blog roundup

Weekly Blog Roundup

AmandaLeave a comment

Jumping in the fray: bits and dressage, a story of development and principle from Guinness on Tap
This is flat-out spectacular. Well-written, well-sourced, and well-argued.

Baseline gaits from A Enter Spooking
Good thinking about how a horse with bad gaits makes upper level work harder.

Endurance Essentials Web-Based Course from Endurance Introspection
This looks COOL.

Tornado from She Moved to Texas
Extraordinary and awful – I’m so glad everyone is ok. Lauren also does a nice job of putting everything in perspective, too.

When should I clip my horse? from If the Saddle Fits
This is something I’ve struggled with and still think about a lot.

Horsepower: Getting Energy Under Saddle, When and Where You Want It from Trafalgar Square Books

Terrific illustrations and descriptions of energy under saddle – something I’ve been working on a lot lately
And a non-horsey read: Handling the Long Valley, from The Simple Dollar. I read personal finance blogs & websites on a pretty regular basis, as a way to keep myself focused on my own personal finance goals and try to have a healthy relationship with money. I like The Simple Dollar, and I liked this essay in particular, about staying focused on goals even in the period of time when it feels like you aren’t making great progress.
march madness 2017

March Madness 2017 Bracket!

Amanda4 Comments

IT’S HERE!

The poll results are in, and we’re ready to start voting next Wednesday, March 1.

In order, our seeds are:

The Pie, from National Velvet
Beauty, from Black Beauty
The Black, from Walter Farley’s Black Stallion
Hidalgo, from the movie of the same name
Sleipnir, from Norse mythology
Ashleigh’s Wonder, from the Thoroughbred series
Merrylegs, from Black Beauty
Artax, from The Neverending Story
Flicka, from My Friend Flicka
Brego, from Lord of the Rings
Flame, from Walter Farley’s Black Stallion
Smoky the Cowhorse, from the Smoky the Cowhorse book series
Joey, from War Horse
Angus, from Brave (Disney movie)
Pegasus
The Colt from Old Regret, from The Man from Snowy River
SO, what are our next steps?

You can participate in this tournament in one of two ways.
1. Just follow along and vote and root for your favorite horse. All that means is you check back here regularly and keep voting!
2. Create your own bracket for a little skin in the game. Originally, I thought that the winner might get the cash pool but it turns out that’s kind of illegal and also not easy to manage – it would mean you would all have to give me the money and I’d have to keep it and there were no easy online tools to do that.
So here’s plan b: you donate an entry fee to a GoFundMe account. At the end of the tournament, all of that money is donated to the winner’s equine-related charity of choice AND the winner gets a bunch of awesome prizes. Now, I don’t know what those are yet, so consider this my recruitment post: do you have something you want to offer as a prize for our contest? If you donate something, then I will waive your entry donation for the tournament.
Our first prize is one that I will put up: a custom quarter sheet, made to the colors/pattern of your choice and your horse’s measurements! I’ll do a roundup post soon when I’ve collected more prizes.
If you want to create your own bracket, here are your steps.
a. Donate a sum of money (minimum $5) to our Equine Charity GoFundMe account.
b. Save the bracket image above and make your predictions; use MS paint or something else to fill in who you think will win each match, and ultimately the whole tournament
If you want to enter everything from scratch and use an easier tool, here’s a bracket PDF; you can use a screenshot to save it as an image.
c. Email your completed bracket to beljoeor@gmail.com. I will then post it on our tournament page for everyone else to see that you’ve officially entered, and link back to your blog. I’ll also double-check at that time to make sure that you’ve made a donation to officially enter.
march madness 2017

March Madness 2017: Seeding Competitors

Amanda1 Comment

Here is the exhaustive list of nominated competitors for Best Fictional Horse Ever.

Please choose six from the list below.

All votes will be tallied up; the top 16 will become part of the tournament, and will be seeded according to their vote count.

This list was created from your suggestions and then added by me trolling the amazing Wikipedia article of fictional horses, where you should go if you want to lose a few hours of time.

I know it’s long, but it’s going to make an awesome tournament!

Voting will close at midnight on 2/24, and I’ll seed the winners according to the number of votes they get, with ties broken at my discretion. The bracket will then appear on Friday, February 25, for us to get our own brackets ready!

march madness 2017

Reminder: keep proposing fictional horses!

Amanda1 Comment

Tomorrow I’ll run the poll that will seed our competitors for March Madness 2017, but in the meantime, there’s still some time left to suggest competitors!

You can suggest as many as you want, so name away!

I also wanted to open up for discussion an excellent point that Lauren made in the comments on my original post: should we consider Misty of Chincoteague fictional? I had listed her as such in my initial post but Lauren pointed out that she was based on a real horse.

I think there’s an interesting argument for the book-version of Misty being very different from real-life Misty, and she might still qualify, but I’m willing to be persuaded in either direction. What do you think?

lesson notes

February Lesson Recap

Amanda2 Comments

I could sum up this entire lesson pretty easily:

FORWARDFORWARDFORWARDFORWARDFORWARD

But this is a blog, so I will elaborate.

Overall, this went really well. I’m really happy with how responsive Tris was, and we were both tired but energized by the end.

Things I need to remember:
– Especially in the warmup & early on, establish my baseline for my aids. I have a bad habit of asking ten times to get one response in leg aids. It’s not like I don’t know to ask once, get an answer or bring the thunder. It’s that bad habit stuff. I need to be more conscious of this.
– Keep my hands forward and a loop in the reins early on to not let him for a second think there’s resistance to him going forward. It doesn’t matter what he’s doing with his face. Just GO.
– Strong into the corners, strong out of them.
– Use diagonals but don’t let that energy jam into the corner. Flow through them!
– Be thoughtful, deliberate, and firm about the use of bending and counterflexion, in two different ways.
— First, in corners: bend into the corner, straighten out of it, almost to the point of counterflexion. Particularly useful for short sides: bend, straighten/counterflex, bend, then GO down the long side. Also useful in shorter cycles on a 20m circle; bend on the curves of the circle, counterflex on the points (where the circle touches the wall).
— Second, in half-halts. BEND, almost over-bend, strong bend, but ask and then done. Keep inside leg asking to access his inside hind at the same time. Keep contact with the outside rein and keep that inside leg active: bend and step up INTO the outside rein.

In particular, we got one wonderful canter: found a whole new gear and he LEAPT forward, sitting down, up and charging with real impulsion right up through his back down a whole long side. It was not unlike the compressed canter approaching a jump, and my body for a second wanted to get ready to two-point so I didn’t follow nearly as well in my seat as I should have. But I know the canter is there and mostly how to get it again, and I am happy with how it felt.

I was not able to replicate this quite as well in my schooling rides later that week. I erred too much on go go GO and not enough with finesse so there were some really ugly moments in the middle. But I was able to pick him back up and finish well, so I will count those as learning moments.

I really wish I could even manage every two weeks, but that’s not going to happen, so that’s it until March.

house post

House Post: Let’s Talk Dining Room

Amanda16 Comments

As I type this, the man cave is making giant leaps forward, but it’s not ready for primetime yet. So we’ll have to recap that next week, or possibly the week after.

This week, I am seeking your advice & thoughts on the dining room. It’s going next.

Previously, we pulled up the carpet, replaced the light fixture, patched the holes in the ceiling, and pulled down some of the wallpaper, but that’s it so far. The bulk of it needs to be done still.

Here’s what it looks like right now.

The fourth wall is almost entirely french doors.

My husband wants badly to keep the stenciling underneath the wallpaper, but I strongly suspect that won’t be possible. In the small amount we’ve already pulled off, it’s clearly pretty badly damaged, both by holes and by plaster near the ceiling. Odds are there are other bad parts on the rest of the wall that just can’t be saved – or would require extensive cleaning and inpainting to look decent, and that is soooooooo not in the budget. If the budget extends to art conservation, that will go toward the mud room mural.

So, what to do?

For a long time, my best idea was arts & crafts wainscoting. In this scenario, we’d make custom wainscoting out of maple lengths all around and either a) paint it or b) stain the wood and paint the wall behind.

Here’s the style I’m talking about, in a few variations.

I don’t see us going too high with it – maybe mid-level to the windows. Not shoulder-height as in traditional styling. That always feels a bit crowded to me. (Though we could have a whole stylistic conversation about whether it’s truly arts & crafts wainscoting if it’s not so high?)
Then I saw these pictures, and cue heavy breathing.

Now I’m not sure what to do.

I think I need to start sketching this out, maybe? What about one of these art deco fans in the middle of the larger wainscoting from my first idea?

Am I just getting waaaaaaaaay too complicated?
So the options are:
– art deco wainscoting, and if so, white, all wood, or wood frame with paint behind?
—and if the above, dark paint on the top or the bottom? color scheme will stay the same: maroon & cream
– something more elaborate like the middle examples?
– art deco wainscoting with a fan design in the center?
Which would you do?

blog roundup

Weekly Blog Roundup

Amanda1 Comment

Valentine’s Day Contest from DIY Horse Ownership
Go and enter to win cool prizes!

Busy Mind vs Thinking Mind from Zen and the Art of Baby Horse Management
An incredibly thoughtful reflection on the different types of horse brains. Tris is definitely a thinker: slow to react, but committed once he does.

Nevertheless, She Persisted… from A Work in Progress
These are hilarious and I so hope this becomes a thing.

Weekly non-horsey read: Autonomy & Domestic Dogs. My dog, Arya, while wonderful in many ways, may never go off-leash. She is lightning fast, very sensitive, and her recall is mediocre to poor. I’ve never had a dog that couldn’t be off-leash before, and I’m so jealous of all of you who can just count on your dogs to stay with you. The handful of times Arya has slipped her leash, she has sprinted for the hills before I could even blink or draw breath. Reading that article made me think about the ways I’m failing her in letting her control her own environment and life despite her inability to go off-leash. I’m upgrading our planned yard fencing in project for this summer.

march madness 2017

March Madness 2017: Nominating Competitors

Amanda18 Comments

DRUMROLL PLEASE

The winner of our theme for March Madness 2017 is…best fictional horse!

Whew!

It was neck and neck between best YA horse book and best adult horse book throughout, but best fictional horse came through with 10 votes. A plurality, not a majority, but that’s how we run the rules of this contest!

Bring on Pegasus, Misty, Black, Blaze, the Pie, and on and on and on!

Comment on this post. Nominations will be open until midnight on Tuesday, February 21. On Wednesday, February 22, we’ll start seeding the tournament by voting among these suggestions. The top 16 vote-getters will advance to the tournament.

[if you’re choosing something a bit more obscure, it might help to add a little bit of context for this round. when we get to actual voting, I’ll do a paragraph or so about each horse so people can either remember or learn for themselves, but for the shorthand voting to get to the tournament a few words of additional info might go over well!]

I will start the nominating with….Ashleigh’s Wonder, from the Thoroughbred series.