Dear Santa

Lordy me, it's easy to develop expensive tastes. Gobi the wonder pony and Pat's sumptuous luxury of a dressage saddle would not fit in my stocking, but the easily $20K I could drop on them would. As ponies go, Gobi is a dream: beautifully trained, responsive, well muscled, and polite, not to mention plain cute. His one foible is a taste for licking people's hands, which is a welcome change from Lear's habit of gnawing on all and sundry. And oh, that saddle. It's a poor craftsman who blames her tools, and that goes double for horsemanship, but damn. Damn. Anyway, with those two advantages I should've done really super-bien, but mostly it was just okay. Last week, one of the new guys rode Gobi and basically racked the hell out of him [ETA, for clarity: put so much strain on the horse's mouth that the horse threw up his head and hollowed his back in an attempt to avoid the bit; no nadgers were harmed in the telling of this story]; in my attempts not to do likewise, I overcompensated the other way and used too loose a rein. But we did some good yields and lovely canter work, enough for the covetise to further consume my soul. La Mère and Seesterperson came out to freeze their butts on the ring benches and critique my form. Or really, La Mère gave post-class comments; Seesterperson settled for chirping, "Inside leg to outside rein! More with the outside rein! Inside leg!" Well, she does have the basics right.

In standard holiday news, procrastinatory ways ahoy! I was all a-scramble to assemble Pat's Christmas present, so rather than filling a stocking with heater packs and carrots, I crammed the goodies in a holiday loofah mitt with "Naughty" on the scrubby side and "Nice" on the suave one. Cheesy as can be, but it was (a) all that was left in the CVS Christmas aisle and (b) sufficient as a bag of holding. That feeling of panic means it's the holidays, right?

With January 7 creeping ever closer, I already owe shout-outs to several great gift-givers: 5starjoe for his annual holiday compilation (which did not include "Mr. Misteltoe," so I don't have to slit my wrists in festive reds and ichory greens), 4mastjack for a signed print of one of my favorite xkcd strips, Iosif for the adorably wack merino-and-possum gloves, and Teal for a panda purse I would never have bought but which made me fall over laughing. Back in the fall, Gee-Clef and I went in together on a stained-glass tree frog for Teal, who is both crafty and fond of things batrachian (batrachial? batrachiose?). She got Gee-Clef a book of fiery ethnic recipes, he being the poor soul who can never convince restaurants to bring sufficient pain, and some duct tape bandages; he liked those but was a little nonplused by the Chinese cicada kite I got him in honor of his new hang-gliding certs and overall computer wiz-dom ("It's not a feature," I explained. "It's a bug," he responded, nodding). Why is gift-giving always so angstful? Why can't it always be easy-peasy?