Small thoughts on small things

As I was filling up the baggies of mixed supplements that Blue enjoys twice a day, it suddenly occurred to me: We must have really shiny mice. And they probably have wonderfully limber joints well into old age.

Also have a theory for you: The smaller the animal, the longer the attention span. A fly will buzz around my head all day unless I kill it, but my horse wanders off as soon as the cookies are gone.

Bluedini

One thing about boarding at a commercial stable—there are a lot more people around to give you guff about your horse's little foibles.

No, actually my new stablemates are too nice for that. But that doesn't mean they haven't noticed that Blue is a terrible influence.

To cause minimal waves in the local herd, Bob turned Blue out with a sweet old thing named Sunny. Sunny is 18 years old, and he is the first horse his young rider has ever owned. Sunny is absolutely the stereotypical "babysitter" senior horse; there isn't a mean bone in his body.

Blue, being a clever mustang, immediately began exploiting the trust everyone had in his pushover of a pasture buddy.

And that is how it was that I arrived out at the stable on Sunday to find my horse tucked into his stall in the middle of the afternoon. It turns out that Blue and Sunny were enjoying being out in the stableyard paddock (basically the awkward space between the the main barn and the arena). This paddock is used for gentle souls like Sunny, who would never dream of disrespecting a fence. One narrow, obscure offshoot between two outbuildings is blocked off with a single band of electric tape 18 inches off the ground. The tape isn't hot because it has never needed to be... until now.

Somebody figured out that he could step—or maybe hop?—over this piece of tape. And then, apparently, somebody else followed him out to do a little sightseeing. And that's how two horses ended up hiding among the Christmas trees on the back 40 and taking an hour to catch. They led Bob, and Sunny's young owner, and Sunny's young owner's beleaguered mom on a merry chase all over the property. The fugitives had just been caught when I arrived, in fact.

Embarrassing.

But Monday night I went out there feeling confident that the problem would be solved. Surely Bob had found a solution for the escape artist.

Imagine my surprise (and secret glee) when I pulled into the parking lot Monday night and my horse came trotting right up to the truck, followed by Sunny... and also by Echo, and Bob's two little sorrel arabs. As soon as Bob came out of the barn to investigate the commotion, Blue trotted off toward the blackberry bushes, and the whole herd followed him like a bunch of thousand-pound lemmings.

My horse is a trendsetter. Or something.

There really is a part of me that can't wait to see what the old trickster comes up with next. And another part of me that needs to figure out how to contain him in a ride camp this summer. It might finally be time to invest in solid corral panels. It's either that or leave the poor thing tied for two days. Clearly, he doesn't take the hint where electric tape is concerned.

Bob says that Blue has a wanderer's spirit. I can't think of a better personality trait for an endurance horse!

As the crow flies...

Fun fact: The ridecamp for Foothills of the Cascades is less than 8 miles from where I'm boarding. But if you drive it, it is roughly 1 hour away.

Can I ride it faster than I can drive it? Maybe we'll try it sometime and see!

It gets a little steep in the middle part.

Wet Side Story

Western Oregon resembles eastern Washington very, very, VERY little. You cross those mountains (or thunder down that gorge), and basically you’re in a different country. A very rainy country.

And sometimes snowy! Yay.

The West Side (AKA, the Wet Side) is home to people who have adapted perfectly to their environment. Store racks are laden with flannel shirts, cardigans and varying weights of raincoats because, dammit, sensible layering is the only way to win the battle with the weather. For example, on Sunday, we had rain. But we also had a period of warm sun. Then high winds. Then hail. Then rain. Then clear skies and plummeting temperatures. Either you layer, or you invent a self-heating shirt (I’m picturing the girl-on-fire costume in The Hunger Games).

Since I have arrived, I bought three more cardigans and a very spendy pair of muck boots. I would estimate that I wore muck boots in Walla Walla a total of twice a year. Now I wear them Every. Single. Day. I still need a “nice” raincoat for work. (For my birthday, before I left WW, Shana and Heather bought me a light raincoat for riding, but it stays too dirty for public wear… what with all the mud.)

This is the wet side. These people invented grunge. (Can you blame them?) They invented espresso stands and Starbucks because you need regular infusions of hot liquid to combat the cold, ever-gushing liquid from above. Their school playgrounds are covered—a phenomenon that my wet-sider husband finds perfectly normal, but which baffles me.What is the point of going outside to play if there's a roof over your head?

Horsekeeping in a perpetual swamp is a completely new experience for me.

I didn't take any pictures of the first place I boarded. But I kid you not, the mud was over my ankles in all the turnouts. It was slick and squishy and horrible. This new barn has a lot more gravel. It's still muddy but at least you don't sink in.

In Nebraska, we had plenty of precipitation (usually), but the sun and wind tended to burn the puddles off pretty quickly. The horses had free access to an old barn, but they hardly ever went in there when it was wet. They were a lot more likely to go inside on hot days to get into the shade and away from the flies. I didn’t blanket in winter because the horses could go inside if they were cold. And they were wooly. That was fine because I wasn’t interested in riding when it was 20 below outside.

When I moved to Washington, I was introduced to the idea of blanketing in winter for a couple reasons. For one thing, there wasn’t any shelter at Heather’s. Not even trees. For another, the winter weather was milder, so we were riding year-round. The blanket kept the worst of the winter wool away, so you could saddle up and ride without overheating the horse.

Now, on the wet side of Oregon, I still have Blue’s heavy turnout blanket for everyday. But I’ve been informed that I may want to buy a summer-weight rainproof turnout sheet soon because it is getting too warm and wet for a full blanket. 

With Blue’s history of skin problems, this is sure to be an uphill battle.

When in doubt, the answer is C. If you are a fan of the PNER Facebook page, you may have seen my post:

I think I already know the answer, but would you pick A or B?

Boarding option A:
• Full care $200/mo.
• 30-35 mins from home.
• Roughly 3 miles gravel trail on the property, multiple water crossings and lots of elevation in that space.
• Almost unlimited logging roads rideable from property.
• VERY muddy paddocks with hodgepodge fencing.
• 60 ft indoor round pen, no arena
• Owner is kind of old school on horse care. For instance, several of his horses have rain rot, which he says is OK because it always clears up in the summer. No frills here. :)

Boarding option B:
• Full care $375/mo.
• 20-25 mins from home.
• 1 mile of gravel trail on the property, water crossing, but property is pancake flat.
• 5 miles of dirt field roads rideable from property, also flat.
• VERY modern, well-run facility. Everything is clean, automatic, and top of the line.
• Two all-season outdoor arenas, one large indoor arena.
• Owner is very up to date and seems conscientious about supplementation and safety.

My initial boarding place in greater Salem—the place I "landed" when we moved—proved to be inappropriate for an endurance rider. I mean, I guess some intrepid person would find a way to make it work. But I was having a hard time doing anything but a few piddly minutes in a small, crowded arena. And then when I found that an important section of the "trail" I had been promised was paved and slick as snot from moss... well, there's only so much a girl can take.


So I decided to strike out for greener pastures, so to speak. I visited option A and option B a couple days apart. There were things I liked about both of them, but I wasn't sure. Of course, my PNER facebook friends identified my problems with both of them right away on and helped me see that I needed an option C.


And, indeed, that's where I ended up.


Option C is so great. It makes horses faster:

Whoosh!

 It makes horses taller:

Meet Blue's new friend, Chance. When I stand next to him, I can't see over his back. His muzzle is literally as big as my head.

 It improves the weather:

Trails as viewed from the bobcat.

It's scenic:

More photos are here.


The inside of the barn is bright and open:

This is just the indoor exercise pen. There's a huge arena off to the right.

Plus there are trails. Five miles of lovely, lightly graveled trails:

Let's just hope the honeymoon lasts!





PS for Shana: There are these decorative metal cutouts all over the property. I thought you'd get a kick out of them :)

I didn’t die. I moved to Oregon.

If you’ve been wondering why there haven’t been any blog updates, well, that’s the reason. Boom—I’m in Oregon now.

Rainy, rainy Oregon.

Even when it's sunny, it's rainy.

I don’t even know where to start with this, so I think we’ll go in sections.

The move itself

It seems like suspense and horror movies all have to do with ghost houses and ancient curses and impossibly brutal psychopathic killers. I think I could make a pretty convincing horror pic about the moving industry.

Oh sure, it seems simple enough.

My first mistake was outsourcing the choice of moving companies to my husband. I had a lot on my plate at the beginning of February, and I thought to myself “Here is a task that I can hand off to Brian. He can do the ‘man stuff’ (i.e., make all the phone calls), and I can work on actually packing up our home and finding a place for Blue. Everyone wins!”

But I’m going to let you in on a little secret. My husband is not very good at the internet. I work on the internet from sunup to sundown, so maybe my perspective is skewed on this, but it seems to me that there are some basic principles to be followed when one is using the web for research:

1. Use a legitimate search engine. I like Google. I tolerate Bing. I am willing to accept that some poor souls are still using Ask. My husband uses Yahoo. Say what you will about their privacy policy, Google has the algorithm that works. That’s why they’re No.1.

2. Cross-reference. I don’t believe anything online unless I can find it in at least two places.

3. Read the reviews. Yelp. Angie’s List. BBB. Whatever, just pick one.

4. Check the map. This is probably my favorite thing about the internet. I can get detailed satellite images just by typing in an address. When I was evaluating where to board, I checked every single possibility this way. I got a sense of the terrain, the tree cover, the distance from home, the facilities (arenas, round pens, parking and pasture all show up really well).

So, like I said, Brian=not good at the internet. So he just searched moving companies, took down their numbers, and called for a quote. No additional research, he just picked the cheapest one.

And that’s how we ended up spending thousands of dollars and more than a week to do something that we could have accomplished in one day with U-Haul and some pizzas.

They were supposed to come load our stuff up on the 13th. Then they changed it to the 14th. Then the 15th. Meanwhile, I’m sleeping on the floor of our new apartment because I had to report to work while all this was happening.

Not cool, Colonial Van Lines. Not cool.

My new job

Have you ever thought about how all the stuff that is on the internet actually gets there? Like really pondered it? 

Someone had to write every single word that's on the internet. And when you click a word, it takes you to more words. And those words take you to more.

And that, my friends, is the essence of my new job. My first project is to write a website. Again, ponder with me what that really means. I’ll give you the ballpark math on this.

Roughly 50 clickable spaces on the home page.

(multiplied by)

5 additional links where each of those spaces takes you.

(multiplied by)

10 more detailed topics reached by each of those 5 links.

(multiplied by)

Another 2 or 3 pages reached by each of those 10.

That’s 5,000 individual pages before we even get to things like job descriptions on the “careers” page and the rotating cast of classes and events on the calendar. And I’m writing all of them at roughly 200 words a page. That’s a million words.

ONE. MILLION. WORDS.

But hey, I have a window.

The boarding situation

Finding a place to board has been trickier than I anticipated. For one, Heather spoiled me in a lot of ways since I was her only boarder. I kind of called the shots there. And I think she and I had a Vulcan mind-meld when it came to making good decisions about the welfare of our horses. Here in Salem, I might be at the mercy of some lunatic.

The woman who is taking care of Blue right now is not a lunatic. Well, then again, anyone who is still breeding horses for a living in this economy might be just a little unhinged. But actually Danielle is quite nice and very smart about how she feeds and exercises the animals. 

There are other nice things about this setup. Blue has a big, bright stall with nice neighbors, Mickey—pasture social director, much like the famous Jose—and Red. His stall opens to the outdoors, so he can watch the goings-on of the farm. There’s a small indoor arena for riding during the downpours. (The constant, endless, relentless downpours...) 

I know, I know. It wasn't raining at the moment when I took the picture.

If I ever have the opportunity to ride off the property, after about 200 yards of what might be called “town,” it is straight up the mountain on a road that makes Cache Hollow look like a gentle slope. If we can trot up McCully Mountain without stopping, I’ll know we’re getting somewhere with the conditioning.

But I’m not thrilled with this place. I think they were already over capacity before she called and offered me a stall. This means that there isn’t any room for my stuff in the tack room. 

That means that every time I go out there, I walk in the rain to get my horse, then I take him to the arena barn and tie him up somewhere. Grab a wheelbarrow and a tarp and go back out in the rain to get my tack from the trailer. Come back in, groom and tack, ride, untack, venture back out in the rain with the tack to put it in the trailer, walk back to the arena barn again to get Blue, then walk him back to the other barn. All in the rain. I know this sounds like I’m just being lazy, but this is a big place. I don’t have time to make so many trips back and forth.

Plus, it is a solid half hour from my apartment. That time could be better spent too!

So now that I’m here and have more time on my hands, I’m seriously shopping for a better board situation. I want more variety in my trails and maybe some like-minded riders to condition with.

So, all-in-all, Oregon is an adjustment—but we’re progressing.

Inspiration

Even if Blue is never a 50-mile horse, I hope to give Janet Tipton a run for her money in LD mileage one of these years.

Awesome! (photo by Sue Butterfield)

Janet rides Blue's long-lost sister, Ladybug (Lady Jasmine), a bay roan mustang who likes to work. I was always aware of them in the back pages of Endurance News, racking up impossible LD mileage every year. As far as I can tell, they must do an LD every weekend in the summer and several multi-days too. How else do you rack up 700 LD miles in one year? She had 26 completions, that's how.

She's a heavyweight rider with a spunky little mustang. I could be her! I WANT to be her!

Here's what she says on the BLM facebook page: Ladybug is a 15 year old mare from the Antelope HMA in NV. I adopted her as a 3 year old. She is the most versatile horse I have ever seen. We have over 2,500 distance miles together through AERC and just two weeks ago at a 3 day ride in Idaho she took the following places: Day 1 - 1st place, best condition and high vet score, Day 2 - 5th place, best condition and high vet score, Day 3 - 2nd place, best condition and high vet score all while carrying a "heavy weight" rider. Last weekend (6/11/11) we competed in an Extreme Horseman's Challenge in Grantsville, UT. We placed 1st in the Open division with a score 0f 97 out of 100. We also participate in an all mustang drill team, she has done parades, pony rides in downtown Salt Lake, pulled a cart, and shown English and Western. She particularly loves cow events and reining.


That's how it's supposed to be, folks. Blue and I are going to get out there and make it happen!

Consider the gauntlet ever-so-gently tossed.

Ol' Buttons, the Wonder Horse

The drive to Portland pretty much looked like this:

The road looks clear because it is covered in a solid inch of black ice.

But we made it to the hotel safely enough.

A glorious view of sunny Portland, Oregon.

 I don't feel any particular need to talk about the convention. It was great; I learned a lot. Sooner or later someone else who was there is sure to write a post about it.

What I really want to talk about is the phone call that Heather got from from her husband on Saturday afternoon. What he said, in short, was that Bunny had caught her back leg in the fence. He said that she had cut herself "close to that part of the back leg where it looks like it's bent the wrong way."

We deduced that he meant her hock.

Since neither of us were home to consult—and because we had the towing vehicle in Portland—he had the good sense to call the vet our for a farm visit. I feel bad for the vet since the rainslushsnow was still coming down at that point.

So here's the result. On Monday, Heather called the vet to ask her about the injury. She found out that it was a fairly large laceration but there was no sign that it had gotten to the joint capsule. The vet mentioned stitches with tensioning devices being under the extensive pink bandage Bunny had been sporting all weekend.

Here are the tensioning devices:

I use the same devices to keep tension in my blouse.

Have you ever seen a horse held together with buttons? Me neither.


***

In other crazy news: I just accepted a new job in Salem, Oregon. More on that in future posts. Everything is up in the air at the moment. But if you live near there and know of a good boarding option, I'd love to hear about it!