(no subject)
May. 21st, 2013 06:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickMany things to talk about today. Cake and frosting. Best time to visit the ER. Boring first real ride on a horse (as it has mostly sort of stopped with the endless rain).
Cake and frosting. Research is proceeding on the Ur-yellow-cake with Ur-chocolate frosting project. I think I have a winner on the cake front. As suggested when last we met regarding cake, the Cooks Illustrated folks pulled through with a Fluffy Yellow Layer Cake that is delightful. It rocks. I used the recipe found here in case you would like to play along at home. The frosting selected for this go-round was a boiled flour frosting which did surprisingly well. The recipe for that is here and it is good, but not quite what I have in mind as the Ur-frosting. Too fluffy. Sweetness about right, chocolate-y-ness was spot-on, but it was too fluffy. More research on those lines is needed. Maybe I did it wrong, maybe I need more of a buttercream thing. I'll get back to that again sometime, right now I am tired of cakes and their frostings.
The best time to visit the ER is when no other patients are there. This is most easily achieved in a small rural ER on a quiet Sunday morning. I know this because Brother the Younger had some cub scouts (and their families) out for a camping extravaganza near my house this past weekend. The cub scouts (and their families) reside (normally) in the greater York metropolitan area and, as such, are used to the normal safeguards of playground equipment in a world where torts are a way of life.
In particular, they are used to thick mulch on the ground and castrated merry-go-rounds that don't go fast enough to make anyone dizzy. Lame. I do not often discuss it, but we have a merry-go-round, an old one. It is at least as old as I am and we have had it for as long as I can remember. It suspends eight benches from poles and it goes really fast without undue effort, fast enough to make small kids throw up and big kids dizzy. It is blissfully devoid of thick mulch underneath it (because that, you see, would impede the running necessary to get the thing up to what I think of as the "fun" speeds). The merry-go-round is a wonderful thing indeed, being both quite enjoyable AND delightfully laced with the potential for bodily harm. It looks roughly like this:
Ours has a better paint job and is a slightly different model, but the general idea is the same. It is still the Best Merry-Go-Round Ever.
If you don't have any experience with things that you could get hurt on, you might approach the Best Merry-Go-Round Ever with a lack of proper respect for its capabilities, speed, and sharp edges. You might also approach the BMGRE with a complete lack of understanding of your OWN capabilities, having never encountered anything that might (in some way) exceed your readiness to deal with it on a physical level. In a world where everything is safe and easily mastered (like modern tort-safe playgrounds), young people lack suitable opportunities to try and fail and learn about themselves and their world. (I get that sometimes this involves trips to the ER. Mostly, children heal quickly.)
So, when you assemble a group of suburbanite cub scouts in the wilderness (such as it is) and provide them with unsupervised and unlimited access to the BMGRE, knowing full well that they hail from a world where things have been made completely free of risk, it is completely reasonable to expect an ER visit to ensue. One did. A scout managed to unexpectedly part ways with the BMGRE and lacerate his leg immediately above the knee, making it something of an unsightly mess in need of some stitches.
I get that suburban peoples do not have as many opportunities for ER visits as rural people with more of a free-range approach to child-rearing, but even so they were quite worried. In the words of my people, it was a long way from the heart and the kid was upright, able to answer questions, able to walk a quarter of a mile to summon an adult -- this is not a life threatening injury, it's a flesh wound. No big deal.
Anyway, in light of very worried parents in an unfamiliar area, I rode along to the hospital as a native guide to ensure that they got there on the first try. We got to the ER in fine time and were ushered immediately into a treatment room. Two nurses were on hand, one to go over paperwork with the mom, the other to get started on cleaning up the wound. A doctor was there before the paperwork (1 page admission form) was filled out. We were done, all stitched up and bandaged and equipped with antibiotics, walking out the door, in under thirty minutes. (The parents were expecting hours of waiting and an ER cluttered with homeless people. Our ER is not really like that, though mostly it's slightly busier that it was last Sunday morning.)
And boring first rides on horses. Some folks were over at the horse people's the other day looking at young stud colts. They bought one (yay) and took it away (yay) and were asking some questions about breaking horses. To my way of thinking (and I am not an expert, being approximately six horses into my horse breaking career), breaking horses should be a complete snooze-fest. It should be boring. It should bore everyone, including the horse. There should not be drama.
In breaking a horse, you start on the ground. You're on the ground and the horse is on the ground and it's more difficult for serious injuries to happen with this setup. It's not impossible, but it's more difficult. On the ground, there is more room for all parties to remain calm, to recover calm, to take a deep breath and think things through. If there needs to be a blow-up (you're doing it wrong), you have a twelve-foot lead rope to put space between you and the horse during that event.
On the ground, your horse should heed you in-hand, should lead where you lead, go where you go, stop when you stop, all like that. He should stay *with* you while the lead rope droops. You should not have to tug at him to get him started OR stopped. He should watch you and stop when you stop and pay attention to you. If you do not have this level of attention from the horse, you are really not ready to proceed.
If your leading skills are good, you can move him around and direct him and pretty much do whatever with him on the ground, then you introduce the saddle and bridle. You bring them out, you let the horse inspect them, you put them on the horse and take them off the horse. You make sure he's OK with the new tack being put on and taken off. The horse should NOT be tied while you do this. He should stand, of his own accord, on a slack lead (I drape the tail of it over my shoulder) while you put the saddle on and off of him. Repeatedly. His feet should NOT move when you bridle and unbridle him. If you are backing the horse up twenty feet every time you go to put a bridle on him, you're doing it wrong. My green horses (Punch and Fiddler) both bridle easily and peacefully -- it took about twenty minutes to teach them the drill, after which things were awesome. (The whole thing will work better if you are patient enough to wait for the horse to be ready. You trying to hurry him along is not going to make him ready faster. Quite the opposite.)
Once you're good on the ground, you can proceed to what I refer to as the "on the bucket" stage. When you're on the bucket, your horse is standing there on a slack lead (rope tail over your shoulder) while you stand on the bucket (so that you are tall enough to lean over the horse's back and pet the other side of him. If your horse can't stand still on his own at this step, he's not really ready to go forward. You stand on the bucket and lean over him and pet him. You kind of lean on him. You lay on your belly across his back and pet his hip and shoulder and down to his knees and stuff. Pet the ears and neck. Pet the butt. Talk to him. He should stand there (being bored) through all of this. (There may be initial wobbling around but he should not be sudden or excessive. He should get his balance and hold still.) Once he can hold still and be relaxed with this step, you are ready to go onward. It is not helpful to cheat and "hold" him still or to have him tied. That is not what you need. You need him to hold HIMSELF still for you.
At this point, I like to ensure that I will have the rudiments of steering when I am aboard. So, I stand beside the horse and hold the reins in proper position (with an arm over her back to simulate the other side rein) and ask for turns each direction. I pick up the rein and take the slack out of it and sit there and wait until the head turns. Good horse. Do the other side. Good horse. Okay, now what do you do if I take the slack out of both reins at once? You back up. Good horse. I go to the other side of the horse and repeat this from that side. Turn left. Turn right. Back up. Good. So, there is steering. (I repeat this a couple of times on different days to make sure it works.) Some folks do this with ground driving. I'm not a ground driver, but if that works for you, fine.
More later, I have to go to work.
Cake and frosting. Research is proceeding on the Ur-yellow-cake with Ur-chocolate frosting project. I think I have a winner on the cake front. As suggested when last we met regarding cake, the Cooks Illustrated folks pulled through with a Fluffy Yellow Layer Cake that is delightful. It rocks. I used the recipe found here in case you would like to play along at home. The frosting selected for this go-round was a boiled flour frosting which did surprisingly well. The recipe for that is here and it is good, but not quite what I have in mind as the Ur-frosting. Too fluffy. Sweetness about right, chocolate-y-ness was spot-on, but it was too fluffy. More research on those lines is needed. Maybe I did it wrong, maybe I need more of a buttercream thing. I'll get back to that again sometime, right now I am tired of cakes and their frostings.
The best time to visit the ER is when no other patients are there. This is most easily achieved in a small rural ER on a quiet Sunday morning. I know this because Brother the Younger had some cub scouts (and their families) out for a camping extravaganza near my house this past weekend. The cub scouts (and their families) reside (normally) in the greater York metropolitan area and, as such, are used to the normal safeguards of playground equipment in a world where torts are a way of life.
In particular, they are used to thick mulch on the ground and castrated merry-go-rounds that don't go fast enough to make anyone dizzy. Lame. I do not often discuss it, but we have a merry-go-round, an old one. It is at least as old as I am and we have had it for as long as I can remember. It suspends eight benches from poles and it goes really fast without undue effort, fast enough to make small kids throw up and big kids dizzy. It is blissfully devoid of thick mulch underneath it (because that, you see, would impede the running necessary to get the thing up to what I think of as the "fun" speeds). The merry-go-round is a wonderful thing indeed, being both quite enjoyable AND delightfully laced with the potential for bodily harm. It looks roughly like this:
Ours has a better paint job and is a slightly different model, but the general idea is the same. It is still the Best Merry-Go-Round Ever.
If you don't have any experience with things that you could get hurt on, you might approach the Best Merry-Go-Round Ever with a lack of proper respect for its capabilities, speed, and sharp edges. You might also approach the BMGRE with a complete lack of understanding of your OWN capabilities, having never encountered anything that might (in some way) exceed your readiness to deal with it on a physical level. In a world where everything is safe and easily mastered (like modern tort-safe playgrounds), young people lack suitable opportunities to try and fail and learn about themselves and their world. (I get that sometimes this involves trips to the ER. Mostly, children heal quickly.)
So, when you assemble a group of suburbanite cub scouts in the wilderness (such as it is) and provide them with unsupervised and unlimited access to the BMGRE, knowing full well that they hail from a world where things have been made completely free of risk, it is completely reasonable to expect an ER visit to ensue. One did. A scout managed to unexpectedly part ways with the BMGRE and lacerate his leg immediately above the knee, making it something of an unsightly mess in need of some stitches.
I get that suburban peoples do not have as many opportunities for ER visits as rural people with more of a free-range approach to child-rearing, but even so they were quite worried. In the words of my people, it was a long way from the heart and the kid was upright, able to answer questions, able to walk a quarter of a mile to summon an adult -- this is not a life threatening injury, it's a flesh wound. No big deal.
Anyway, in light of very worried parents in an unfamiliar area, I rode along to the hospital as a native guide to ensure that they got there on the first try. We got to the ER in fine time and were ushered immediately into a treatment room. Two nurses were on hand, one to go over paperwork with the mom, the other to get started on cleaning up the wound. A doctor was there before the paperwork (1 page admission form) was filled out. We were done, all stitched up and bandaged and equipped with antibiotics, walking out the door, in under thirty minutes. (The parents were expecting hours of waiting and an ER cluttered with homeless people. Our ER is not really like that, though mostly it's slightly busier that it was last Sunday morning.)
And boring first rides on horses. Some folks were over at the horse people's the other day looking at young stud colts. They bought one (yay) and took it away (yay) and were asking some questions about breaking horses. To my way of thinking (and I am not an expert, being approximately six horses into my horse breaking career), breaking horses should be a complete snooze-fest. It should be boring. It should bore everyone, including the horse. There should not be drama.
In breaking a horse, you start on the ground. You're on the ground and the horse is on the ground and it's more difficult for serious injuries to happen with this setup. It's not impossible, but it's more difficult. On the ground, there is more room for all parties to remain calm, to recover calm, to take a deep breath and think things through. If there needs to be a blow-up (you're doing it wrong), you have a twelve-foot lead rope to put space between you and the horse during that event.
On the ground, your horse should heed you in-hand, should lead where you lead, go where you go, stop when you stop, all like that. He should stay *with* you while the lead rope droops. You should not have to tug at him to get him started OR stopped. He should watch you and stop when you stop and pay attention to you. If you do not have this level of attention from the horse, you are really not ready to proceed.
If your leading skills are good, you can move him around and direct him and pretty much do whatever with him on the ground, then you introduce the saddle and bridle. You bring them out, you let the horse inspect them, you put them on the horse and take them off the horse. You make sure he's OK with the new tack being put on and taken off. The horse should NOT be tied while you do this. He should stand, of his own accord, on a slack lead (I drape the tail of it over my shoulder) while you put the saddle on and off of him. Repeatedly. His feet should NOT move when you bridle and unbridle him. If you are backing the horse up twenty feet every time you go to put a bridle on him, you're doing it wrong. My green horses (Punch and Fiddler) both bridle easily and peacefully -- it took about twenty minutes to teach them the drill, after which things were awesome. (The whole thing will work better if you are patient enough to wait for the horse to be ready. You trying to hurry him along is not going to make him ready faster. Quite the opposite.)
Once you're good on the ground, you can proceed to what I refer to as the "on the bucket" stage. When you're on the bucket, your horse is standing there on a slack lead (rope tail over your shoulder) while you stand on the bucket (so that you are tall enough to lean over the horse's back and pet the other side of him. If your horse can't stand still on his own at this step, he's not really ready to go forward. You stand on the bucket and lean over him and pet him. You kind of lean on him. You lay on your belly across his back and pet his hip and shoulder and down to his knees and stuff. Pet the ears and neck. Pet the butt. Talk to him. He should stand there (being bored) through all of this. (There may be initial wobbling around but he should not be sudden or excessive. He should get his balance and hold still.) Once he can hold still and be relaxed with this step, you are ready to go onward. It is not helpful to cheat and "hold" him still or to have him tied. That is not what you need. You need him to hold HIMSELF still for you.
At this point, I like to ensure that I will have the rudiments of steering when I am aboard. So, I stand beside the horse and hold the reins in proper position (with an arm over her back to simulate the other side rein) and ask for turns each direction. I pick up the rein and take the slack out of it and sit there and wait until the head turns. Good horse. Do the other side. Good horse. Okay, now what do you do if I take the slack out of both reins at once? You back up. Good horse. I go to the other side of the horse and repeat this from that side. Turn left. Turn right. Back up. Good. So, there is steering. (I repeat this a couple of times on different days to make sure it works.) Some folks do this with ground driving. I'm not a ground driver, but if that works for you, fine.
More later, I have to go to work.
