Month: May 2005

Summer has arrived. The temperature has hovered just below 100F for several days in a row. Summer is the only time of year that I’m
grateful my office on campus is cool enough to require my wearing socks and a
jacket. Friday evening when we got home,
we discovered that the a/c unit was not working. The fan was blowing but no cool air came out
the vents. Fortunately it was just cool
enough outside, i.e. no warmer outside than inside, that we could open the
windows and turn on all the fans in the house. I worry about the cats when the house gets over 85F but they didn’t seem
to mind at all. Cats are very adjustable
to temperature. 

Horses, on the other hand, are much more able to handle cold
temperatures than the heat. I think
sometimes in SoCal that horse people are a little fanatic about blanketing in
the winter. Our low temperatures are
often in the 40’s. Clipper gets tired
more easily when it’s hot and he’s shedding like crazy, even though his coat
never got very heavy. I turned him out
in the arena this morning and made him run a little bit. On his own he’ll saunter about 1/3 of the way
across the arena, roll, then saunter to the end where he can visit the horses
who live in corrals. If he doesn’t run a
little bit, he’ll be a nut when I get on him tomorrow. He’s not fun to ride when he’s like
that. And it’s fun to make him gallop
around the arena. He runs around with
his head in the area. Watching him run
is truly a beautiful site: gleaming chestnut coat with rippling muscles, mane
and tail flowing in the breeze he creates. When I feel as though he’s ran enough, just enough to stretch his legs
and get the bucks out, I keep my arms by my side and talk to him as I
approach. He faces me, walks toward me
with his head lowered slightly and lets me pet him. When I walk away he follows me, his head at
my right shoulder. I stand at the gate
and tell him he doesn’t have to come in yet because no one else needs the arena
right now. He walks away to nibble on
the grass outside the arena. 

When I bought Clipper back in January I thought for sure by
now we’d have solid plans to be moving up to Washington. I’ve been looking for a job and applying for
numerous jobs for at least a year. I
have received one phone call for my efforts. Dave is working with a placement agency but hasn’t received any
bites. He proposed telecommuting last
week but the response was no, our department doesn’t make any special arrangements. Other departments in his company do so he’ll
try to transfer within the company.  Barring that his supervisor will help place
him at a law firm in Seattle.  I was in hysterics because of the
heat, because after trying to make plans to move for so long we still didn’t
have any solid ones, and my job ends July 1. I cannot imagine being here in San Fernando Valley heat with nothing to do but ride my horse a few times a week.  I’d go stir crazy! We have got to have solid moving plans by
July 1! At this point I can only wait
and hope my pleas have been heard.

This video last about 6 minutes but worth the watch!  Funny!

I had a very nice ride yesterday.  Whew!  Thankfully after my hard fall on Thursday we spent a fair amount of time going back to work regain our confidence.  That helped my nerves when I got on yesterday morning.  Clipper was really pretty relaxed even though he hadn’t been worked since that fateful Thursday.  He may have been turned out on Friday but I don’t know for certain.  In any event, he was pretty mellow during the warm up hack and didn’t spook at anything until a kid started dragging lawn chairs around the outside of the arena.  When the kid stop, Clipper resumed his half-asleep demeanor.  I actually had a hard time keeping him from breaking from a lovely slow canter.  This canter is definitely progress.  He’s learning how to carry himself.  When I first started riding him in January, he galloped around the arena because he didn’t know how to carry himself.  Hours and hours of circles, transitions, and encouragement has paid off.

After the warm up, we went over some easy jumps, always beginning with the trot.  After the easy jumps we tried a bending line: trot in, canter 5 strides on a bend to a small vertical.  When he landed on the wrong lead after the first trot jump, I’d bring him back to a trot before jumping the second jump.  I’m not sure how many times we did that but eventually he landed on the correct lead and we cantered softly around the bend to the next jump then softly cantered away.  Perfect!  It was hot yesterday so he was rewarded with a cool bath, lots of carrots, patting, and general fussing, which he seems to enjoy.

These photos have been on my camera for a couple months now.  Since I woke up before 6:00 a.m. and am not riding until 9:30 there is plenty of time to fiddle with digital pictures.  We took this hike in late March when the wildflowers were at their peak.  This park is owned by the City of Malibu. Click each picture to enlarge.

This is a meadow against a hillside of native coastal sage.  The meadow is mostly exotic grasses but it has a good mix of plants, instead of a monoculture of a single type of grass, such as brome grass you see in most grasslands in SoCal.  This area used to be a ranch long before it was shi-shi Malibu.  The plant communities are not only shaped by fire but by historical grazing as well.

I can’t resist taking pictures of poppies, even though the poppy bloom in my backyard was better than what you see in this photo.  I like the mixture of roxks and plants.  Most of these plants are native.

Purple flowers, probably purple nightshade (Solanum xanti), according to my field guide by Milt McAuley.

More purple flowers, but I can’t remember what these are.

This is a pretty mix of flowers.  The yellow flowers are the ubiquitous sticky monkey flowers that cover the hillsides in the spring.

These flowers are probably mostly gone by now as summer is bearing down upon us, though late this year, thank goodness.  The temps have been over 90F for the last few days.  We haven’t turned on the a/c yet as we like to make sure we’re good and miserable before we resort to artificially cooled air.  Plus I hate to admit that I’m stuck indoors because it’s too hot outside.  Hopefully we’ll get some June gloom before summer gets really serious.

Well, good bye wasn’t as permanent as I had thought.  Typical of me.  Like this blogger, I can’t decide why I blog. Furthermore, like her, I’m a rather private person and posting my thoughts to a forum that is available to anyone bothers me a little bit.  The positive side of that is perhaps I’ll learn to keep negatives at bay.  When I first began blogging, I was inspired by The Julia/Julie project, a daily cooking blog that has since been replaced by a book contract.  At the time I suppose I fancied myself somewhat of a writer.  Unfortunately, writing my master’s thesis has cured me of that notion.  Yet, several of my regular readers (see comments from this post) said they’d miss me and wanted to keep up on my progress with riding Clipper.  Their encouragement, not to mention a pretty hard fall the other day, made me decide to continue posting.  This time I’m not going to feel guilty about the irregularity of my posting.

Having said all that, here’s the Progress on Clipper report:
First I have to preface this report by stating that I have been very stressed out about writing my thesis.  I hope to have the darn thing filed by June 24 but that may not happen because I am just not a speedy writer.  I have to work on my thesis then put it down and let it rest for a while, then repeat.  I’m working on my second draft but only the first draft of the discussion section.  Hopefully the other sections will only require very easy revisions.  June 24 is an important day for a couple reasons.  If I file by then, I don’t have to pay an additional filing fee.  Also, Dave and I want to move.  My last paycheck is July 1.  It’s important for us to be moving by then, otherwise I have to find a temporary job until we do move.  That’s a drag but I’ll do it if I must.

Anyway, this is everything on my mind as I also attempt to teach a green horse how to jump.  Keep in mind that I’m only an intermediate rider.  Maybe even only a beginning intermediate.  Or advanced beginner.  Whatever.  You get the picture.  Clipper is a pretty good boy but he does get nervous when presented with a problem that he doesn’t feel confident about.  Since I’m still learning too, I’m not always in the presence of mind to help him solve the problem.  Consequently he’s been stopping at jumps more frequently than in the beginning as we work on harder problems.  I’ve been falling off more, which rattles my confidence.

Thursday morning I had the mother of all falls (so far).  We warmed up with a hack and easy stuff: two trot poles set along the rail.  The second trot pole was replace by a low jump.  Clipper wasn’t sure about the distance between the trot pole and the jump so he slammed on the brakes at the jump.  I made him check the jump out then we went back around to try again.  Apparently I encouraged him a little too much before the trot pole because he attempted to jump the little fence from behind the trot pole.  He made a gallant effort, knocked over the jump with his hind feet (after all, we came in at a trot).  I was off balance from his enormous effort, then he took off because the jump scared him and I fell of amid thundering hooves.  I landed on my right elbow, fell back and hit my head on the sand.

I was wearing a helmet, of course.  I never ride without a helmet and would never think of doing so ever again.  Clipper stopped and turned around to look at me with a puzzled or concerned look on his face.  I’m sure he was thinking what just happened just like I was.  I sat up and felt my head throbbing inside my helmet.  My trainer immediately began lecturing me about rider error in a tone of voice just short of yelling.  I thought I don’t need to hear this right now then she said that my fall scared her.  Yeah me too I said.  Then I realized that she was lecturing me because she was scared so I let it go.

I stood up, didn’t see spots but my head still throbbed.  I got back on then attempted the same trot pole and jump.  He was really nervous about that jump by then and stopped again but I made him look at it and petted him when he did.  Then we tried again.  He took off from the right point (with my help this time) but he was still nervous and tried running away after we landed.  We stopped, I petted we tried again.  A couple more times through helped him regain his (and my) confidence.  We tried a few more jumps after that and successfully jumped them in a relaxed manner.  Whew.

That was a hard lesson for me to learn and I wish it didn’t require my getting dumped on my head to learn it.  What I learned is that he was stopping at jumps because he either wasn’t paying attention and suddenly there was a jump or he wasn’t sure how to handle it and I wasn’t helping him.  I also learned that stopping at this point in his training is better than him freaking out and over jumping then running away from it.  The key is to be able to provide him with the aids to help him do his job.  I’m a little nervous about that but I think I’m cured from being aggressive about his training.  I ride again tomorrow and will let you know how it goes.  In the meantime, I’m pretty sore from the fall.  My neck muscles hurt, I have a small bruise on the right side of my jaw, the base of my left thumb hurts, my right calf hurts, my right elbow is scraped and my ribs hurt.  Thankfully the headache only lasted one day.  I’m on a very steep learning curve right now.  I hope that curve has leveled out now.  Tomorrow should tell me something.

This will be my final post here.  I’ve decided to take down this blog, mostly because I’m not using it the way I had intended, which I had hoped would stimulate my creative writing but it really hasn’t.  I’ve been blogging for about 2 years now and enough is enough.  Please keep in touch and I’ll likely be visiting your blogs regularly.