Family

PSA: My Uterus is None of Your Business

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In each one of my exam rooms is a canvas 16 x 20 photo of Dusty, Wyatt and Myself. They are two of my favorite pictures of us and do the job of providing a conversation starter for times when I am doing an in office procedure and need to do small talk as well as for those appointments where I am providing nail care for the older population.

My head will be bent over someone’s feet and they will look to their right, spy the picture and inevitably ask “is that your family?”

I look up and can feel the grin splitting my face as I too look at it and say ” Yep! Those are my boys!”

I put the picture there for that exact purpose and I love talking about my family. I could talk about Wyatt for hours when invited to do so, and often times even when not, and I like the ability to connect with my patients on this level.

Unfortunately, this often times goes beyond this though. Several times a day the person will then ask “Is he your only one?”

I’ve perfected my answer over the last 3 years: “Yep! I love my little family. It is perfect”

Thankfully, most times that ends the line of questioning and we move on to other subjects or I get back to talking about their foot condition. A handful of times a day though, the person persists “you don’t want any more?”

What I want to do is look them straight in the eye and tell them “It isn’t about wanting. What I want doesn’t seem to matter in this regard. After 2 years of unprotected and very planned sex often times with pills, injections and invasive tests involved there was never a pregnancy and never an answer as to why since all tests came back perfectly normal and healthy. After we adopted there has been 4 more years of unprotected sex without a resultant pregnancy, so no wanting has nothing to do with any of it”

Instead I have learned to just repeat my above answer “I love my little family. It is perfect the way it is”.

Some persist though. “Don’t you want a daughter?”

My mind reels. Why pester a complete stranger with such personal questions? What would they say if I said “no…I would hate to have a daughter!” I’d love to tell them that getting pregnant doesn’t ensure a daughter and I don’t have another $47,000 to spend on adopting one. We still haven’t paid off half that from Wyatt.

I repeat my answer “I love my family just the way it is”

“You really should have a sibling for him. He would be happier”

Are you kidding me?! Now the person is telling me I am a bad mother for not having another child. If you don’t think this happens, guess again. I go through this multiple times a day. My answer to this one has always shut down any and all additional questions: “A lot of siblings don’t get along. He wouldn’t be better off if he hated his sibling”

I could take down the pictures. I could tell them I adopted Wyatt. But the thing is that it is none of their business. This is an extremely personal question and one I would never ask any person unless I was incredibly close to them to the point of sharing such information. I don’t like explaining that Wyatt is adopted 20 times a day and don’t feel like I should have to. People tend not to think about problems they never had to face. To many people getting pregnant just happens, whether it is wanted or not, and so they never dream that for someone else it wasn’t so and that their line of inquisition could be hurtful.

I won’t take the pictures down. I love them. I love talking about my boys and I love giving my patients an easy way to connect with me and come up with small talk which can be awkward. I don’t mind being asked if he is my only child and I don’t mind the follow up about having more, but once it gets beyond that it is crossing a line.

 

Family

A Day in the Life

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One of the new blogs I am following is about life with a small child and she wrote a day in the life type post last week. I found it interesting and decided to bore you all with a look at my own, but on a more general basis since I am pretty boring. Just thinking about it opened my eyes to why my house is messy, my errands don’t always get done and I have little energy to ride most days.

Weekdays:

6:30 am is wake up time. Typically Wyatt is in our bed having joined us around 3 am or so and Dusty has already been up, showered and served breakfast to our herd. I help get him dressed and shower while they get out to door around 7:10am

I then make my own breakfast, drink a cup of tea and catch up on blogs until its time to go to work.

740 am I leave for the office and spend the day seeing patients, writing notes and putting out fires

5:15 pm and  I can finally leave. Mon, Tue, Thur, Fri I pick Wyatt up from preschool/day care. This puts me home right around 5:45 or 5:50 and I let Einstein out to pee. If it is a Thursday I pick Einstein up a few doors down from Wyatt from his doggie day care day.

Two days a week I head to the YMCA for a work out. On these days I throw the horses their hay and give them their grain and stand to make sure Pete doesn’t eat Gemmie’s snickers instead of his kale. Then I change, put Wyatt back in the car and head to a 6:15 class. Thankfully I live only 5 miles from the Y so this works.

Dusty gets home at pretty much any time. On time puts him at home by 5:45 and if he is there then Wyatt stays home with him. Lately, he has been so slammed at work that he is getting home who knows when and will just come to the YMCA instead.

Wyatt either plays with kids at the Y or hangs with his dad, whichever he prefers to do until my class ends at 7:15 at which time we will either eat at the Y’s diner (soooo good!!) or head home to eat left overs.

8:00 starts the bed time ritual and Wyatt finally crashes around 8:30 or 8:45. At that point I read a book in bed until 9:30 when I crash myself.

On days I don’t go to the YMCA, I cook dinner while Wyatt plays outside with Einstein or he helps me cook. He really loves helping me cook and gets to measure, stir and dump things in. We eat when Dusty gets home and then have about an hour or 90 minutes before bed time to read, wrestle and play.

You’ll notice the absence of any TV time. We don’t have cable or netflix and Wyatt gets no screen time on a school day, so really the TV only gets turned on Friday night for family movie night and a little bit for sat/sun morning cartoons.

On Wednesdays I work outside my office at a local Wound Center which means I leave the house 30 minutes earlier. I head off straight from there to ride when I can and when I don’t I go straight home getting there around 6:30 pm and then see the above.

So…all told I get about 2.5-3 hours of awake time at home during each week day. I struggle with my inability to keep the house tidier, ride more on week nights and do chores like rotate the compost or pick the pasture. Truth is I just don’t have the time since one of those hours is spent getting ready for work in the morning.

Weekends

Dusty works every other Saturday morning. Either way he generally gets up when Watt does around 6:30 am and I get to sleep in until 7.

I use the Saturday’s that he works to clean the house in between playing with Wyatt and we have a good system of when I take a break from vacuuming, washing the floor, doing dishes etc…

Once that is done we play until Dusty gets home.

The rest of the weekend is typically spent grocery shopping, doing laundry and running errands that didn’t get done during the week.We also always try to do something fun for Wyatt. This past weekend I introduced him to Pokemon Go since he has gotten really big into Pokemon and we went downtown hunting. He had a blast.

So anyway…there it is. A look into my life. It is busy and hectic and I mostly love it although I’d love to find a better balance and be home more. Some day.

Riding/Horses

Cantering…Ugh.

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Give me a wide open access road or an inviting single track or even a meadow and you’ll find me cantering down it like a boss. A slight uphill grade on an inviting trail is almost always going to be taken at a canter, hand gallop, or if the stars align and Gem is in the mood, a full blown racing gallop. I love cantering. In fact, Gem prefers to canter at anything above 10 mph and we quite literally cantered about 80% of the first 34 miles at our last endurance ride.

I can canter.

Or so I thought.

Put me in an arena and it all goes to crap extremely quickly. Turns out that while I can canter and my seat is good (light but solid and flowing with the horse) I can’t actually steer for crap. So in an arena where there are actually rails and turns are a must, things start to flail quickly.

Ugh.

Someone fix me, please.

When I rode Ralphie, I thought I was just dealing with some Gemmie PTSD. You see, the mare couldn’t/wouldn’t canter the entire first year I had her. When we moved to WI and had an indoor, I spent the first winter (winter of 2010-2011) focused on her canter. Any time my leg hit her side she would either kick, buck or rear. Not good. I backed off and started on the lunge and taught her word commands. Then I used those same verbal commands under saddle keeping my leg steady. Then I began oh so slightly introducing my leg along with it and by the time spring came we were able to perform a canter transition with a leg aide only without dying.

Except….

Then she would flail around the arena at 100 miles an hour and even wiped out on her side once. I stopped asking to canter indoors.

My next thought was to use jumps. We would trot in and she would pick up a canter on the landing and would typically be pretty steady. I would then let her canter a few strides and bring her back to a trot. That seemed to work better and we settled on that for the rest of spring until I could go out on the trails and work her outside.

Cantering on trails came easily and naturally and we spent the summer eating up the trails. The following winter we were stuck indoors and the cycle repeated although she no longer reacted negatively to my leg aid.

All that to say that I have some serious baggage.

Flash back to the present. With Ralphie, I would ask to canter but then tense up and grab with my hands preparing for some major zoomy flailing that never came. He quickly got angry with me though and trying to get him to canter was a mess.

On Misty, I had zero fear. She was fun and safe, yet I could not get her into a canter for the life of me. I was using so much leg to get her to even trot that when Trainer said to canter, I tried to bring my leg back to ask and she would immediately slow down and all would be lost.

When I finally managed to get the canter, we would make it a few strides and I would lose it back to a trot and have to suffer the humiliation of trying to get my caner back all over again. It seriously took me the entire width of the very large outdoor arena (we worked in one end only) to get her to canter.

Trainer would tell me to sit two trot strides then ask for the canter but I never felt organized enough to do so. I am much better from a rising trot, but she insists on using a few sits to make it work.

Then…if I do manage to get into a canter and maintain it longer than a few strides, I am completely incompetent at guiding my horse anywhere. How do you all do it all day long around a course?

Its frustrating to be so horrible at such a very basic thing that I know I can do in a different setting yet seem to be a sack of half rotting potatoes inside the arena. And I can’t really progress much in terms of jumping anything meaningful until I can at least canter around the arena.

Ugh.

 

 

 

 

 

2017 Reading Challenge

POPSUGAR Reading Challenge Book #13

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I was really excited about this prompt. One of my favorite books is A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson. I find it hilarious and so very real. When I saw the prompt, I took to the internet and searched “books similar to A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson” and was encouraged when I found an entire forum thread dedicated to this exact question.

Scrolling through the comments, I saw two books come up frequently and went to my library website to find out if they had either. They had one of them and I quickly put in my hold request and texted the selection to my mom.

A book about travel- The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner

Eric, a former journalist who has toured the most negative time sand places in the worked during his career, is a self proclaimed unhappy person. His newest project is to research those places on Earth that are considered happy and create his own atlas.

His travel takes him first to the pioneer of happiness research where he spends time reading data banks of information to determine his route of travel. From there he begins by heading first to Switzerland, one of the happiest countries on Earth.

Each chapter of the book is dedicated to a new country where he describes the landscape, culture and what defines happiness in that locale. Eric interviews both locals to the region as well as transplanted Americans to see what they think about being happy.

I really, really wanted to like this book. I just couldn’t. I’m not sure how so many people likened it to Bill Bryson on any level other than the basic “its a book about travel” because the two couldn’t be less similar than if they were of two separate genres. There was no humor, no travel gone awry story.

I did enjoy the look he provided at countries I had not even heard of or knew very ittle about such as Qatar, but once the initial descriptive passages were over the book quickly got burdened down in the writers own…well…I’m not sure exactly how to explain it…cynicism, pessimism. Either way it wasn’t a happy or light hearted book.

My other complaint is how much quoted research he had. Nearly every other sentence was a quoted text from some research and while I understood his attempt to put some science behind his work, it was over done and slowed the narrative down to a halt. It also broke up the text in a way that was displeasing.

Another failed pick on my part, I do not recommend  reading it.

1/5

 

 

 

 

 

 

Riding/Horses

Shrinking it Down – Pony Jumping

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Misty – a New Forest Pony and my jumping partner Wednesday night

 

Trainer J texted me Wednesday that I was to ride Misty. Her description: the fat grey pony with a horse sized head.

I didn’t think much of it until I arrived and wandered the barn aisle looking for a horse that matched this description. It really didn’t dawn on me that she meant an actual pony until I saw her.

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I stood and stared a bit. I’ve never actually ridden a real pony, of pony height, before. She was so short! Where were her legs?

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The ground is so close to me!

She was sweet although a bit cranky that I pulled her away from her hay pile and striped her naked in the 30 degree temps. Misty has shown First Level Dressage, shown up to 2’6″ and gone cross country. She knew more than I did and right now that is what I am looking for, so I was game to hop on up and get to know her.

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The prior lesson was working over a course of this height  it was nearly as tall as my pony

The lesson was once again very basic – we worked on my seat and position a lot, worked on walk and trot without stirrups, sitting trot and then the canter which I am horrible at and need to write an entire post on because ugh. From there we strung together a small course of three cross rails all set to around 2′. It was a fun little course for me because it really made me focus on my weakest point: planning ahead and riding with purpose. It began with a cross rail on a right turn off the rail going across the width of the arena, then make a right turn at the rail and cut back on a diagonal to hit fence #2, after it was a sharp left hand turn back all the way around the arena at the rail and past fence #1 to get to fence #3.

It made me really have to plan my path and helped me keep things in focus. I’ll do my usual what I did well and what I need to improve at the end, but I want to talk first about my first ever ride on a pony. It was really, really different. To begin with, she is a kick ride. Her natural tendency is to stop whenever she can and holy crap did it take so much leg to get her moving at more than a snails pace. I even used a dressage whip. I am so used to my hyper reactive mare, that this was a totally new world for me. She would trot when asked but it was so slow and I had to keep applying more leg to keep her in the trot and the same was true in the canter. My legs were exhausted!

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The other thing I noticed was how quickly her legs turned over and how short her stride was. I was posting at a million miles an hour which on Gem relates to about a 10 mph trot, but on Misty was more like a 4 mph trot. In the canter, it was the same. My seat had to move with her so much more quickly even though we were not going very fast. It was hard work for sure and required me to be much more relaxed so I could keep up with her.

Being so close to the ground gave me a whole new boost of confidence. I got up on her and looked down and thought “huh..the ground is so close that even if I do fall off it won’t hurt so much” and you know what? All my tension was gone. I didn’t fight myself at all with grabby hands. i asked her to go and let her do it. It was amazing! If Trainer J had built a 5′ fence and told me to jump it, I would have. I was not scared one single moment on her. It was a new feeling.

She also was incredibly well trained. All I would do was sit tall, tighten my abs and she would down transition. I learned what a real contact felt like and barely had to squeeze the reins to get her to respond. It was really nice to ride something so well trained. I loved her by the end of it all.

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Cold enough to break out the insulated tall boots for the first time all winter

What I did well:

  1. My position was 1000x better and more stable right from the start.
  2. I actually got a canter transition without pulling on her face and asking her to stop right away
  3. Trainer continues to like my jumping position and I never lost a stirrup or caught Misty in the face over the jumps
  4. My shoulders twisted in the circle and the mare’s body bent around me instead of being a surf board going around the turn
  5. I didn’t mess up my jump course and planned my turns according to our pace.
  6. I had fun!

What needs work:

  1. My right leg goes all rogue on me. The left hangs nicely right where it should, but the right tends to want to toe out which put the zipper of my boot on her side and caused my hip angle to be way too open. Part of it is my own biomechanics. That ankle has had surgery and it doesn’t flex very well. so when I try to sink that heel down it toes out to get more flexion. Sorta cheating my way through it. It stretched out a lot by the end of the hour, so it is possible to fix it. It will just take time.
  2. Cantering is my nemesis. I’m terrible at the transition, great once in it, but then I can’t seem to keep the horse in it. Going to write a whole post on this.
  3. Stamina!
  4. Figuring out a way to keep my leg on for forward momentum yet still be able to use that leg to apply aids. If anyone has any great tips, I’d love t hear them. I was using all I had to just keep the horse moving forward, that I had no way to use my inside leg in the turns to balance her or my outside leg to push her away from the rail.
  5. Keeping contact. Every time Trainer would tell me to shorten my reins, I would then extend my elbows so I had shorter reins but I cheated and kept the contact thrown away because my arms were so long. Oops.

Future Plans

  1. I really want to take Gem up there for a lesson. We discussed possibly doing back to back lessons with one hour on a lesson horse and the second on Gem. She thinks it would be really beneficial to jump on Gem right after and apply the same principles to her. I will be missing a lesson due to travel here shortly, so I am thinking of piggybacking next weekend.
  2. Potentially a fun jumper show in June. They do $10 classes and she said I can use Misty or Ralphie in it to do the 18″ and 2′ classes if I am feeling up to it. She also offered Misty for lead line classes for Wyatt which I am all for. Imagine the pictures!

 

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She lent me this book to help with my seat as well. I’m 1/2 way through it and already have a better grasp at what she has been saying.

 

 

 

2017 Reading Challenge

Popsugar Reading Challenge Book #12

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My mom should host a book club. Her picks are the best and this one has topped my list of the favorite I have read in this challenge so far.

A book written by or about someone with a disability – Still Alice by Lisa Genova

At 52 years old, Alice has a great life, solid career and a wonderful, if slightly distant, family. She has tenure as a Pscyhology professor at Harvard and travels the world speaking at conferences. Her husband, John, is cancer researcher on the brink of a breakthrough. Everything is going as planned.

Until the day she gets lost going home and doesn’t recognize anything on a familiar street. Soon after she notices that she can’t remember certain words, has difficulty deciphering her own to do list and forgets to go teach classes. When she forgets to board a plane to head to a major conference, she knows she needs to see someone. She was not prepared for the answer though: early onset Alzheimer’s.

The book follows her progression through the disease. Her family rallies around her, handling it the best they each can in their own way.

I adored this book and cried through most of the second half of it which is very rare for me. Told through Alice’s perspective, you get a sense of the losses she suffers, not only in her memories, but in her independence and her sense of self. It is a powerful book with a powerful message.

There are a lot of questions raised through out this book that make you pause and think. In the early stages, Alice plans her own suicide and leaves her future self a daily test and directions in case she fails her test. She does not want to be a burden to her family in the future as a young, but mentally lost dependent.

She has a genetically dominant form of the disease and has three children, each with a 50% chance of having it. Do they want to know? Would you? Her daughter wants children. Should she continue trying to get pregnant knowing that she may pass this on?

Reading how each of her family members treat her is eye opening as well. Some ignore it and plod on with their own lives without wanting to make any sacrifices because “she won’t remember me anyway”. Others try to do everything for her, taking away what little independence she has left. And too few work with her within her abilities and recognize that she still is a person.

This book is amazing and everyone should read it. I know it is also a major motion picture, but I like books better than movies and will not be watching it for fear it will ruin the experience.

5/5

Riding/Horses

What Can I Say? I’m Not the Monogamous Type Anymore!

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Many moons ago I took a few lessons with a crazy lady. Knowing what I do now, I wouldn’t have mounted up with them at all, but hindsight is 20/20 and all that. Anyway…back then I always felt bad for lesson horses. I’d throw my leg over a horse I didn’t know and have to ask it to work and I just had this deep seated feeling of being sorry to do so. Like it wasn’t fair for me to be working a horse who didn’t know me. Plus with a lot of lesson programs, you just never know what the care is like and how many times that horse has already been worked. It is actually what led to me purchasing Gemmie. I didn’t want to ride horses I barely knew – I wanted a relationship.

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Misty –  a new set of ears to look through Wednesday night

Flash forward seven years and my thought process has flipped 180 degrees.

Last night was a jump lesson (more details to come when I have more time to type it all up) and I was riding a new mount. As I groomed and tacked her up I was surprised to notice that I didn’t mind. Its not that I no longer care about the horse or that I want to use a horse as a means to an end, but I think owning Gem has taught me that it isn’t really so bad to ask a horse to do some work for an hour or so even if you don’t have that bond with them. As long as you are fair to the horse, act kindly and don’t ask more than they are capable of giving, it really can be a enjoyable experience for both.

My current situation is really different than any lesson barns I had known before. Maybe times have changed, maybe it is the regional difference of being in the south versus suburban north or maybe I just lucked into something great, but the lesson string of my past is nothing like my current trainer’s set up. The horses I ride are either her personal horses or a boarder’s who doesn’t mind allowing their horse to be used for a lesson from time to time. So these horses are being used judiciously, have a person who loves and cares for them and isn’t just being taken out to go around a ring all day long.

Whatever the reason, I am loving my new found infidelity. Not only am I being pared with horses that allow me to work on new skills and focus on me (you know instead of just trying to tame the beast beneath..umm…looking at you Gemmiecakes), but I am learning what it feels like to ride different horses and what suits me best. Gem will turn 19 this May and while she is in great shape and capable of being tortured by me for years to come, I know that in the nearer future I will be on the look out for a new main squeeze. Getting to ride different types of horses of various personalities and training levels is teaching me what I really want and need.

Being a one horse at a time type of gal and turning 35 soon means that if I get another horse in 3-5 years, it may very well be the last horse I purchase. That means that I want to get exactly what I am looking for.

In short, I am loving getting the chance to ride new things and learn what I want, need and enjoy. Of course, the better I become at my new found discipline of…well, I’m not really sure since I’m just working on beginner basics stuff but something english and arena/course based…what I want and need may change, but for now I am enjoying the variation quit a bit.

 

 

Uncategorized

Enjoying Horses Again

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Have you ever been so deeply entrenched in something that you don’t even notice you no longer enjoy it? Or that at least you lost the reason for doing it in the first place and replaced it with this new drive?Have you accomplished your goal and then felt a little deflated because the only reason you were doing this is now gone and you have no clue what to do next?

That has been me the last 10 months.

I started endurance because Gem hated everything else I tried with her. She excelled in it and was happier at rides than I had ever seen her, so I kept going and put in the sometimes awful conditioning time because it was needed in order to compete successfully. Some days out on trail were magical and some were so terrible I questioned my sanity for continuing on.

There was always some future goal to achieve throughout all this madness: completing a 25 mile ride, then a 50, then a 100. With each step up, I had to become more focused, more strict with the miles we rode, the pace and the terrain. Every ride was pre scheduled and my GPS was glued to my wrist. I never went more than a mile without checking in on our pace and distance. It was a necessity if I was going to get her conditioned enough to do the 100 with the limited trail time I had available.

It all paid off too. We got our completion on a respectable course in a respectable time, neither chasing the clock nor rushing and causing harm. Gem had all As all day and looked just as fabulous 18 hours after the start as she had the night before it. I was proud of all the work that I put into getting a horse nobody thought could even go a mile safely on trail through it and I was proud of my mare for never giving up.

After the initial high of the completion, I felt empty. I took the entire summer off then halfheartedly prepared for the Ride and Tie Championships and then promptly took the entire fall off. I thought perhaps it was a lack of a goal that was leaving me wavering on my rides, but every time I looked over the AERC schedule for 2017, I felt nothing. No excitement at picking out a ride. No nervousness. Just a little bit of dread of all the time away, the money spent and the long hours in the saddle fighting a horse who thinks conditioning is a waste of her time and why not just use competitions as her training instead? (Because, Mare, I can’t afford to do that)

I didn’t even renew my AERC membership yet for this season. I haven’t chosen a ride. I haven’t made conditioning plans. I haven’t done anything towards getting a 2017 completion at all. When I rode last weekend, my friend asked what I was planning and I just looked at her. I wasn’t planning anything. She was shocked. I’ve always had a plan. Always another ride to work towards, a schedule of how many miles over what terrain and at what pace on each day available to me to ride.

And you know what? Right now I am having more fun and have been happier while thinking about, during and after a ride than I have been in years.

I’ve been on Gem, on Ralphie and on Pete.

I’ve been on trail without my GPS or a plan.

I’ve been taking dressage lessons on my beloved mare.

I’ve been taking jumping lessons on a new to me gelding.

I’ve been on Pete watching Gem teach the love of the trail to a beginner.

I’ve been carefree, learning and exploring all the different facets of riding and I have been basking in the glory of it along the way.

It really hit home this past Wednesday. I had a jump lesson scheduled that got postponed a week and I was shocked to realize that a) I had been feeling like a kid on Christmas morning all day waiting for the lesson and b) I was really disappointed it would have to wait. I haven’t had either of those feelings in a long time.

I love Gem, all she has taught me and all we have done together. She isn’t going anywhere and is still my main mount, but I am also really really enjoying riding Ralphie and Pete and having absolutely no set in stone goals or plans at the moment. I may make a 50 mile ride happen this year or I may not. It doesn’t actually even matter to me.

What matters right now is how much fun I am having doing a hobby that is pure indulgence. If I’m not having fun, what’s the point? I already don’t have fun 50 hours a week at work plus another several hours a week cooking and cleaning and doing laundry, running errands and grocery shopping. I darn well better be having fun on my horse and for the first time in a long time I am.

I am having a blast and I intend to not stop again.

 

2017 Reading Challenge

Popsugar Reading Challenge Book #11

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For this prompt, I had to do several stages of research. For starters, I had to look up a list of all book genres then pick one I don’t typically read. From there I needed to find a best seller and a list of the top 30 of all time came up online. Then it was finding which one was available in multiple copies at the library. Phew!

A book from a genre you don’t typically read – Coraline by Neil Gaiman

Coraline is a young girl who recently moved into a flat in a big house. Her parents work from home and it is nearing the end of her summer break from school. She is lonely most of time, having to entertain herself while her parents work. Most of her time is spent exploring the new house and grounds.

One day she opens a door in her sitting room that supposedly was bricked over to create separate flats in the mansion. Instead of bricks, she finds a dark and musty corridor leading to another world.

A darker version of the well known Alice in Wonderland story then commences as Coraline tries to return to the real world.

The genre I chose was horror and I don’t believe I have ever read a horror novel outside of Frankenstein in college. When I saw Neil Gaiman, I was excited. One of my favorite books is Good Omens co authored by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett and I own most of the Disc World series by Pratchett. This was my chance to read a Gaiman novel within the challenge.

Unfortunately, this is a YA novel and I’ve already written about my feelings on those. This was no different and left me wishing the same topic had been written for a more mature audience. I did read a passage to my son and it scared him, so for the intended audience I would say it does the job.

The book was highly entertaining though, kept my attention and I kept reading past my bedtime to see what would happen. All excellent things in a novel. The characters were a bit bland and the theme was too similar to Alice in Wonderland, but it was a quick two sitting read and enjoyable enough.

3.5/5

 

 

Uncategorized

‘Fraidy Cat Eventing 2017 Eventing BINGO

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Emma over at ‘Fraidy Cat Eventing is hosting a great contest. Please go check it out – here. This is my entry for the eventing BINGO story. I don’t event (yet) and I am not familiar with all the technicalities of the sport, but it is un to join along and write a story of what would likely happen if Gem and I attempted a show.

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GEM GOES EVENTING

Here we are – our first event. Just a schooling show, but you have to start somewhere, right? Gem is all dolled up for dressage – shiny bay coat sparkling in the sun, red and white dressage pad actually clean, black dressage saddle scrubbed within an inch of its life. I’m nervous and couldn’t eat breakfast. Can I even remember my dressage test? We are about to find out.

Its getting close to our test time, so I mount up and head into the warm up arena. It is busier than I anticipated. Horses are everywhere and Gem and I are both high as a kite. I’m supposed to be getting her to relax, but all I really want is about 20 miles of hilly trail to canter her along before hand. Endurance seems easy compared to this!

Circles. And halt transitions. I hope my brain starts functioning so I can actually ride. As I am trying to get her to calm down and show some sort of the training we have put in, Gem catches sight of a plastic bag outside the warm up ring. She freezes for a half a second then drops her shoulder, spins 180 degrees and runs.

There goes my white breeches.

I fall off over her dropped shoulder and land smack into a pile of manure. Great. Thankfully Gem stops right away and I collect my horse, damaged pride and ruined attire with just enough time to mount back up and head into the ring as the steward is calling my number.

With that behind me, things couldn’t get any worse. Hopefully. We go down center line and are mostly, basically straight. Ish. We wiggle our way through the BN test and all is going well for the first half. I decide to start breathing again. I relax. Things should go smoother if I just relax.

Right as I take a deep breath and exhale, Gem sees that damn plastic bag again. I think it is following us. Maybe a competitor attached it to a drone and is flying it around to sabotage us. Are we that good that we need sabotaging? Gem catches it out of the corner of her eye and that is it. Game over. She flails and jumps right out of the arena! All her jumping training has finally paid off, but it was intended to teach her to jump over the small white fence demarcating the dressage court. Are we eliminated?

Thankfully it is a school show and they let us re enter and finish the test. Someone is holding that plastic bag. I hope they throw it in the trash and put a lid on it. Is that an evil smirk I see on the person’s face holding it? I have to be imagining it. Wait…did she just wink at me?!

Dressage finally ends. Who knew 2 minutes could take so long? We do our best square halt and exit with what little pride I can manage. I need to track down that person, but I have no time. I have to get Gem ready for stadium jumping. She stands mostly still while I exchange her dressage tack for jumping. She looks just as sharp in her red jumping gear and brown saddle as she did in her dressage tack. I change out of my white breeches and into clean light tan ones. We are all ready to head back to warm up and I keep my eyes open for any rogue plastic bags.

Warm up goes uneventfully and while she remains her good old stiff self, so do I and we pop over the small fences a few times to get our heads in the game. I think Gem wants this day to be over with and she practically pulls me into the arena for our stadium round.

We cross the timers and head towards the first jump. Its a nice and inviting vertical and we approach it in a nice canter with enough forward momentum, but not crazy. Maybe I will survive this day yet. She launches over the fence and hits the ground on the other side with more energy than before. I find myself with a freight train on the other end of the reins.

Jump two comes at us faster than I thought and just as we approach that plastic bag flies right in front on us. I barely have enough time to register the fact that there is no wind when Gemmie jumps both out of her skin and over the standards! Who knew she could jump that high? We manage to safely land and I am seething mad now. My anger only eggs Gemmie onward and we manage to leave two out of the next line to fly over the jump. the rest of the round is clear, but frightening to both watch and participate in. I don’t know how we finished that course without an injury.

As we make our way back to the trailer to untack I look around for the woman with her plastic bag. I see her mounting up for her turn in the arena. No signs of the bag though. I wonder….