(no subject)
Nov. 22nd, 2009 08:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickBusy weekend. Want to know what I did?
Saturday, I had breakfast at La's (typical) and coffee and some of the regrettably bad batch of gingersnap cookies. Went out to do horse things but wound up pulling orange round-bale strings out of the field. (For non-rural people among the readership, round-bale strings go around the outside of round bales of hay. They are plastic. They don't go away. As the livestock (horses in this case) eat the round bale, the strings get snarled up and trodden into the dirt and generally made into a mess. If the people putting the round bales in the field cannot be trained to take the strings off the round bales BEFORE putting the round bales in the field, the snarls of orange string accumulate and ruin the grass and look like hell. Prior experience suggests that the odds of the round-bale-placement team getting all OCD about their string management system anytime soon are less than good. Therefore, someone has to go pull up the strings out of the field on a semi-regular basis. This weekend, that someone was me.) I made a great big huge pile of round bale strings, many of them covered in what we shall euphemistically refer to as "mud". I considered my great big huge pile of round bale strings for a while and then I set my balls of plastic round bale string on fire, tidily and neatly, so that they all burned up in a contained space that never exceeded a square three feet on a side.
While I was burning the round bale strings, Julie's son Jared showed up (Julie from when I was in high school -- a factoid that will help some readers place her) and inquired if I had a permit to be burning trash out of doors. Buh? A what? I don't have a bloody permit. I don't need a permit. Besides, who is going to complain? I'm pretty much in the middle of the horse people's hundred acres. The smoke from my contained ickle plastic fire is not going to offend any neighbors because it will have dissipated by the time it gets to the neighbors.
Jared then proceeded to inform me that it was also a windy day (there was a light breeze) and that my fire would probably get out of hand and burn things that I did not want burned. This, while I'm burning plastic (Does not spark, does not pop, does not waft bits of char into the air. Melts and puddles, stays mostly where it is.) where the ground has been churned up enough that it's largely mud with some scattered bits of hay on it. There was very little accidental fire fuel in my immediate (20' radius) vicinity and that was one of the reasons I chose that location to burn in. Also, it poured rain on Thursday so what mud there was went *squish* underfoot and even far away things what my non-sparking, non-wafting fire might magically chance to alight were not bone-dry tinder. I mean honestly, I'm not stupid.
I am pleased to report that I didn't strangle Jared even after he didn't like my explanations of why I was not in danger of setting the farm alight. Instead of deferring to my superior judgment and extensive fire-building experience, Jared then informed me that he was a Boy Scout and that he was prepared and would still try to save me and put out the fire when I wound up setting the farm alight. Oh, for fuck's sake.
Saturday evening La, Cass, and I went to York to take my niece Gwen (she's in kindergarten) to see the World Famous Lipizzaner Stallions, a horse-related entertainment thing that is not endorsed by or affiliated with the fine folks over at the Spanish Riding School. We all had a lovely time. Gwen was well-behaved and enthralled. La and I had a slightly-different fabulous time, predicated on our rather more sophisticated and knowledgable enjoyment of horsemanship, and Cass had a fine time that fell somewhere between ours and Gwen's.
Sample differences in event enjoyment:
Gwen: All the white horses are so pretty!
Me: See the spur marks on his belly, third one in line?
La: She's got no business wearing spurs on him if she can't keep her legs quieter.
Gwen: He's got braids in his mane.
La: She's got him behind the vertical and his neck is locked at the bottom. He's only bending the top half or so.
Me: Yeah, he looks miserable. Look at her hands... *tsk tsk*
It's a good show for anyone who wants to take kids to see infotainment dressage. The horses were in good health, carried a decent amount of weight and were clean. Horses and riders were reasonably well-presented as far as turnout (saddles, bridles, outfits, etc).
Pickier viewers and persons with extensive riding experience and/or experience reading horse body language will be able to pick nits with enthusiasm. Some horses were either cranky, sour, or slightly sore -- temper and swishing tails on two-tempe changes, for example, clear fuss/fret slobber instead of white foamy slobber, and pinned ears and a *very* bunchy canter on occasion. Some horses were smoother and better at stuff than others, some riders were significantly better than others. As a result, the performance was uneven. It also substituted "easy" moves for harder ones (eg. leg yield instead of half pass) that give much the same bang-for-the-buck when they hit non-horsey eyeballs. Considering that it's infotainment dressage, however, this is to be expected. (If you want to watch real dressage, they do that yearly at Devon and every four years at the Olympics. Unless you're really, really into it, watching real dressage is like watching paint dry.)
I was thinking about the whole thing and the economic realities of the world are such that really good grand prix dressage horses are worth more as grand prix dressage horses than they are as anything else. If you have top-notch lipizzaner dressage stallions, they will make a living doing by dressage tests and breeding mares, not by going around the country and performing for mouth-breathing yahoos such as myself who cannot tell the half pass from the leg yield. (Except I can and now I'm bitching about it even though I totally scored free tickets to this thing and had a fine time with my niece.)
We got home late from the Lipizzaner thing and went straight to bed. Sunday I had breakfast at La's. I did some more algebra with Cass, who is chugging along in pre-algebra. We're at "two step equations" -- combine like terms (variables on one side of the equation, numbers on the other side), then divide by coefficient of x. A sample problem would be like "3x + 10 = 6 - 4x" or similar. Step 1: 7x = -4. Step 2: x = -4/7. Them's the two steps. She got it and then she talked me through her homework as she did it, writing down all the steps along the way.
Then I pulled strings out of the upper field, an activity that was very interesting to the Ungrateful Babies and notably to the Most Ungrateful Baby, who followed me around inspecting what I was doing with an excessive amount of interest. Damn horse. We Are Not Friends. Stop being all nice to me. (Liss says there's been an inquiry on the Most Ungrateful Baby, so maybe she'll sell and go down the road. I will be sorry to see her go but that's what she's for. Her job is to magically turn into pretty, tasty, delightful round bales... take one mouth away and feed the ones that remain.) I burned the upper field strings in the outdoor furnace because there were a lot fewer of them.
I helped La clean out the chicken coop hallway thing after that. It was a somewhat messy job but necessary. Liss wants a pig. (For eating. Pigs are for eating. Pigs, you have so that you can eat tastylicious pork products.) The pig pen is located next to the chicken coop in the same building. You have to be able to go down the hallway past the chickens to GET to the pig pen. That's why we were cleaning. The pig pen proper also needs to be cleaned out, but that's a job for another day. Today was cleaning out the hallway and putting up windows in the holes-for-windows. We got today's job done and done nicely.
And then finally, with what remained of my weekend, I got Nick out and we schooled canter departures. That was the plan. We spent the warmup with me in half-assed (but very non-wobbly) two-point and my horse trotting because My Legs Were Touching Her!!! ZOMG! It was not a happy place for either of us, but nobody died. She'll get over the Legs Touching Her thing eventually. We got warmed up (brain of horse online and reasonably functional) and went to work on canter departures. Recall the jumping clinic of two weeks ago wherein we didn't have any canter departures at all besides "trot 'er into it at ninety miles an hour"? I recall it, anyway. The memory is as a blade in my soul. So, we were schooling canter departures.
My knowledge of proper canter departures is limited to two years of dressage lessons and my experiences piloting Cole-the-thoroughbred in same. Pony lady says I need to have more faith and believe that Cole will canter, else he will not. (If it was up to me to make Tinkerbelle live, she'd be one dead pixie, for real. I'm not long on belief.) This, says pony lady, is why my canter departures with Cole are so fraught with fraughtness. I don't believe that he will canter for me and so he does not. To say that what we have here is a self-fulfilling prophecy sums it up nicely.
I do not have a problem of belief with Nicknick. She will canter with me. She may not stop cantering, particularly, but she will canter. Cantering is not a problem. So I trot her around a twenty meter circle to try to wear a track in the grass so that I can see where I'm going. I'm also trying to get my horse more or less bent in the direction we are going. And I sit. And I put my legs where they go (at 1 and 3, kind of sitting crooked, inside leg forward) and I *think* canter and nudge her very slightly and Nick zips forward lickety-lickety-lickety. We go round and round and round the twenty-meter circle. I'm high and tight and way out of the saddle. Horse is high and tight, nose damn near in the air, and accellerating. This is not good. I sit down. Horse slows down to trot after a longer-than-I'd-like interval. She's hot, won't walk, blowing hard, dancing like a dipshit ayrab. Fuck.
And again, other direction. I establish a trot. She goes to canter and I haven't cued shit. I rack her back and we trot again. More. And I sit and put my feet and think *canter* and we are again going round and round and round at ninety fucking miles an hour with me flying out of the seat and thinking "relax, sit into it, yadda yadda yadda" like my pony lady says. The thinking is not particularly helpful, but I have now resigned myself to death-by-dizziness and so sit down on the horse who then relaxes back into a trot. O-kay, then. (Yes, "sit on the horse" is great advice. Horse starts cantering so high and tight that I get thrown out of the damn saddle.)
Reverse. Other direction again. Establish nice non-fast trot. This takes some effort. Sitdown, putfeet, half-halt on outside rein, kiss, horse canters. Not quite so yee-haw, here. It's not slow but it's a lot better. Two circuits, the second one at a half-full-speed canter. Not too shabby. Way too fast for the ring, but hella better than what we'd been doing. Back to trot more easily and nicely now.
Reverse. Trot. Trot two whole circles. Sit, feet, half-halt, horse is cantering. Much better. Improvement, it is visible. We do one more rep each direction and horse seems to have decided that there is "canter" and that this is DIFFERENT from "OMG, MOAR SPEED NAO!!!" and that actually cantering along at medium-speed is sufficient for "canter". She slips back out of canter and into the trot again with minimal cueing.
I think perhaps practice doing canter departures is the way to improve canter departures. Who the hell would have thought of that? I mean, honestly, it makes like no sense at all.
(I'm an idiot.)
Saturday, I had breakfast at La's (typical) and coffee and some of the regrettably bad batch of gingersnap cookies. Went out to do horse things but wound up pulling orange round-bale strings out of the field. (For non-rural people among the readership, round-bale strings go around the outside of round bales of hay. They are plastic. They don't go away. As the livestock (horses in this case) eat the round bale, the strings get snarled up and trodden into the dirt and generally made into a mess. If the people putting the round bales in the field cannot be trained to take the strings off the round bales BEFORE putting the round bales in the field, the snarls of orange string accumulate and ruin the grass and look like hell. Prior experience suggests that the odds of the round-bale-placement team getting all OCD about their string management system anytime soon are less than good. Therefore, someone has to go pull up the strings out of the field on a semi-regular basis. This weekend, that someone was me.) I made a great big huge pile of round bale strings, many of them covered in what we shall euphemistically refer to as "mud". I considered my great big huge pile of round bale strings for a while and then I set my balls of plastic round bale string on fire, tidily and neatly, so that they all burned up in a contained space that never exceeded a square three feet on a side.
While I was burning the round bale strings, Julie's son Jared showed up (Julie from when I was in high school -- a factoid that will help some readers place her) and inquired if I had a permit to be burning trash out of doors. Buh? A what? I don't have a bloody permit. I don't need a permit. Besides, who is going to complain? I'm pretty much in the middle of the horse people's hundred acres. The smoke from my contained ickle plastic fire is not going to offend any neighbors because it will have dissipated by the time it gets to the neighbors.
Jared then proceeded to inform me that it was also a windy day (there was a light breeze) and that my fire would probably get out of hand and burn things that I did not want burned. This, while I'm burning plastic (Does not spark, does not pop, does not waft bits of char into the air. Melts and puddles, stays mostly where it is.) where the ground has been churned up enough that it's largely mud with some scattered bits of hay on it. There was very little accidental fire fuel in my immediate (20' radius) vicinity and that was one of the reasons I chose that location to burn in. Also, it poured rain on Thursday so what mud there was went *squish* underfoot and even far away things what my non-sparking, non-wafting fire might magically chance to alight were not bone-dry tinder. I mean honestly, I'm not stupid.
I am pleased to report that I didn't strangle Jared even after he didn't like my explanations of why I was not in danger of setting the farm alight. Instead of deferring to my superior judgment and extensive fire-building experience, Jared then informed me that he was a Boy Scout and that he was prepared and would still try to save me and put out the fire when I wound up setting the farm alight. Oh, for fuck's sake.
Saturday evening La, Cass, and I went to York to take my niece Gwen (she's in kindergarten) to see the World Famous Lipizzaner Stallions, a horse-related entertainment thing that is not endorsed by or affiliated with the fine folks over at the Spanish Riding School. We all had a lovely time. Gwen was well-behaved and enthralled. La and I had a slightly-different fabulous time, predicated on our rather more sophisticated and knowledgable enjoyment of horsemanship, and Cass had a fine time that fell somewhere between ours and Gwen's.
Sample differences in event enjoyment:
Gwen: All the white horses are so pretty!
Me: See the spur marks on his belly, third one in line?
La: She's got no business wearing spurs on him if she can't keep her legs quieter.
Gwen: He's got braids in his mane.
La: She's got him behind the vertical and his neck is locked at the bottom. He's only bending the top half or so.
Me: Yeah, he looks miserable. Look at her hands... *tsk tsk*
It's a good show for anyone who wants to take kids to see infotainment dressage. The horses were in good health, carried a decent amount of weight and were clean. Horses and riders were reasonably well-presented as far as turnout (saddles, bridles, outfits, etc).
Pickier viewers and persons with extensive riding experience and/or experience reading horse body language will be able to pick nits with enthusiasm. Some horses were either cranky, sour, or slightly sore -- temper and swishing tails on two-tempe changes, for example, clear fuss/fret slobber instead of white foamy slobber, and pinned ears and a *very* bunchy canter on occasion. Some horses were smoother and better at stuff than others, some riders were significantly better than others. As a result, the performance was uneven. It also substituted "easy" moves for harder ones (eg. leg yield instead of half pass) that give much the same bang-for-the-buck when they hit non-horsey eyeballs. Considering that it's infotainment dressage, however, this is to be expected. (If you want to watch real dressage, they do that yearly at Devon and every four years at the Olympics. Unless you're really, really into it, watching real dressage is like watching paint dry.)
I was thinking about the whole thing and the economic realities of the world are such that really good grand prix dressage horses are worth more as grand prix dressage horses than they are as anything else. If you have top-notch lipizzaner dressage stallions, they will make a living doing by dressage tests and breeding mares, not by going around the country and performing for mouth-breathing yahoos such as myself who cannot tell the half pass from the leg yield. (Except I can and now I'm bitching about it even though I totally scored free tickets to this thing and had a fine time with my niece.)
We got home late from the Lipizzaner thing and went straight to bed. Sunday I had breakfast at La's. I did some more algebra with Cass, who is chugging along in pre-algebra. We're at "two step equations" -- combine like terms (variables on one side of the equation, numbers on the other side), then divide by coefficient of x. A sample problem would be like "3x + 10 = 6 - 4x" or similar. Step 1: 7x = -4. Step 2: x = -4/7. Them's the two steps. She got it and then she talked me through her homework as she did it, writing down all the steps along the way.
Then I pulled strings out of the upper field, an activity that was very interesting to the Ungrateful Babies and notably to the Most Ungrateful Baby, who followed me around inspecting what I was doing with an excessive amount of interest. Damn horse. We Are Not Friends. Stop being all nice to me. (Liss says there's been an inquiry on the Most Ungrateful Baby, so maybe she'll sell and go down the road. I will be sorry to see her go but that's what she's for. Her job is to magically turn into pretty, tasty, delightful round bales... take one mouth away and feed the ones that remain.) I burned the upper field strings in the outdoor furnace because there were a lot fewer of them.
I helped La clean out the chicken coop hallway thing after that. It was a somewhat messy job but necessary. Liss wants a pig. (For eating. Pigs are for eating. Pigs, you have so that you can eat tastylicious pork products.) The pig pen is located next to the chicken coop in the same building. You have to be able to go down the hallway past the chickens to GET to the pig pen. That's why we were cleaning. The pig pen proper also needs to be cleaned out, but that's a job for another day. Today was cleaning out the hallway and putting up windows in the holes-for-windows. We got today's job done and done nicely.
And then finally, with what remained of my weekend, I got Nick out and we schooled canter departures. That was the plan. We spent the warmup with me in half-assed (but very non-wobbly) two-point and my horse trotting because My Legs Were Touching Her!!! ZOMG! It was not a happy place for either of us, but nobody died. She'll get over the Legs Touching Her thing eventually. We got warmed up (brain of horse online and reasonably functional) and went to work on canter departures. Recall the jumping clinic of two weeks ago wherein we didn't have any canter departures at all besides "trot 'er into it at ninety miles an hour"? I recall it, anyway. The memory is as a blade in my soul. So, we were schooling canter departures.
My knowledge of proper canter departures is limited to two years of dressage lessons and my experiences piloting Cole-the-thoroughbred in same. Pony lady says I need to have more faith and believe that Cole will canter, else he will not. (If it was up to me to make Tinkerbelle live, she'd be one dead pixie, for real. I'm not long on belief.) This, says pony lady, is why my canter departures with Cole are so fraught with fraughtness. I don't believe that he will canter for me and so he does not. To say that what we have here is a self-fulfilling prophecy sums it up nicely.
I do not have a problem of belief with Nicknick. She will canter with me. She may not stop cantering, particularly, but she will canter. Cantering is not a problem. So I trot her around a twenty meter circle to try to wear a track in the grass so that I can see where I'm going. I'm also trying to get my horse more or less bent in the direction we are going. And I sit. And I put my legs where they go (at 1 and 3, kind of sitting crooked, inside leg forward) and I *think* canter and nudge her very slightly and Nick zips forward lickety-lickety-lickety. We go round and round and round the twenty-meter circle. I'm high and tight and way out of the saddle. Horse is high and tight, nose damn near in the air, and accellerating. This is not good. I sit down. Horse slows down to trot after a longer-than-I'd-like interval. She's hot, won't walk, blowing hard, dancing like a dipshit ayrab. Fuck.
And again, other direction. I establish a trot. She goes to canter and I haven't cued shit. I rack her back and we trot again. More. And I sit and put my feet and think *canter* and we are again going round and round and round at ninety fucking miles an hour with me flying out of the seat and thinking "relax, sit into it, yadda yadda yadda" like my pony lady says. The thinking is not particularly helpful, but I have now resigned myself to death-by-dizziness and so sit down on the horse who then relaxes back into a trot. O-kay, then. (Yes, "sit on the horse" is great advice. Horse starts cantering so high and tight that I get thrown out of the damn saddle.)
Reverse. Other direction again. Establish nice non-fast trot. This takes some effort. Sitdown, putfeet, half-halt on outside rein, kiss, horse canters. Not quite so yee-haw, here. It's not slow but it's a lot better. Two circuits, the second one at a half-full-speed canter. Not too shabby. Way too fast for the ring, but hella better than what we'd been doing. Back to trot more easily and nicely now.
Reverse. Trot. Trot two whole circles. Sit, feet, half-halt, horse is cantering. Much better. Improvement, it is visible. We do one more rep each direction and horse seems to have decided that there is "canter" and that this is DIFFERENT from "OMG, MOAR SPEED NAO!!!" and that actually cantering along at medium-speed is sufficient for "canter". She slips back out of canter and into the trot again with minimal cueing.
I think perhaps practice doing canter departures is the way to improve canter departures. Who the hell would have thought of that? I mean, honestly, it makes like no sense at all.
(I'm an idiot.)
