortly after that the fighter jets did a flyby. We had to thread our way past a couple of marching bands to get to our starting spot. The Nevada Democrats had a crazy looking animatronic / inflatable donkey on their float, and Dixie gave it a long hard look. Two small kids, momentarily unattended, ran directly behind her throwing rocks at each other and she just swiveled an ear back to track them. Vendors pulling handcarts full of toys, spraying bubbles from bubble machines, were working their way against the direction of the parade, and she didn't even blink. One of the other horses in our group was having a Very Bad Day and kept backing into other horses, spinning and crashing into other horses, and generally being on the brink of a meltdown. Dixie just moved out of his way when I asked and didn't pick up any of his nervousness. I even let kids come pet her at the trailer after the ride. She was so calm about the whole adventure that she never even broke a sweat!

At first I didn't want to take pictures because I wanted both hands in case I needed to control her. Then when the parade started I was too busy waving at kids to bother with pics. I know, in internet terms that means today did not happen, but I was entirely too busy having fun!

I have no idea why Nevada makes such a big deal about the day they entered the US, when none of the other states I've lived in have even noted it. But I think it's incredibly endearing :) Everybody loves a parade and a day off work.

New Plan?

So there's a brand inspection tomorrow at the arena because there's a 4H open show as well! It's one of those Nevada Weirdnesses - in the south, horse shows are all at night. They don't even start til 7 pm. It's still intolerably hot, but at least it's not hot and sunny. I guess out here all the shows are in the morning, because it's pleasantly cool then?

Anyway, I think I will enter Miss Thing in some easy classes. We will get destroyed by snotty teenagers who have been showing their whole lives, I'm sure, but it'll be good for her to do something different. This may tell you something profound about my character: I don't have a tag for horse shows. ;)

Confused

I do not understand the weather here. From the venerable National Weather Service:

Friday: A chance of rain between 10am and 4pm, then snow likely, possibly mixed with rain. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 61. Very windy, with a south wind 20 to 25 mph increasing to between 35 and 40 mph. Winds could gust as high as 55 mph. Chance of precipitation is 60%.

Do you see what I see?
Friday: A chance of rain between 10am and 4pm, then snow likely, possibly mixed with rain. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 61.

So. The low on Thursday night will be 38 (above freezing, for my metric friends). Then Friday, after 10 am, it will snow and/or rain, and it will get up to 61 (which is sleeveless-vest weather, even if you're a thin-blooded Southerner). How can it snow when it's above freezing and headed up to 61?

Who knows. I should try to ride before 10am, I suppose, before the driving slush knocks me off my horse and I die of hypothermia in tee-shirt weather.

Gone fishin'

The big problem with moving somewhere new is figuring out what's weird and what's odd but otherwise normal for the area. I've seen some odd stuff, but nothing really stunningly weird til today.

Cersei and I went across the highway and up a dirt road into the Peavine Mountains. I threw The Ball down a canyon until she was exhausted, then we headed home. Back down by the highway there were two guys standing in the road and one of them was waggling a stick...? As I got closer, I could see what was really going on - it was a fishing pole, and he'd somehow snagged the hook in the power line about 20' above his head. I busted up laughing when I figured it out - then his buddy saw me laughing and started laughing too. As I drove past, he was pointing at my truck and telling the inept fisherman that yes, everybody thinks this is very amusing.

Hiatus

I haven't ridden in several days, because I'm waiting for the rub marks on Dixie's ribs to go away and I've been puzzling over them.

Champ used to get rubs all the time, right where the blevins buckles were. He had really round ribs, though, and I figured it was just a combination of my crappy riding + his round ribs. I wrapped the buckles with vetwrap and the problem mostly went away.

Now Dixie is getting them. She's not shaped anything like Champ, and my seat has improved (trust me! it has!) so what's going on? I'm super logical and there's a bunch of different elements at play here, so bear with me.

• I'm riding her a lot more than ever before. I rode her probably 12 days out of the last 15, and before Champ died I was riding her every other day. Not strenuous work - we don't usually break a sweat - but definitely lot more.
• I'm riding dressage-y, with lots of leg cues.
• I'm riding dressage-y, trying to keep my toes pointed forward instead of off to the sides like most western riders.
• The saddle has Cordura fenders and nylon leathers, and maybe they "grab" the hair differently than leather fenders and leather stirrup leathers.
• I've tied the fenders so they hang about an inch further back, so I'm not constantly fighting the chair seat.
• I just can't ride. Always a possibility, but I don't think my legs move THAT much at a walk. Not so much that it should sore her!

I've spent two days just thinking about the differences in western versus dressage saddles. I thought about taking off the existing fenders/stirrups and putting English leathers and irons on - I could do it reversably, without ruining my saddle. But I don't think that's the answer.

A dressage saddle has long flaps between the rider's leg and the horse's side. The flaps are smooth leather (or synthetic), and they keep the leathers/leg from rubbing the sides. If I just put leathers on, I wouldn't have that flap in place and I think I'd just rub different wear patterns and eventually sores on her.

I am still tempted to blame the synthetic materials, but the thing that bugs me about that hypothesis is that it's not just the fenders themselves rubbing. It's the BUCKLE. On any western saddle, the buckle's in roughly the same place.

What's changed lately? Most importantly is frequency of riding. She may have never gotten rub marks before because I was riding her 1-3 times a week. My riding has changed too; I've been trying to improve my seat.

Look at these two pictures. This first one is a still from a lesson on 2-14-09 - you can actually see the silver buckle peeping out just below my knee.


Now look at this one, from almost a month ago - right about the time I started riding her every other day.


My toes are pointed out in the first one. The buckle is also not in contact with her - well, maybe a little, on the inside edge.

On the second picture, my toe is pointed a tiny bit more forward. You can barely see the buckle, because my whole leg is (correctly!) pointed forward, which moves the fender forward and inward, and brings the buckle against her skin.

So am I right? If I'm right, what should I do for an immediate fix? I'm thinking of pulling the fender around so the buckle is lower, down near my ankle. Or I could ride with my toes out. Or I could be totally wrong about all this guessing!

Welcome to 2008

I just watched Die Hard 4 for the first time. Man, I love Bruce Willis, but I just don't watch TV/movies very often. Anyway, I think he reads my blog. At the end, he does something kinda dumb yet clever, and his daughter asks him why he did that?! He said "It seemed like a good idea at the time!"

Hell yeah.

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!

Addendum

I like to tell yall the weird "training techniques" I have learned from local horseowners, for a couple of reasons. One, I don't look nearly so bad in comparison, and two, as a kind of sanity check for me. Some things (broken double twisted wire curb bits, and heavy shoes, and "action devices") I have always instinctively known to be cruel and ineffective. But some other stuff didn't seem correct when I first heard about it or saw it, but it didn't immediately strike me as wrong.

I've seen lots of people, who, when starting a young horse, will yank its head up at the trot. Because it's harder for the horse to buck if its head is up. This is counterproductive, right?

Anyway, it does make some part of me vaguely nervous for my horse to walk along with his head level. He's entirely too polite and lazy to actually try to buck me off, but it just looks... abnormal. His head's always been carried high, and all the horses I ride or see ridden carry their heads high. It never occurred to me that this was actually bad riding, although it sure seems blindingly obvious now!

Weird Life

It's 10 pm on Independence Day. In honor of the holiday, I am drinking, but in honor of passing the bar, I am also writing out some notes.

The animals are all weirded out by the fireworks on the river. Curtis is wandering around being emo, and Jerome and Cersei are cuddled up by me on the bed. (I am trying the "play it cool but don't make a big deal about it" method of dealing with her fear.)

It's the first 4th in... seven years that I haven't gone to see the fireworks. Just one more thing that's happened in this awful year. This too shall pass.

ANYWAY, I was quite amused because I'm:
a) drinking
b) writing out notes for Chapter 11 (corporate) bankruptcy law
c) reading stories about Punk Rock Houses when my hand gets tired of writing.

The punk rock and corporate bankruptcy stuff clash so nicely.

I'm still alive, really!

Still studying. Just under 4 weeks to go!

Dog update first. I've been taking Cersei to the unofficial dog park to play instead of out to the barn to play. There's several reasons - Sam the Barn Dog has fleas and keeps giving them to Cersei; it's twice as far to the barn as to the park; seeing other people's horses and not mine is kinda :(

Memphis in general is weird, yall. It's not just ghetto Frayser. The whole town is permeated with weirdness.

The Overton Park "dog park." First, it's not a dog park. I think we only have one official dog park, on the other side of the city in Shelby Farms. This is just an area in Overton Park where, by consensus, everybody brings their dogs to play off leash. The Not A Dog Park (NDP) is part of a large field, with a truly nasty concrete pond. There's a treasured patch of old-growth forest nearby, and a golf course all around.

The forest is another Memphis oddity. Back in the 60s, the highway dept wanted to build I-40 through the park, to connect East Memphis to Downtown. The Midtown hippies were up in arms (and rightly so, it's not just a park. It really is as close as you can get to untouched forest in any city). There was a lawsuit that dragged on for ten years, and finally the highway dept lost. In honor of this historic decision, they left the uncompleted access ramps and bridges to nowhere standing for the next 30 years. Seriously, two years ago there was a big renovation of part of our highways, and the Bridges to Nowhere were finally torn down. Just a surreal bit of Memphis history.

Back to the dog park. Cersei really loves to swim in the horrid nasty concrete pond, and she's warming up to the dogs who play there. She'll play with any given dog after she's met it twice, so she's starting to get some "friends." Notable characters and dogs I've met:

• The Asian guy with the intact boxer. Not a show dog or a wonderful specimen of boxer-ness. I suspect he just doesn't want to genitally mutilate his dog. Whatever.
• The sweet gay guy with that odd-looking black GSD. Well, I thought Diablo was a GSD until yesterday, when he admitted that the dog is half GSD and half timberwolf. Normally I'd call bullshit, but he wasn't bragging, just kind of matter of fact about it. Someone asked him about Diablo, and he told us. (I still don't think Diablo is an F1. He's SO laid back and SO doggy.)
• The girl with the enormous BYB pit bull. Her dog is really sweet, and just a puppy who wants to play, but at 9 months the dog is already like 80 lbs. HUGE.
  
• The guy with the two tiny perfect little pit bulls. His are both rescues, and they look to my untrained eye exactly like pit bulls should look. Maybe 50-60 lbs, shorter than Cersei, alligator jaws and built like tanks. I'm glad Cersei's taken a liking to them.
• The girl with the out of control huge 80 lb Rottweiler puppy. Another one Cersei's age, but this dog really initimidates / bullies / annoys her. The Rott wants to play tackle football with every dog out there. Whenever the Rott knocks Cersei down, I go over and make the Rott back off and let my girl up.
  
• And Cersei has a Chihuahua buddy! At first I was really reluctant to let her play chase games with a 5 lb dog, but the owners swore that the Chi loves big dogs and Cersei isn't very prey-drivey. And damn that little dude is FAST. Even if she wanted to chase him down and kill him she wouldn't have a chance.
  

The dogs are about half mutts or rescues and half purebreds. I've seen a Bouvier des Flandres, a couple of Ridgebacks, a (super cute!) Visla puppy, a couple of Great Danes, lots of Weimeraners and Dobermans and pibbles.

It's very strange. A very libertarian dog park. You can't yell at somebody for not controlling her dog (coughRottweilergirlcough) because none of us are supposed to be there. Non dog people wander through all the time. It is very odd to me when pit bulls run off to lick non dog owner kids, but nobody seems to mind. There are so many pits in Memphis that the general awareness about them is much higher - odds are that the non dog people at the park have friends or family with a pit, so they know that pits aren't actually babyeaters. And the pit owners are actually more aware of possible dog aggression than the non pit owners.

Cersei's number one favorite thing to do is still just to go swim around in circles by herself. She doesn't really want to retrieve, she just wants to swim in circles. About a quarter of the time she'll come out of the water and play with her "friends." She's getting more comfortable with the other dogs every day, and honestly, as long as she's having a good time, she can do what she wants out there.

I'm going to write out some notes and when my hand gets tired of writing, I'll come post HORSE PICTURES and write about my large useless beggars.

Horsie heaven and FHOTD fodder

Heaven:
Went down this morning to see my uncle's place in Como. He is giving my three horses a 40 acre field, with plenty of good grass, some trees, a cow pond, and good cow fencing. They are going to horse heaven. I made that high pitched girlie "squeeee" noise most of the way back to Memphis.

FHOTD:
I was sitting in the roundhouse this afternoon with a buncha fellow boarders, talking about pets. (One of the barn cats just had kittens; cute little buggers but I hope the AC lady gets the other cats fixed soon.) One of the other boarders said:

"At one time I had 29 cats and 19 dogs in the house."

We all kinda boggled at her.

"The damn things just kept breeding!"

More weirdness.

So this morning I parked my truck, noted the ghetto sled w/Earnhardt plate, went in to class and posted the previous entry. After class I told my friend about the car. He's also about to graduate law school, and he's a Christian rocker / band manager. He's got ear spacers, and his main crisis right now is having to take them out and look "normal." Anyway, I described the ghetto sled and he said, mysteriously, "Nascar fans are everywhere."

Maybe he watches race cars go around in circles on TV. Who woulda thought.

Anyway (Yes, I say that all the time and I probably should've named the blog "Anyway..."), my friend was telling me a story about her horse from years ago. He was "being ridden into mud that came up to his belly and he got stuck. I'm not sure how they got him out, but he hasn't been a huge fan of mud since." That reminded me of another Weird Redneck Story.

Jessica (I'd call her J, but I've got too many other J's in my Redneck Chronicles already, and I'm not organized enough to think up individual nicknames and keep track of them) had seven horses. One of them was a *really* fucked up padded stud, Power.* I mean, she'd jacked with his feet so bad that he couldn't walk normally much less gait. His rear pasterns would buckle with every fourth stride. I'm serious, he was constantly stumbling on his back legs. Before I started boarding, in the summer of '06 or '07, she took Power on a trail ride. In his pads.

You can't take a padded horse trail riding. You just CANNOT. If your padded horse walks through the mud there is a very real chance that he'll get stuck, and if he gets stuck and tries to pull his legs out he might YANK THE HOOF CAPSULE OFF. Padded classes at local horse shows are cancelled if the arena's at all wet, because this has happened too often.

Jessica went trail riding on her padded stud anyway. Just to prove that he's tougher than we think (1st alternate runner-up name: "Tougher than we think"), Power did not pull his hooves off in the mud. He sank instead. Power sank up to his stomach in some mud near the soybean field. Jessica jumped off before she sank with him and waited for him to yank himself out of the mud, then got back on and rode home. She hasn't, afaik, taken Power on a trail ride since then. Of course, she hardly rides him because he's a real dick of a stallion and she can't really handle him, but that's par for the course.

*Jessica, as far as I know, never deliberately hurt her horses. He was one of those "clean" padded horses, not a sored one. But she always got the cheapest padded farrier she could find, and she hardly ever rode Power. When she did, it was a full on cheap english saddle, gojo-on-the-legs, chains-on-all-fours SHOW. The cheap farriers kept doing weird things to his hoof angles and he ended up really high-heeled in the rear. I think. It's pretty hard to look at a padded horse and evaluate the hoof angles; they're all such slipper-toed Frankensteins in the front that it's hard to look at the rear feet objectively. Anyway - either from the (atypical) chains on the back legs or from the weird angles on the back hooves, Power gaited worse than any TWH I've ever seen, and he stumbled all the time. When he wasn't stumbling, he was hollering at other horses or trying to rear. Poor crazy stud.

I know my attitude toward other peoples' horses seems cold. I had to accept, really early on, that I could not save all the horses I saw. It's a hard moral choice, and I still wither on the inside when I see "mistreated" horses, but I cannot save them. It's like... if you really loved cats and really thought declawing was inhumane, but your friends were all getting cats and kittens and having them declawed. Do you alienate everybody around you by ranting about how declawing is evil? You can't rescue all those cats. Your friends cut their cats' toes off, yet they're taking adequate care of the cats - aren't the friends' cats better off than the scrawny disease-ridden stray cats you see? Yeah, I know people who sore their gaited horses. I know people who "just" pad their gaited horses. But those horses are adequately provided for, and they're not sold to the killers for $200. I save what I can save (Silky, Quinn) and I try to lead by example, and that's all I can do.

PS My two cats have forty evil claws of doom.

Memphis is so weird.

There's a ghetto Crown Vic in the parking lot - two tone, 22" chrome rims, and a Dale Earnhardt license plate. The mind boggles.

The Bread Mania

For some reason, a lot of people at my barn have started feeding their horses stale bread. I don't mean "feeding" as in "treating," either; I mean these people are feeding multiple bags of stale wonder bread to their horses. It's pretty surreal. I keep noticing pickups half-full of bags of bread.

It's all Roger's fault (or Roger's brilliant idea, depending on what you think of bread). He swears he's been feeding his horses bread for years. It started with Roger, then spread to the big redneck family. I think the barn mgr is dabbling in bread, and I know the woman who works for Animal Control feeds bread. Memphis has a Wonder Bread factory, so we have a lot of Wonder Bread outlet stores where they sell almost-expired bread. I think they're getting the expired bread from the outlet stores.

I am not at all sure that bread is a good horse feed. It sounds like a good recipe for choke to me. It also sounds like one of those things you'd read about in an article about seized horses - "27 horses stood in filthy pens, with no water and no hay. They appeared to be clinging to life by eating stale white bread."

My barn is a weird place.