Boston Public Library Photograph Collections: Horse Sports, Part 1

January 13, 2017 Amanda6 Comments

Massachusetts – and, more broadly, central/coastal New England – used to have a much bigger tradition of horse sports than it does now. Not for nothing was the USET based out of Hamilton, MA, one of the earliest international three-day events was at Ledyard Farm, Myopia Hunt is one of the oldest in America, and equestrians like Karen O’Connor and Bobby Costello grew up in the area.

So here are a selection of photographs from the Boston Public Library about the halycon days of eastern Massachusetts as the center of the equestrian world.

lesson notes

Lesson Recap

January 11, 2017 Amanda3 Comments

One of my 2017 goals was to take more lessons, and when my trainer was in town for a few days and did a clinic, I jumped on board.

I honestly can’t remember the last time I took a lesson. Summer, maybe. In another life, old me took lessons weekly, and sometimes twice a week. If something came up that made me miss one, I’d handwave it away with a laugh and say, oh, I’ll make it up later, I have plenty of credits! Old me was an asshole.

So: lesson. I’m going to take down a few bullet points as things I need to work on, and have been working on since.

1. Get my goddamn hands out of my goddamn lap. Shorter reins, more over his withers. In order to encourage him to come up and lift through his withers and the base of his neck, in order to create that space between hips and hands to hold collection, THERE HAS TO BE ACTUAL SPACE THERE.

In order to really work on this, I need to let go of the part of my brain that feels like I’m tipping over, leaning forward, not following with my arms enough, because what I need to do is follow WAY more, because it is one thing to follow with long reins and your hands in your lap and another entirely to follow with a careful regular contact and short rein.

2. Stop providing resistance for him to meet. This is one of my old, favorite traps: Tristan is hard-headed and uses his under neck muscle to grind out his frustration, and hoo boy do I take that bait. I’ve risen to that bait for a decade now. We’re like an old married couple except instead of arguing about the dishes we argue about him softening his mouth for, like, one half second, asshole. The thing is: he knows better, I know better, and miracle of miracles, when I refuse to hold up my end of that pattern everything falls apart…and comes back together much better.

3. FORWARD FORWARD FORWARD FORWARD FORWARD. ’nuff said.

4. Canter transitions! These were something I’d specifically asked to work on. So, we spent a lot of time breaking down the idea of transitioning on a half-halt, first picking moments and then creating moments in which he was surging up through his back to ask for a canter transition, so that we went forward into the canter with a bouncing, bounding energy. Keeping that in the canter, more half-halts, more encouraging him to lift and carry, then keeping it back down through into the trot.

5. Part and parcel of everything: setting the bridle out in front of me and then sending him forward into it. Elementary, and yet: sigh. Still working on it.

Sometimes, honestly, I despair that I have been riding this horse for ten years and I still more or less suck at it, but other times I think of everything else I’ve learned and – it’s probably even.

tack

Tell me more: spurs?

January 9, 2017September 25, 2017 Amanda14 Comments

I wear spurs for every ride.*

*well, except when I forget and then end up hating myself.

Tristan is the epitome of the kick ride. Getting forward is our #1 problem, and nearly always has been, except for the early phase in which “stay all four feet on the ground” was our biggest problem.

So: spurs. Every time, every ride. Spurs, whip, helmet: without these things, riding does not happen.

Mind you, I am not digging into him with every stride. They’re a pointed reminder that I need to have in my toolkit to remind him that this shit is for real, they help give an edge to our transitions, and basically my life is much better when I have them on my feet.

So I’m not rethinking the actual wearing of spurs.

But I am rethinking the spurs that I have.

They’re 1/2″ Prince of Wales nubs. Bog-standard, except they do have fake crystal thingies on the side which, um, is the only way I can tell which way to put them on. Also, half the crystals are missing now, BUT I DIGRESS.

Do you ride with spurs? What type of spurs? Should I try a longer spur for a more effective aid? What about swan’s neck spurs? (Keeping in mind I am 5’9″ and he is 15 hands, and keeping my leg on properly is definitely a consistent challenge.)

Please, talk me through this. It feels like this is an area I could make a small change that might pay off in dividends.

house post

House Post: The Man Cave Abides

January 8, 2017September 25, 2017 Amanda2 Comments

My in-laws are up this weekend, which means huge progress on the man cave!

See: my husband does not do home improvement. He’s not that guy. He hikes and skis and plays video games and loathes anything like tools or work on the house. (Which is why these posts have been about what I do; I’m the one who works on the house 98% of the time.) His dad is the opposite of that guy, which means that when my father-in-law is here, so much shit gets done.

Last time, we ripped out the old insulation, old sheetrock, old ceiling, old floor, and put up new insulation, new vapor barrier, and new walls.

Then, when my dad came to visit, we replaced the old fluorescent lighting with recessed lighting.

In the interim, I have not touched it except to add spray foam to the gaps around the windows, because the space is my husband’s and I have loads of things to do in other rooms.

This past weekend we’ve put up vapor barrier in the ceiling, put up sheetrock on the ceiling, and done two layers of mud. One more layer of mud and we start primer!

Then, the remaining list for the space is: paint the walls, figure out the floor (some combination of carpeting + tile), put trim around the windows & door, and decorate.

a reminder of the before-before

where we left off on this blog

and following: this weekend!

blog roundup

Weekly Blog Roundup

January 7, 2017 AmandaLeave a comment

Creating Transferable Skills from PONY’TUDE
This is precisely something I always struggle with when I go from bareback to a saddle, or from no stirrups to stirrups. How to really and truly break the pattern and the muscle memory of bad habits?

Well, that’s one way to start the year from Four Mares, No Money
Really interesting (and scary) medical story with a good ending + a GREAT offer to commission gorgeous art. Check it out and maybe get some of your own art!

equestrian history · horse racing · suffolk downs

Boston Public Library Photograph Collections: Suffolk Downs

January 6, 2017 Amanda1 Comment

I’m going to do a series of posts exploring the superbly digitized collections of the Boston Public Library, as held on Flickr.

Today’s topic: Suffolk Downs.

I can’t think about Suffolk Downs without feeling a pang of grief. It was a grand track, a classic track, a real Boston kind of track: the sport of kings, but in a hardscrabble kind of way. It was the place where Tom Smith discovered Seabiscuit in 1936, when the track was a year old, which is such a perfect Suffolk Downs story: diamond in the rough, champion amidst the claimers.

When I turned 18, I celebrated at Suffolk Downs. I could bet by myself! I brought friends and my then-boyfriend and we spent the day and I broke even. It’s a place where my two favorite things in life converge perfectly: horses and history.

But racing and horses have been fading fast in eastern Massachusetts for the last twenty five, if not fifty, years. When I was growing up, there were a half-dozen horse farms in my town. There was a Thoroughbred breeding farm that bred for the track. The barn I grew up riding at took in racehorses on layoffs for rehab, a half-dozen at a time. All of that is gone now, except the barn I first rode at: now it’s just a lesson barn, no rehab horses. It’s all buried under McMansions and suburban sprawl and godawful assholes driving pristine pickup trucks.

A few years ago, Suffolk Downs changed hands around the same time as Massachusetts was desperately trying to shove through casino licensing. The new owners said the only way they could make the track viable was if they were granted one of the casino licenses. They were voted down, and now the track is mostly shuttered. It no longer holds regular racing meets, settling instead for occasional days. In 2016, there were only six days of live racing.

But during its heyday, when it was one of the jewels of the American racing scene? There was nothing like it. So today, I’m throwing it back to those days.

All photographs are courtesy of the Boston Public Library’s Suffolk Downs album on Flickr, They’re embedded here, so you can click on them and go see the higher-res pictures.

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(Caption is “Boston police search stable at Suffolk Downs for Brink’s Robbery suspects and loot.” Amazing.)
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puppy · wordless wednesday

Wordless Wednesday: Mom, make the kitty stop snuggling me

January 4, 2017September 25, 2017 AmandaLeave a comment

Poor Arya. She can dish it out, but she can’t take it.

stupid human tricks

Dual standards

January 2, 2017September 25, 2017 Amanda8 Comments

For about a month now, I have been limping around.

At first, I thought that I had tweaked something in my right ankle when I made the switch to wearing winter boots. It happens. Big stomping boots change your gait, and I always buy winter boots slightly too large for my feet, because I always end up layering socks within a week or two of wearing them.

Time marched on, I kept limping, and I learned through trial and error that the problem was not my ankle, it was my heel. Specifically, it was the back of my heel, and it was not getting better.

Whatever: I walked less, and I was riding without stirrups anyway.

You can see where this is going, right? It didn’t get better. It’s still pretty definitively not better. I finally, grumpily, started googling, and pretty quickly made an armchair diagnosis of achilles tendinitis, pretty classically right where the achilles tendon connects to the bone of my heel.

Unsurprisingly, diagnosis did not actually change anything. In fact, things continued to get kind of worse, with the pain sharper when the tendon was expressed and a low-grade burning sometimes even when at rest.

So, for the last 10 days or so I’ve been resting even more (so many extra holiday pounds that are just not getting worked off, ugh) and icing it every night. That has helped a little bit, but do you know what uses your heel? Driving. And putting stirrups back on your saddle to get ready for a lesson.

I have a doctor’s appointment next week. Since I can still flex my ankle just fine – well, it’s painful, but mechanically sound – it’s definitely not ruptured, but there is a nagging sense in the back of my mind that it’s a partial tear. Best case, I’m still looking at quite a while of restricted activity and icing because soft tissue. Damn it.

Sometime last week, while icing my heel and reading, it finally occurred to me.

If this had happened to my horse, I would’ve had the vet out to ultrasound him a month ago. I would be icing every day, monitoring bute, working to get the inflammation down and watching every step he took with an eagle eye.

It’s one thing to vaguely and intellectually know that I treat my horse far better than I treat myself. It’s yet another thing entirely to have it so cut-and-dried in front of me. If my horse had a strain of his digital flexor tendon, I would be FREAKING OUT. My own foot? Meh. I’ll gimp around some more and after 3.5 think about icing it.

Not that I have any intentions of changing this pattern, mind you.

house post

House Post: Reading Nook

January 1, 2017September 25, 2017 Amanda1 Comment

Starting off with my goals of decorating! I’ve been slowly adding art to the walls of my office, and, drumroll, finally put up Tristan’s horseshoes.

Thank you, everyone, for your input on this!

I bowed to the wisdom of the crowd and took out the ice pads. That was not terribly easy, since they were nailed to the shoes, but I ran them under hot water for a while to soften the rubber and then tugged really hard.

Then I took a wire brush to the shoes and rinsed them in hot water repeatedly, then carefully toweled them dry. My bathroom might have looked like a murder scene from all the rust flecks and drops. I did not take pictures. You’re welcome.

Then: on to the wall!

I was originally going to put them straight up, but when I put one nail in and turned around after grabbing another I really liked the tipsy look! So they will stay tipsy until and unless I decide to straighten them out.

I also added another piece of decoration to the room thanks to a Target visit (a staple of every trip to Boston).

$3.00 in half-off Christmas lights! I have to get some hooks for the corners, because longterm these lights will go on top of the molding for the windows and thus around the entire top of the room, but they are fine hanging like they are for now.

So, the last finishing pieces for the office are:
– get cavalry posters printed & framed
– get curtains
– finish off wall behind radiator (you can see it in the bottom right corner of the last picture)
– reupholster reading chair (this is more like a 3-5 year goal)

blog roundup

Weekly Blog Roundup

December 31, 2016 Amanda2 Comments

Some links for you in this holiday week.

Temptation and Doubt from Bully and Blaze
A dog blog but horse-applicable, with many many thoughtful things about risk management and the dangerous things that we do.

And a horsey response to the above: On Risk and Responsibility from Journey to 100 Miles

The Season of a Good Dog from The Collie Farm
This is a beautiful tribute to a working dog and to life on a working farm.

A non-horse read for the week: The Man Who Cleans Up After Plane Crashes. Difficult but worthwhile read, with a lot to think about – especially about empathy and compassion even in the most terrible of circumstances.