The physio clinic called a little while ago to cancel my appointment for this evening, due to the physiotherapist being ill. I've been doing my exercises faithfully, and though they are wimpy little exercises they seem to be working (the physio thought my spine felt better.) They are also kicking my ass, and I think that's why I'm so sore this week. (The last couple of nights have been rotten, I wake up around two and painkillers and liniment do nothing to help.)

So it's probably okay to have a few extra days to acclimatize to doing the stuff I'm already doing before anything else gets added. With any luck I'll get to the barn tonight and at least try to longe and maybe do a few little carrot stretches.

And then of course I'm going out tonight, but I might as well, considering if I stayed home I wouldn't be able to get to sleep anyway. Also, I need to look for cushions for my kitchen chairs, since all my other seating options are really uncomfortable right now.

Might be time to bite the bullet and replace my older-than-me family-heirloom (;)) couch, too...

...my only defense is that I am pretty sick of it myself.

(Incidentally, on Friday I had a meeting with a very nice medical student who needed some help with an assignment, and because he is very nice he asked about my leg and pretty much confirmed my impression it's the sciatic nerve.)

However! I keep saying that I'm making progress, and I believe this to be true! Yesterday morning I was supposed to meet Lease Girl at the barn at about ten AM. I got to bed at three, which meant I was tired when I woke up BUT! I had only spent a few hours lying down, so my leg wasn't all seized up the way it gets when I try to have a proper night's sleep. (Honestly, if it isn't one thing, it's another.)

Last week I found that when I was at the barn I'd get really sore and tired very quickly, especially standing grooming Mitzi. Yesterday I was walking back and forth with Lease Girl and sitting on a stepstool while Lease Girl groomed, but I stood by the rail during the longeing session and I shoveled out my stall while waiting. And when I left the barn my leg didn't hurt much at all.

Mind you, it stiffened up again later in the evening, but even so I consider Sunday mostly a win.

Right now I am sore as hell from sitting too long but I should walk out of it. Bus seats are really uncomfortable, but barring a real setback I think I'll go to the barn and longe tonight. Lease Girl is supposed to start lessons tomorrow. I suggested that she and Coach Girl might consider incorporating longeing into the first couple, just because the horse is in pretty soft condition at the moment anyway. But (fingers crossed) I should be myself again in another week or so.

I hope.

...something I have said about Matt before.

And the something is this: Matt is very tall but when you stand next to him you don't really notice because his vibe is fairly unassuming. He doesn't strike me as a tall man until I see him standing next to someone else.

I've mentioned that Coach Girl and a friend of hers have acquired a young Hanoverian gelding as a training-resale project. Or at least he was supposed to be a training/resale project.

The gelding, Benson or Benny to his friends is 17.2 and growing. The other day I was standing next to him, scratching his shoulder and having a say, and it occurred to me: I do not relate to Benny as a tall horse. He has such an amiable and unassuming vibe that he strikes me as a normal-sized horse. Even though he is a full foot taller than Mitzi.

I need to get photos. Apparently, last week Coach Girl decided longeing is too hard for him, Benny being big and not muscular yet and a baby and circles being tough. So she started riding him. I understand his reaction was to turn his head to look at her in surprise, play with her toes, and then walk and trot amiably around the pen.

Training/resale project my foot! Coach Girl is as likely to part with her poodle, Roscoe!

For anyone who's been wondering about the black mare situation, the barn owner's husband let me know yesterday that she's going for training at the end of the month. She'll be with the same trainer who did Mitzi so much good a couple of years ago, and I sincerely hope the kid takes advantage of lessons as part of the package.

If she doesn't show drastic improvement, the mare is not welcome back, and even if the barn owner is inclined to get wobbly on that edict her husband (the nicest man in eastern Canada, I swear to God) will dig his toes in, because as far as he's concerned a horse you can't lead nicely in and out of the barn is a horse he doesn't want around. And this is a guy who is endlessly patient when Mitzi has one of her brainless "eek-a-wolf" moments.

So: Whew.

And also: yes, this is a leased horse. I have no idea what, if any, option they have to actually buy her.

( And a bit about Mitzi as spring approaches. )

There is a bad cold going around, and I am coming down with it. Consequently, I didn't sleep much last night. Bojo was having one of his pace-and-purr nights, which didn't help. I am really going to have to consider closing the bedroom door at this rate. And then of course I started thinking about the conference in May and very nearly freaked myself out with prognostications of disaster.

I am so getting a big bottle of NyQuil tonight!!!

However, I did get to the barn and the pen was muddy but not slippery, so I got Mitzi dressed in her boots and wraps and out we went to longe. After watching the "expert" video yesterday I have to say I was quite particular about safety, so that's one good thing about it. We were out with the young warmblood mare, who is getting used to wearing a saddle, and although both girls spooked a little under the lights, it was mostly "Hee! It's spring!" spooking.

When I turned Mitzi to work her on the right rein, though, the ground was starting to freeze and she hit a deeper patch of mud with a skin of ice over top of it, sort of stutter-stepped and kind of stumbled. She actually did step on herself a little bit and I think she gave herself a scare because she didn't want to move out for a second. I stopped her and checked to see whether she'd torn her polo wraps or her providential new bell boots (I bought those last weekend, thinking that if she was ever going to step on herself it would be when she first got back to work this spring.) I couldn't see any damage and she walked out all right. I pushed her a little for a jog and she seemed fine, but it was getting on for time to come in anyway so I didn't get after her too much. When I checked her legs back in the barn everything seemed fine, so I really think she just lost confidence after stumbling and wasn't having fun any more. Poor dear.

I was even home before nine, but that was only because I went straight to the barn after work and didn't stop for supper. Which I remedied when I got home.

And now I have to run out to a meeting in Dartmouth, so that's it for now.

Okay, I am not an expert in anything (with the possible exception of PubMed searching), nor do I play one on the Internet. But that gawdawful longeing video I just linked to reminds me forcefully of one thing I do right:

I am pretty nearly always safe around my horse, and I make darned sure I model that behaviour around the kids at the barn. For instance, a couple of weeks ago I was out in the pen with the black mare and the kid who rides her. At that point I had not become actively alarmed about them so I wasn't paying a whole lot of attention to what they were doing, but I think they were having some trouble longeing.

And given that I made the fuss over the pair, it relieves my mind somewhat to remember that as I longed Mitzi she was wearing wraps and boots, and I was wearing sturdy barn boots and gloves (some would recommend a helmet for longeing, but that's a habit I have never gotten into.) Despite having been off for some weeks Mitzi stayed on her circle and responded to voice commands, including lope-walk transitions, and I kept the extra line coiled neatly and safely in the hand opposite to the rein she was on.

I only say this because we all know "do as I say, not as I do" is no teaching strategy. In that instance, anyway, I was actually demonstrating safe and effective longeing technique with a horse who knows how to longe because I taught her to. And yes, any of the kids who happened to be watching would have seen safety rules reinforced.

Now that I'm thinking like this I'll probably be all paranoid, but it's definitely worth keeping in mind that, as one of the card-carrying adults these kids see a lot of, I need to demonstrate how they should be handling their horses so as to keep everyone in one piece. (One piece each, I mean.)

The thing about being a role model is, you don't get to be one or not because you say so. And you don't always know when you're being one. So I guess the thing to do is try your best to behave in a way you wouldn't mind seeing someone else's kid behave, in front of their mother. At least regarding your interactions with large hoofed mammals.

I wasn't talking to the barn owner personally but I got the impression from her email that I wasn't the only person who's contacted her about the black mare. Who incidentally kicked the BO one day last winter when she was being turned out, so her manners have been bad for a while. It's just the BO figured when she started getting worked regularly they'd improve.

Anyway, when I got there a couple of the other boarders were on hand getting their horses out of their winter woolies. One of the new boarders is a black Morgan gelding, a pretty tall guy at maybe 15.2 (not, I might add, measured by the Eensy-Weensy Spider Method) who was obviously living outdoors without a blanket on before his current owners got him. I'm pretty sure he wasn't suffering any, because he arrived at our barn with an impressive winter haircoat. I have been keeping such strange and sporadic hours lately that I hadn't seen his owners since he arrived, but I did notice he looked cleaner so I knew they were working on him.

Last night I walked into the barn and there was Mr. Morgan, looking very pleased with himself, on the crossties while one of his minions owners worked him over with a shedding blade. There was a Labrador retriever's worth of black hair on the floor around his feet and more coming off by the handful. It was like that old joke about how you carve a statue of a pony: "You take a block of marble and you knock off all the parts that don't look like a pony." In this case, it looked like she was just about done and was fine-tuning.

It certainly gave me perspective on Mitzi's shedding situation.

He does have a beautiful full tail, I must say.

So I put Mitzi on the crossties behind him and started scrubbing on her. The Morgan lady and I had to keep respectively stepping our horses forward and backward--Mitzi was flirting shamelessly with the Morgan and he seemed to think she was pretty cute, herself. She was pretty cuddly in general really, stood on the crossties with her head down all relaxed and did her happy-camel face when I scratched her favourite spots. I got enough hair off her to stuff a pillow, which I guess we can put on the love seat you could stuff with the hair that came off the Morgan.

The young warmblood mare on the last set of crossties was shedding as well, but not as obviously as my white miss and not as impressively as Mr. Morgan.

I tell you what, this is a time of year when you can see the results of your grooming! (Except of course, that the second you scratch them you're all over hair again!)

I just heard back from the barn owner. She's going to talk to the black mare's people about the situation. Fingers crossed.

... because otherwise I will be one of those barn people.

( All the worrisome details behind the cut. )

I rarely indulge in catastrophic thinking, but it's hard to see how there can be another outcome if something doesn't change.

I just found a link to these tips for critiquing a story, and perhaps I should keep them in mind while critiquing this kid's horsemanship. Although I'm afraid that if I am too gentle and reasonable, I will be too easy to ignore. Given that this is what she's been doing all along. I mean, it's good, I guess, that she's not scared or intimidated, but that appears to be because she doesn't have the sense to realize there is anything wrong.

And there is a difference between trying to help a writer improve and trying to get through to a fourteen-year-old kid before she hurts herself or someone else. Damn.

We had two new horses arrive over the weekend, and one more coming this week. One is a big black Morgan gelding called Stryder (so of course I asked if it was a Lord Of the Rings name--and I'm not even that big a nerd!) Stryder yelled the place down, apparently.

Which may have scared Scout ("Scout's Honour"), a big bay Hackney who was so quiet in his stall I am pretty sure he was afraid someone was going to eat him. Mitzi was like that when she arrived, and she seems to be making friends with him since he's in the stall next door.

Tia, a young thoroughbred mare, is arriving this week.

I'll get pictures as soon as I can!

Lease Girl and one of the other kids went and built a snowman before they left the barn, so the job got done. I ended up not even going out for dinner after all--my friend's street, which I drove down on my way home from the library, was really slick and there are no sidewalks leading up to her building... so I just didn't feel like either walking or driving.

I stayed home and read. More on that later.

And thanks to the folks who are sympathizing with me over the weather... or possibly gloating. But I spent four years in Texas and the very idea of hot sunny weather in February actually makes me feel sort of rashy all over. Believe me, it was bad for my disposition. I'll take the snow!

Anyway, I thought that was a particularly fab snowman!

Dang! I just remembered, I meant to build a snowman in the ring before I left the barn!

Probably just as well I didn't stick around long enough to do it--it's coming down here in Clayton Park, but it was snowing even harder in Sackville when I left.

I had Mitzi out in the pen earlier but it turned out that, while the snow was nice and sticky for me to stand on, underneath was still icy so she kept slipping and sliding while walking on the longe. So I turned her loose for a roll and we came back inside.

Now I'm going to pick up my holds (two Grateful Dead books and A LIBERTINES CD, dachelle!) and go home. I was going to go to work for a while tonight and order some more books, but it's not worth going out in this. I'm going to a friend's place for dinner, anyway, so no point rushing. And the friend is close enough to walk.

I should note that I went out to the barn for a little while last night and the barn owner's husband (who is the barn owner too, but I like to keep track of them) was around. I asked him why Mitzi was turned out with her halter on over the weekend. It would be very hard for her to get into trouble out there so I wasn't complaining, I was just concerned that she was being silly or obnoxious when it came time to bring her in. If she's misbehaving I'd like to know about it.

No, he just finds it easier to put the halter on, which she's good about, to have something to hang onto when he goes to put the mask on, which he's not as used to. (On Saturday the mask turned up missing, but she was wearing the replacement on Sunday.)

So: no problems. Whew!

I had another lesson yesterday--first time I've ridden since the whole back spasm situation. (Ironically, I probably had the spasms partly because I was all stressed out about whether the nursing showcase last Thursday would be a crushing failure. And it wasn't. Perhaps I can learn from this!) I've longed Mitzi since, but just in case I made darned sure I was out in plenty of time to give her a good long workout before I tried to make her really concentrate.

There was a load of hay coming in as well, which led to a lot of activity and noise down at one end of the ring. We went out a side door we don't normally use and Mitzi was sensible about the whole thing.

I ended up asking Coach Girl if we could go for half an hour instead of the full hour (I paid her for a full hour, though) just because I'd already longed for quite a while and I figured it would be possible to overdo it for both of us.

Short version: Mitzi was good, bless her. We worked on transitions to get her to pay attention and I'll carry on with those on my own. (Later, if we get serious about the western thing, we'll have to work on getting her to travel steadily carrying herself on very light contact. However, baby steps.) When I'm getting Mitzi to go past a scene of confusion I generally do it by initially circling at what she considers a safe distance and Coach Girl was fine with that. (I do like it when the coach believes that you know your own horse.) We got some nice transitions and Mitzi ended the session calm and quite relaxed. (Although she did spook a little on the way back into the barn through the side door, when someone came out of the chemical toilet. Of course, it startled me too.)

At the end of the lesson, though, I spoke to Coach Girl about the advisability of asking Lease Girl, who used to ride Old Bay Gelding before he moved west and now has one ride a week on TeePee, if she'd like to take a lesson a week on Mitzi. (I considered the idea a while back but thought Lease Girl was getting her own horse. Now it looks like that's on hold for the foreseeable future.) Coach Girl's response was to clap her hands and jump up and down. I think she likes the idea. ;) Lease Girl is a doll, sensible and calm and affectionate, and now Coach Girl knows Mitzi and can offer support. If Lease Girl is into the idea we can longe together a couple of times before she takes her first lesson, just so she gets to know Mitzi a little. And when Mitzi is in work she's actually less silly than TeePee, and Lease Girl gets along fine with him.

If there's an issue with the cost of the second lesson I may offer to subsidize, since she'd be doing me and my horse a favour. We'll see about further rides before the ground freezes once we see how they get along.

Anyway, I should have done this before, probably, but I wanted Coach Girl to get to know Mitzi and offer an opinion. So now we'll see how it goes.

And of course if this goes ahead it means there will be pictures of Mitzi all duded up in English tack. I'm sure we can find her a pink saddle cloth somewhere...

The benefit went really well Saturday night--the pub it was held was totally packed and the auction was lively. I don't know how much money they raised for our barn friend, but the organizers looked surprised and delighted at how well everything went. You have to think it lifted her spirits some just seeing how many people were there rooting for her.

I went with a specific contribution in mind and figured I'd either buy something or just hand it over or a combination of the two. I ended up going with the combination--someone contributed a basket of brushes and a halter and saddle pad, so I bid on that and got it. The saddle pad is English--gave it to the barn owner, whose horse is beginning training English--and a blue halter--big enough for Mitzi to wear as a harness, so I gave it to Cruise, her enormous neighbour. I kept the brushes and was delighted to find this Oster curry with handle, which I'd been looking for anyway. I have a couple of the massager-type curries but I have long since lost the one with the good hand grips that I had with my first horse, and the ones I've had since are hard to keep hold of.

I gave Mitzi a good going-over with it last night. She hasn't been so clean in weeks!

Mitzi and I went out with Soloman last night and longed and rode. I longed her Saturday, she was in standing heat and was a complete ditz--it took forty-five minutes before she went along without bracing herself and trying to run off. She's not witchy when she's in heat but she does get hormonal. Last night I longed her for half an hour, partly because Soloman was also longeing for that long and since he sometimes spooks and drags his owner around a little I figured we might as well be on the ground for the excitement. She spooked once and set him off, but I noticed he spooked four or five times, once when I was on her, and she didn't react to him at all. Good girl.

With that said, I didn't bother cantering, because, again, I didn't quite trust Soloman's mood and wanted to stay well out of his way. Se we did our thing and called it a night.

As weekends go, it was a pretty good one.

Okay. My back is lots better but I'm still going to take home my spare bottle of liniment (don't worry, there's one still there if Mitzi needs it) and keep treating myself. Have I mentioned that a few weeks ago there was a big sale at Linens'N'Things and I got a great deal on really, really high-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets? I only mention this because it seems like liniment washes out of them surprisingly well.

If Mitzi's not in the field I'll longe her today. I also think I'll stop at Staples and look for another daytimer for next January. If you do't move fast the ones I like get all sold out. I even have little fish stickers todecorate it with. (I repeat: I used to teach grade three.)

Also, last week was the final week of September and I ended up doing quite a lot of teaching in between one-on-ones with students and ended up working late every night because I had other stuff to do I couldn't get at during the day. I ended the week tired and sick of the sound of my own voice.

However, tonight I am going out.

To a fundraiser for a barn friend who has cancer.

She's twenty-three.

And that, my friends, puts my "long week" and sore back squarely into perspective now, doesn't it?

(I understand she has an eminently treatable form of cancer so I am optimistic she'll be like my aunt who had the same illness twenty-odd years ago and is now the picture of health. But it still sucks.)

...but perhaps one of my old friends from Metepenagiag would like to come do a sweetgrass ceremony at the barn. I think that cleanses a place of bad spirits.

This time it's not a horse who's sick, it's an owner. I knew she had health issues, I didn't realize how very serious they were. Dammit.

Just how many events can a person my age stuff into a single Saturday? The barn owners planned a barbecue for last Saturday, but moved it to this Saturday because of the monsoon conditions last week. That's at 3:00.

Faded Blue is playing The Seahorse that night at probably 11:00. I've been wanting to see them at a non-BOTB event in the hopes of finally finding out what they really sound like.

And now it turns out there is some sort of benefit show happening on the Bedford Waterfront at 7:00-ish, featuring Gloryhound & the Skyhawks. It's not that I haven't seen them recently, but latsyrk and my brother and those folks haven't, and maybe they'll be interested in going to an early show and then continuing to whatever they have on the go for that evening.

Anyway. We'll see what happens. For me, this would count as a busy day!

So it turns out Mitzi is not always a model of patience and good manners with the kids who help out around the barn. Late last week one of them was opening the gate (well, lowering the poles that serve as a gate) to let her out of her paddock and into the common area so she could get back into the barn for supper. It seems my girl tried to jump over the poles before they were properly dropped, and she's got scuffs on one knee and one fetlock as her reward. I started putting Zincofax on them but have switched to Bag Balm, since I was using that on her udder (she's always had sort of a dirty udder and the Bag Balm really seems to help) and it seems to be working well. Except, of course, it's yellow goo, so when I returned to the barn the day after the first application I thought for a second she was oozing infection.

I apologize to anyone who may read this entry at lunch time. In fact, the fetlock scrape is healing nicely, and the knee scrape looks clean and not infected at all.

We had so much damp weather over the past couple of weeks that several of the horses, Mitzi included, had scabs on their heels that may have been mud fever. I tried the Bag Balm on them and it seems to be working. And here I thought it was just a beauty aid for Shania Twain!

(Seriously--I don't believe that Bag Balm honestly is the secret to her complexion, but I cannot hate a woman who claims it is!)

Anyway, I hope she's learned to wait for the gate to be open all the way before trying to get through.

In other news, it seems the kids also find her hard to catch--one of them tried to get hold of her to put on her fly mask, which had been forgotten. I would have assumed she'd walk right up to them. I mean, she comes to me and I am the one who drags her away from her friends and makes her work! I may suggest a little test case, so I can see if they're trying to follow her or corner her. Because she'd definitely evade you forever if you were following her around, whereas she's pretty good-natured about letting me head her off and then catch her.