Okay, so one of the many things that my darling husband is responsible for in our relationship is providing his dear wifey with new music.  Otherwise, I'd listen to the same shit day in and day out until my ears bled.

I hand him my little 4 gb turtle thumbdrive and he gives it back, laden with things he thinks I'll like or that I've ponderously requested.  And I upload and listen and send telepathic question marks in his direction.

So, this most recent foray into discovery involved a cd by Linkin Park.  I derp what?  I haven't heard of Linkin Park in years.  But I remember having vaguely appreciated the screaming/singing.  Anyways, the new cd is great and sounds like the love child from Muse.

Where am I going with this, on my little life-of-a-horsewoman blog?

I have iTunes loaded on my work computer because everything else is blocked.  And I'm an Apple whore.  I add a station for Linkin Park and spend several hours listening to it in the background.  A song comes on that I instantly love.

Here's why:

This is 10% luck, 20% skill, 15% concentrated power of will, 5% pleasure, 50% pain, and 100% reason to remember the name.

That just makes me think ponies.  And athletics.  And life.

I left work early on Friday Tuesday.  I should say, my department was released an hour early.  By the time I made it to my parking garage, mine was only one of a handful of cars left.  Snowpocalypse 2014!

In preparation for the "icy/snowy winter mix", I'd brought my tack home to clean.  I found out before leaving work on Tuesday that I would have Wednesday off and was looking so forward to laying on the couch and watching Veronica Mars.  After whatever attacked my husband on Sunday night, I needed it.

Cleaning.  I don't mind that my leathers don't match the bulk of the saddle because they match the knee patch.

Mint might be my weakness. Thank you, Hillary!

Is my bridle dying?

Ponykins was brought in and shoved into a stall on Tuesday night, due to the freezing rain.  I vacillated about this and wondered how much anthropomorphizing I was doing; y'alls' northern horses stand in the snow all the time.  But, then, Archie isn't acclimated to cold weather and has such a thin winter coat.

D and I spent the "snow" day around the house, cleaning, sorting, lounging, and periodically checking for the promised snow.  Shocker: no snow.  Today, I got to go in to work late, but I still didn't go to the barn. The high was supposed to be 42, but it was only in the 30s when I left work.  Boo.

I wish BMs sent joyful text messages.  It's always, "Your blanket is in shreds."  Or, "Your horse is lame."  Or, "You're out of supplements."  And, "Your horse's eye is swollen."

I want something like, "Because your horse is just such a beautiful and majestic creature who inspires all of the other horses to be better horse citizens, I'm discounting your board for the next decade."  More likely would be a text detailing the position of his hooves and/or teeth as they educated another horse.

So the text I got Friday was about the Dude's eyeball.  Again.  Happened in September.  It's always that left eye.  No freaking clue.

I went out after work and swung by the grocery store to get a saline solution to flush the eye ball.  When I pulled him from the pasture, I'll be honest, it looked like crap.  I immediately thought about calling the vet out.  Walking him out, though, he opened it back up considerably more.

After flushing it, checking it for any sort of visible foreign body, and applying a cold compress multiple times, I determined that he was doing "meh" better.  It's a measurable quantity.



I sent a picture to the vet who did his fetlock injection back in Augusta.  He's an old school racehorse vet who changed to small animal.  We worked emergency together and I trust this guy s o  m u c h.  I know looking at some iPhone photos isn't necessarily comparable to an ocular stain, but it's a start.  He told me to keep on doing what I'm doing.  No improvement in the next couple of days, I'll call out our regular vet.  Deep sigh.

When I went out Saturday and took off the fly mask, I swear there was improvement.  There was a little bit of crust, but the swelling was down.  More flushing, more cold compressing, shoving some cookies down his face, fly mask back on, and back out he went.
That fourth photo is from Sunday morning.  He looked much, much better.  So, Sunday night I went out and checked him again and actually opted to ride.  He wasn't swollen anymore and just a tad bit squinty.  We kept it pretty basic -- walk, trot, canter and a popping over a couple of crossrails.  Then it was more flushing, cold compressing, cookies, dinner and turning out.

Derp derp?

I'm super freaking exhausted because the husband was up all night due to bad Mexican (the HORROR), but the plan is to go back out to the barn after work (can I make it eight hours?  really?) and hopefully the squinty goodness will be gone.  I'm dying to try some of the jumps that the Eventer set up (and OR kindly lowered to a more reasonable level).

I haven't done this since before Xmas.  Whoops.

1. If you have Instagram, you should read this article.  It's not at all educational or horsie, but make sure you click through the (fucking) slideshow of the reality of this dude's photos.  Perspective.
2. Lush Cosmetics.  I know, I know.  We're horsewomen.  Our perfume is horse manure and sweat and our concealer is the dirt perpetually on our hands.  But I love this company.  Let me tell you why:  animal friendly, no animal testing, mostly natural ingredients, and a solid product.  By the way, this is an international company, so our friends to the north and east can enjoy, too!
3. This hoofpick.  It sorta creeps me out and I sorta love it.  It looks very stabby.
4. The Horse.  I know everyone knows about the Horse.  But let me just remind you that it exists and has great articles and videos to kill mid-afternoon slumps while simultaneously making you question your horse-ownership skills.  For example:
   → Video of signs of a shitty saddle fit
   → Cold-weather feed tips (even though they say now is too late in the season)
   → Stem cells!
   → A shit ton of free "reports" (really just articles and fact sheets with the occasional diagram)
   → This report is timely, as Archie has a swollen eye.
5. First National OTTB Study.  I felt like hot shit when I got the questionnaire in my email.  The results tell me that I paid too much on average for the Kid, but on par with the category.  And there were 35 other responders in the state of Georgia.  I want to find them. Here's a link to the pdf.

First up, though:  the Eventer has a blog!  ..About eventing!  It's very informative about the things she's doing with her pony, Johnny, and has a shit-ton fewer swear words than you'll find here (okay, zero).  In addition to training talk, she also talks about the surgery that he had - evidently, there isn't much first-hand experience on the interwebs about laryngoplasty (tie-back surgery).  Go check it out!

My pack horse.

Secondly, the sheet I ordered for the Archer came in.  When I opened the package, I could hear my mother's voice saying, "You get what you pay for."  It was really, really cheap.  And cheaply made.

Opening the box.

$3.30 lead rope.

And an end (in addition to cheap metal) that you would expect on a $3.30 lead rope.

$9.95 halter.  I expected the "Horze" to be bigger.  Is that tacky of me?

Um.  I'm an artist. I normally pick turquoise or teal for Archie, but I dig this color, too.

Deets on my $47 "waterproof sheet."

It says "navy", but I really think it's like a gunmetal blue.

What?

Just like with cheap human clothes, you size up.

With both cheapies on!

Of course, immediately after I buy this, they get a whole slew of 600 and 1200 denier blankets for $2 cheaper.  This was much thinner than his Weatherbeeta and the fabric felt like... the cheap disposable blankets that they give runners prior to a race.  I don't expect it to last long, but hopefully I'll be a grown up some day and purchase blankets on sale off-season.  Maybe.

Minus the gate.  Also known as, "I brought my racehorse to a trail ride."  Or, "I derped." Or, "The Eventer lusts after logs."

The Eventer, OR and I met up at the barn yesterday at about nine.  It was a quick grab of our three bay OTTBs, cleaning and tacking up and we were on our way.  The Eventer's horse is a giant, somewhere around 17 hands, and has a monster stride.  She spent a lot of time weaving him around so we weren't terribly outpaced.

I took shit photos this time, for whatever reason.  Archie was pissed at not leading, but didn't have the gonads to bravely lead when in front.  So he had to practice being a big boy and working through his attitude in behind.

The first thing we encountered was a ditch with a little bit of water/mud.  The Eventer's horse crossed it without any issues, but OR's horse doesn't like water.  I took Archie over it in time for OR's horse to sproing into the air and land next to us.  It was slow-motion and tucked-knees adorable.

The next thing, which seems to be an issue every time, was crossing the main road.  There isn't heavy traffic, but the speed limit is 55 mph and there's a curve at one end.  It's also got ditches on either side and a creek running parallel to our trail and perpendicular to the road.  Anyways, it's a bitch.  OR dismounted for safety because her horse notoriously likes to play in the road.

After crossing the road, everything else was pretty much smooth sailing.  We walked out for about 45 minutes, going back over the wooden bridge, through the parking lot, up the wooden trail and into the recently developed neighborhood.  Archie walked with his eyes rolling, ears pinned, and a kink in his neck.  He seemed to hold some grudge that the Eventer's horse was in front of him and followed like a beacon - if her horse marched through the middle of a cannon-deep mud puddle, by god, Archie was going to, too.  His attitude only seemed to resolve when we reached the part of the route appropriate stuff other than walking.

Pissed off pony.

And we trotted.  Three deep, for most of it.  It was the first time that Archie's ears pricked and he did some more extensions to keeps up with the bigger horse.  Such a goober.

I love how Archie, on the right, has puffed himself up enough to look as big as the bigger horse.

After trotting a little ways, we walked some, turned around, and decided to canter.  Let me paint this scene for you:
The Eventer is in front of and to the right of me.  OR is directly in front of me.  The Eventer tells OR to go ahead and pick up the canter, which she does, and TE starts trotting.  This means that my horse is 1) in the rear and 2) the only one walking.  He promptly loses his shit and starts crow hopping sideways.  I realize that I can try to keep him back and just go when TE goes, which would probably result in more hopping, maybe some baby rears, and a heavy possibility of bucks.  Or I can just let him go.

So I do.

I don't think there were very many strides of canter before I was pulling on his face and he was accelerating to gallop.  I saw TE a little bit ahead of me and on the right and yelled to OR that I would be passing her on the left.  Her horse promptly bucked a few times before he realized that he was about to be taken over on both sides and started galloping.  We flew by them and I saw TE matching me on the right before Archie started pulling ahead and I yelled that I had no brakes.  He galloped out a little bit more before I was able to bring him back down to a walk.  Oh, the excitement.  I had to apologize for escalating what was supposed to be a little canter.

After that, Archie proceeded to do his fancy sideways prance for about a mile.  I felt that he was exhilarated to have "won" a race, but when TE's horse got in front of him again, he reverted to grumps.  Both TE and OR complimented his lateral moves - which I wasn't asking for - and the light, collected trot.  So we got video.



The rest of the ride was easy.  Archie resumed walking like a sane horse and had no other major snits.  When it came time to cross back over the ditch that gave us issues, we took it at a different part (that I've taken him over a ton of times when it's dry) and all three horses jumped it.  Archie actually jumped me out of the tack.  If I had been thinking clearly, I would have asked them to give me a lead over the swamp water that I still haven't gotten him successfully over.  Baby steps!

Much less grumpy after having "won".

After cleaning all of the horses and putting up all our crap, we turned them out.

Mud puddles!

TE had to head home, so OR and I got lunch together.  It was nice to have a conversation with another heterosexual, animal-loving woman.  Which means, we talked about cats and men.  Meow.

I have ridden at four barns.

Tall Timbers was my first barn.  I started riding there at the age of nine and continued until I graduated high school.  It was your typical lesson barn, with a ton of kids milling about and several lesson horses.  While there were two girls that I was close with and that I enjoyed showing with, I didn't have any real friends until I met the girl who would become my bestest bestie my freshman year of high school.  I invited her out to ride and we spent the next four years riding together at that barn until she went off to college.

Bestie and me.  Poor Spike... we were not little people.

I took several months off from riding when I started college and I'm not really sure why.  I think money and a slowly developing identity.  I got back into riding the second semester of my freshman year of college, when I had the opportunity to be on the equestrian team for my college.  The barn affiliated with the team became my second home.  I worked hard for them and took lessons as I could.  My trainer was a friend, but we never really rode together.  And, of course, my bestie rode there throughout college, until she moved away.  And there were barn kids here, too (fuckers are now in college!).  I'll never forget summer days spent cantering through the woods, sunburns and scrapes.

And we were both in a skinny cycle! Bestie with her horse and me with the Archer.

Archie might be bi.

From the bliss of the Augusta barn, we moved to the privately-owned hellhole here in Savannah.  I was mostly alone.  There was the brief period that BB and her leaser rode there and occasionally we rode together.  But, yeah, it was really just the Archer and me.

Okay, so the leaser took this photo.

But it was really just us.  Swear.

So while this isn't a new experience, it feels new.  I'm excited about planning stuff with OR and the Eventer, even if it's just a little trail ride.  I like chatting while we ride and taking turns over fences and sharing photos that we've taken of each others' ponies and talking shit about random grievances.  I'm not confusing this with a real friendship - I don't know their birthdays and I don't think that I would turn to them for a non-horse crisis, nor vice versa - but, sincerely, appreciating that there are horsewomen in my life again.

In the Ponykins front, we jumped last night for the first time in like, two weeks.  It was a little grid that the Eventer had set up.  For her, it was four trot poles to a vertical and one stride to an oxer.  For us, it was four trot poles to a crossrail and a rough stride to a trot pole.  The first time I took him over it, I don't think he saw the crossrail until we were right up on it and he slammed on the brakes and then walked over it, one leg at a time.  The second time was better, with him cantering through after jumping the crossrail.  Our little issue with the jarring left lead has resolved as well - I'm pretty sure I was shifting my seat too much to the outside and he couldn't compensate.

So here's to a long weekend!

Just a big ol' puddle of warmth and sunshine.

Honestly, I don't know what the fuck was up with Archie's mane. After one night of pulling and treatment, he had significant improvement. It makes me wonder if there was something parasitic - mites? - that was able to live in his too-thick, toasty mane. And if that parasite died when I took the warmth away.

I feel like this week or so has been two steps forward and eighteen steps back.

• The night before I was supposed to have my lesson with T3, when it was in the thirties, Archie was incredibly stiff cantering left and jack-knifed his front end a few times before coming to a stuttering break.  No problem on straight-aways or around the rail, just the one end that is sloppy.  I assumed this was arthritic pain, hard ground, cold temps, etc.  A fluke.  It repeated last night.  Before I assume it's him, I'm going to reassess my seat (again) to make sure that I'm not eight shades of fucked up.
• I got the text that he had broken the belly strap on  his sheet that I fixed.  Then another text the next day that he had broken the other strap and was walking with his blanket between his front legs.  This, of course, happens the day I place an order for a new sheet - which I've yet to get confirmation on shipping.

My little work station.

Just replaced the fucking old green straps.

And rather than connect at one point, I connected a couple of feet.  :)

Repaired the leg strap, too.

A little bareback ride in the rain.

I bought this thing used for $5.  I think it's supposed to be a stable sheet, but it was really absorbent, so I used it to dry him off.

• I hadn't pulled his mane since we moved barns and he was looking awfully homeless.  I pulled it last night and noticed that the middle was incredibly dirty.  Dirty pasture horse, to be expected, right?  Then I noticed that there was like... a ridge in the middle of his mane.  I separate the layers and it looks like flea allergy dermatitis.  Dr. Google, DVM, tells me that it might be sweet itch.  He's due for vaccines and I was hoping to wait until next month, so I could get him on the schedule with the rest of the barn.  This grossness might warrant an earlier visit.

Center is dirty.

See the weird layering?

And, BAM!  Vomit.



• The one kinda-sorta good thing?  That whole no-room-in-the-trailer thing for the XC schooling yesterday might have been a blessing in disguise:
• Archie was a little shit on our baby trail ride through the woods that he's been in dozens of times now.  I fear the thought of him out in strange, open spaces with a dozen other horses.

And the happy ears promptly stopped and we took several opportunities to practice our reining horse spins.

• I left the barn at seven last night and they hadn't returned yet.  I can only imagine what a horrible bitch a tired, cranky me would have been after twelve hours.  I'm already a horrible bitch when I'm happy.
• When I asked OR about it, her first response was "scary". Er?  The website for the location was misleading.  To quote, "from the smallest of logs to large Advanced size tables and questions."  She said that nothing was smaller than Beginner Novice.  I'm sure to the rest of the group there, this wasn't a big deal.  But it was her first time trying solid fences and she just jumped 2" in the ring on her horse a couple weeks ago.  No baby steps!  There was also a little issue about some airs above ground and eating dirt (not her - some more advanced people trying to help).  So, we've talked about trying to find something with tadpole fences, hopefully a little nearer.

Or, The Chronicles of a Lazy-ass Carpenter.

Can I call myself a carpenter?  I touched wood.  I didn't cut it, though.

I want to toss "easy-peasy" in here somewhere, but I feel like that's an artificial attempt to be nicer in language than I really am.

So here's the inspiration:  I am a million times over-excited that the barn has jumps, considering that the last barn had a jump.  This is progress.  But, unfortunately, it doesn't have shit on our first barn.  And seeing how the group of us have expectations to compete (OR is actually going to a show this weekend for English Equitation and Pleasure), we need to expose the horses to more than our sand-colored jumps and get some variety.

Old barn:

Color.

And more color and fancy wing standards.

And the wall.

And the skinny brush box.

And the coop. (which might be my next project!)

And the wishing well (standards were wells). I hated this jump.

Cheap & Easy Flower Boxes

• I originally thought about making a hole in the center, at 18", and then every six inches out from there.  It would result in a total of five holes per piece.  But then I started thinking about the two pieces being set next to each other, end-to-end, and the resulting empty almost-foot of flower-less space where the ends met. 
  
• Keeping with a six-inch gap, because it was the easiest mathematically, I divided the space between holes so when placed end-to-end, the wood would look continuous and have uninterrupted flower power.
• I measured three inches from the end and made a light, preliminary mark.  I measured six inches from that and made another, until I had six light marks per piece.  I then measured the width of the wood to find center.  Surprise.  The wood wasn't a perfect 4".  To make life easier on myself, I just made a darker mark where center and my old mark sorta converged.  I don't think this much measuring really matters, so long as you're near the center of the wood.

• I drilled the holes with a 1/4" bit, measuring depth with a flower stem to attempt to get some sort of consistency.  

D's g-ma bought us this thing and then almost immediately asked if we'd used it.  Uh, no.

• And then my drill died after about nine holes.

It's a piece of shit, but the first power tool should be, right?

$4.97 at Walmart.

• So I opted to go ahead and start painting while my drilled charged.  I bought the cheap-ass $1.47 Walmart spray paint in white and a navy-ish blue.  I'll never do that again.  The white exploded all over my hands.  It took about three light coats, but I was able to spray one set, start on the second set, and then the first set would be dry.  I didn't paint the bottoms, since the wood was already treated, just the five sides.
• I bought some $1 flowers from Dollar Tree and stuck those bitches in. I'll buy more to fill the boxes eventually.

Second coat or so.

I don't remember the white looking so splotchy.

Okay, so I'm off-centered.

Adds a little something.