The other day, last week, some point this month: I didn't have a book to read during lunch. As should be no surprise, I am a voracious reader and leave lunchtime socialization to those better equipped. So, yeah, no book is a big deal.

Soooorta like Steph's "Books With Horses On the Cover".

I'm an avid reader.  I can't help it.  It's an addiction and it neither makes me fat nor drunk, so I indulge it.  A lot.

So I want to share with you some literature I found that involves ponies, but won't tell you shit about how much you suck as a rider/trainer/caretaker/owner/person.

Novels.

The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope

Chaos Walking

A depiction by LeaBHarlann.

A lot of my last few rides have been working on Archie responding to my seat.  Thanks to 100 Whatever, You Suck As A Rider, I've learned that I've been reversing the pressure of my seat bones, oh... my entire riding life.  You know, twenty-plus years.  Fuck, I'm old.

The brilliant monster that he is, Archie had pretty much become numb to this means of communication.  Mom's ass says go left, but she's bent me right and has that left leg closing off my left shoulder.. I'll go right and see what the fuck happens next.


So it's been a lot of walking, over-dramatizing the pressure of my seat bone, making the answer to my question as easy as possible, praising the fuck out of him when he gets it, and immediately bringing my seat back to neutral.  I have a harder time with this madness at trot, because there is such little time with my bum in the saddle.  And since we do walk/canter transitions (because I have almost successfully broken the habit of chasing him into the canter), it's been pretty easy for me to do the same walk exercise while setting him up for canter.  I derped last night, got frustrated when I couldn't get him to pick up the right lead, which led to him getting pissy and confused.  So I stopped, walked for a moment, reassessed where I was sitting, where my upper body was, and bam.  No problem.

We did do a little bit of jumping on Saturday.  Every single standard had been crammed into the ring and it was.. um.  Not up to my standards.  So after lowering fences, adding ground poles, securing barrels, and switching out PVC for wood, he and I just worked on trotting and cantering some baby fences.   Him being amazing and me working on my sumo squat.

...

We've also worked on a couple of the very first few exercises in 100 Ways, Bitch, Please, I'm Fabulous that involve teaching him to lower his head on command and to come.  Meh.  Ground tie?  Stand?  Graze peacefully and not run off?  We're amazing at that.  Coming when I don't have a treat?  Meh.

1.  Friday.  Enough said, right?  More so, when it's a payday Friday.

2.  These tags.  All things Etsy, all the time.  For ever and ever and ever.  But I was looking for metal tags, in order to start filling up my own stock for my own shop (tentatively called "OscarTangoTangoBravo", as a shout out to OTTBs and "my" military background.. and because WhiskeyTangoFoxtrot was taken).
Anyways, $8 and gorgeous and incredibly customizable.  Customer service was amazing.  You send them your specs, they send a proof back for verification.  I didn't like the way one of the fonts looked and they immediately changed it, no questions asked.  Pay an extra $1.50 to get the phone number on the back.  My only not-love is the clip they used, as it's triangular and really just puts the tag in a position to fall off.  Overbending it corrects that.

3.  Appreciation.  My father is retired Army.  I have always lived in a city with a nearby base.  Always.  Even when we move away, we're still nearby one.  Or are they everywhere?  Anyways, I was shooting a litter of puppies at the HS and there was a military guy adopting one.  I normally get a bit skittish about military adopting because the return rate is pretty high, with the deployment and everything.  They have such hard lives.  But I had a good feeling about this situation.  Anyways, I had him in a lot of my shots and bumped into him picking up his puppy last night.  I offered to send him some of the photos.  So, yeah.  This gave me warm fuzzies.

(if i ever become real, i'm totally going to do military appreciation stuff)

love at first sight.

4.  Thriftbooks.  That WW photo this week?  All my new pretties!  I'll talk about each one, eventually.  I think I've already declared that 100 Ways to Improve Your Horse's Schooling is amazing.  Twenty pages into 100 Ways to Improve Your Riding has already called me out on some shit.  Seatbones, wtf?  So, excluding the one outlier ($12 for Cross-Train Your Horse...), the average cost of the other nine was $4.32.  Free shipping.  Sales tax only on the ones that were sold within my state.  Bam.

Shipping Soon from Auburn
TBID: 412871973 Price: Shipping: SalesTax: Total: ISBN: 071531680X $3.79 $0.00 $0.00 $3.79 Title: 100 Ways to Improve Your Riding Quality: Used - Very Good
Shipping Soon from Portland
TBID: 510606945 Price: Shipping: SalesTax: Total: ISBN: 0385474059 $3.99 $0.00 $0.00 $3.99 Title: Anne Kursinski's Riding Quality: Used - Good
Shipping Soon from Atlanta
TBID: 709880679 Price: Shipping: SalesTax: Total: ISBN: 1859672698 $4.40 $0.00 $0.31 $4.71 Title: The Practical Rider's Handbook: A Complete Professional Riding Course--From Getting Started to Achieving Excellence Quality: Used - Like New
TBID: 710144060 Price: Shipping: SalesTax: Total: ISBN: 0715321900 $5.41 $0.00 $0.38 $5.79 Title: 100 Ways to Improve Your Horse's Schooling Quality: Used - Like New
Shipping Soon from Dallas
TBID: 811545963 Price: Shipping: SalesTax: Total: ISBN: 0789493381 $4.22 $0.00 $0.00 $4.22 Title: Complete Horse Riding Manual Quality: Used - Like New
Shipping Soon from Hartford
TBID: 909974084 Price: Shipping: SalesTax: Total: ISBN: 0131551442 $4.07 $0.00 $0.00 $4.07 Title: Competitive Riding: A Manual of Dressage, Show Jumping and Eventing (A Prentice Hall Press equestrian book) Quality: Used - Good
TBID: 910258087 Price: Shipping: SalesTax: Total: ISBN: 0914327186 $4.07 $0.00 $0.00 $4.07 Title: An Introduction to the Tellington-Jones Equine Awareness Method: The T.E.A.M. Approach to Problem-Free Training Quality: Used - Very Good
TBID: 910706429 Price: Shipping: SalesTax: Total: ISBN: 0715315005 $3.96 $0.00 $0.00 $3.96 Title: Enlightened Equitation Quality: Used - Good
Shipping Soon from Phoenix
TBID: 1008814484 Price: Shipping: SalesTax: Total: ISBN: 0715319639 $4.24 $0.00 $0.00 $4.24 Title: Unlock Your Riding Talent: 30 Key Exercises Quality: Used - Very Good
Shipping Soon from Reno
TBID: 1304103609 Price: Shipping: SalesTax: Total: ISBN: 1570760462 $12.02 $0.00 $0.00 $12.02 Title: Cross-Train Your Horse: Book One: Simple Dressage for Every Horse, Every Sport Quality: Used - Acceptable
Total:			$50.86

5. Blog labels.  After reading about how I should be riding, I went through and cross referenced all the posts about the lessons I had with T3.  Those mythical days back when I had a trainer.  You know.

This is a little book.  Almost a freaking pamphlet.

It's 24 pages long and has a ton of hand-drawn illustrations.  Published in 1988, I don't think that much has changed in fence construction, save the frangible pin stuff.  And if you're using those, you probably don't need a 24-page book to give you pointers.

Fran and I probably could have been friends.

Pretty hefty contents page.. for all 24 pages.

Good intro!

So, the book is basically into two categories (to me).  Show jumping and cross country.  I think it pretty much assumes that you've got basic show jumping stuff, so it affirms how those things should be set up.  What point should be the highest, how many poles should be used in the back portion of an oxer, et cetera.  While not rocket science, it did make me think.

One of their things is to not have excessive poles on the back portion of an oxer - something I've never even thought about.

Sproing.

The "dangerous jumps" was probably my favorite section.

So.

If you follow a couple of your fellow bloggers on Instagram, you might have seen a little bit of my smashing-metal-into-metal work yesterday.

I was sitting there, last Friday night, prior to leaving for a day trip on Saturday, going through my collection of little metal bits and my alphabets and just completely flummoxed as to how to make something for Steph at Hand Gallop for that little contest she won.  Two ponies.  Both with short names.  And it might not be the actual case, but I feel like the chestnut gelding is the favorite.

After having fucked up one tag (how important is the letter e and kerning, anyways?!), I had this weird little epiphany.

Steph.

Have I seen this before?  Probably.  Almost certainly.  But did I ever think about changing my methodology and trying something new?  Nope, nope, nope.

My husband can attest that after having successfully made Steph's "Hand Gallop" tag, I was.. stricken.  It was all I could do to think of more things to hammer, trying to piece things together from my dwindling supply of metal (I fuck up a lot.. there's no cmd Z with metal and it is not forgiving).  He went off to bed and I stayed up, hammer tapping.  The next morning, sitting in the car with my supply box at my feet, piecing more things together.

So a couple other of my blogging buddies were the recipients of my attempts.  I might sell this stuff in the future, I might continue to randomly gift it for upcoming birthdays, shitty months, contests, etc.  You know, if I have your address.

Hillary.

(Ps.  I stole y'alls photos.  And passively invited everyone to go to your feeds.)

It's "partial" in that I'm not giving you a bit of my entire review, rather that I only reviewed part of the book.  Sure, I can easily chomp down six novels in a week, but give me something non-fiction and my brain slows to a crawl.

Dressage for the Not-So-Perfect Horse. I think she meant "asshole", but that wouldn't sell as well.

So, uh, I reviewed this book while being driven on the shuttle from my parking garage to my office.  That being said, don't expect much.  Here are some pictures of some paragraphs and charts that I appreciated in the first four chapters.  Also, did you know that a raised mane is a sign of a relaxed poll?  Or a supple poll?  Maybe I should have read more before I started spewing off trivia.

Poll exercises.

If you can read this, props to you.

That big heading that is partially chopped off says "Find an Instructor."

What shall we do with a drunken sailor?

Drunken sailor, drunken sailor.

Hint.  On the previous two photos, the ideal is "A".

I think Archie is B or D.

I've never thought about how this stuff should be taught or should progress.  This is interesting to know.

I love the last paragraph:

The weather continues to be weird.  The forecasters promise that we'll return to a glum, dreary January shortly and I can go back to blaming seasonal affective disorder for my mental fog.  Right now, though, we're breaking records.  High of 81 today, thanks.  Wore a short skirt to work to celebrate.

I don't have much horsie news to report.  I plan on doing a pretty in-depth review of one of the books I checked out of the library (so I can justify sharing the photographs I took of the pages without really feeling like a pirating jerk).  I've gone through some of the exercises with Archie and he seems agreeable.  At least, he doesn't seem like I'm screwing him up.  Maybe I can get the husband to take pictures while I put Archie through his post-ride stretches (while also getting photos on the Kid again that don't make me feel like a fat ass).

I have another book that I'll eventually review.  Maybe.  It's called "Fitness, Performance and the Female Equestrian."  When the tall, lithe dressage-riding Canadianne gave it to my short, stocky, whhhhaa?-riding self, I was immediately offended.  And jealous.  She was easily six feet tall and had super long, wrappable legs.  The book has been sitting on a shelf ever since.

Last night, prior to going home to change clothes and bust out a workout at the gym, I just stood in Archie's stall.  Breathed in his smell and rested my face on his flank while he narfed his beet pulp.  Good gut sounds, FTW.  I feel like a big part of my less-than-happy right now is that I'm not getting to spend adequate time with my horse.  I could make time, but everything comes with a sacrifice and I blame the shortened days.  I feel like everyone else right about now: too little time, too little funding, too much to do.  And too little that interests me.