Where is the horse and the rider?

Really. Where are they? (Where is they?) Because life is conspiring against me lately, mes amis, and I dun like it.

A friend with whom I used to take Western classes e-mailed today to let me know about the dates for this year's roundup. Danny is a tolerant man and apparently is willing to let me continue to hassle his cows from the back of one of his horses, despite his obvious amusement at the sight of a rider wearing a helmet instead of the cowboy hat God intended. Or maybe because of it. I don't mind being visual amusement for ranchers, as long as they buy me breakfast, lunch, and beerth, loan me a horse, and keep up the pretense that I've helped rather than hindered.

But this year, it's the weekend of Orthodox Easter. COME. ON. If I ran religion, we'd long ago have straightened out this ridiculous mess about the different calculations. Date of Passover, add one weekend, done. Just reorganize the spiritual world so I can ride, is that so much to ask?

The other sorrow is that my forthcoming work trip to Mexico won't be long enough, nor my wallet quite deep enough, to support another visit to Finca Enyhe. There are other riding options in central Mexico, but at this distance it is difficult to tell which ones are legit and which ones involve saddles and horses of equal decrepitude. Pepe and Lucia's outfit is what you really want: The horses are kept in excellent trim, they're scheduled carefully so that the weight a horse loses on one ride can be put back on before the next ride gets going, there are chances for long canters as well as impromptu jumping (reason number 24,297 I'm glad I'm not a guy: what happened when I took a three-foot log while using a Western saddle), the food is aces, and you get to go back to the house every night for a hot shower and a three-course supper. I fell flat-out in love with my horse, a glum-faced buckskin of unflappable calm and balance. At the time, I didn't realize how little I knew (a classic new-rider scenario, and check out my stirrups here for proof), so having a horse who took steep paths, rain-swollen creeks, slick footing, and the occasional crumbling path literally in stride was a tremendous asset.

Oh well. These are high-class problems to have, I know. But if anyone has tips about short rides in Michoacan, please share. Please please please!

Because Torchwood isn't odd enough

Seriously, Wales, is it something in the water? Of all the peculiar things that mankind has done with sheep, this is...okay, well, it's one of the most work-safe. But fantastic, entirely.

A life between the covers

Commence official packing mode. This is a stage that would normally be marked by sleeplessness or anxiety dreams about leaving my toothbrush in the Hellespont or some damn thing. Currently, however, I'm taking muscle relaxants for reasons unrelated to travel, and as a result have been sleeping like a dreamless log. Not only that, but fighting off the fog of analgesia leaves me with little oomph to worry too much about the luggaging process. Pack the jeans, don't pack the jeans, whaaaatever.

On an intellectual level, however, it is clear that arriving for a horseback trek sans pants would not be wise, so I've made a list and am carefully checking off items as they go into the monster duffel or my ripstop backpack. (The misfortunes of others have taught me to carry my helmet onto flights rather than putting it and my faith in the checked-bags system, and now I've got a carry-on camping pack large enough to hold the helmet and a change of clothes. Listen well, o wolves: Do explain your intentions to the REI staff before you start cramming one of their boarding helmets into one of their packs to test the sizing, lest they get an understandable wrong impression.) Shirts, shoes, swimsuit, toiletries, Tiger Balm, sunblock, fleece jacket, rain gear, check check check.

The real struggle is choosing solid vacation books. The standard beach reads go far too quickly, the cost of cheesy magazines outweighs their entertainment value, and one vacation with only Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for refuge was enough to cure me of being over-ambitious. I managed well in Argentina, with Foreign Devils on the Silk Road and Tom Shippey's excellent book on Tolkien's linguistic scholarship (my geek flag flies free and proud), occasionally supplemented with a neighbor's memoirs of life in Patagonia in the 1930s and the estancia's enormous compendium of Jeeves and Wooster stories. I'm trying not to dip too far into the current pile of possible contenders—some Oliver Sacks case studies, Drunken Forest, a few books of French history, a couple of Mary Renault novels—or to bemoan the lack of another Patrick O'Brian series. Maybe it's time to crack a gothic novel or two? It is bliss to be so spoiled for choice.

Keeping the Red Army chorus busy

An uncomfortable number of years ago, I spent a summer at an archaeological field school in remotest taiga-est Alaska, where I learned how to use a transit, fire a shotgun in the approximate direction of menacing wildlife, drink cheap-ass rye whiskey, deploy chemical agents against the local arthropoda, cook a wide variety of packaged foods, and hate, with a fiery unyielding passion, the music of Creedence Clearwater Revival. These days I never have to try to level precision equipment in squashy brush, brace against a shoulder-bruising recoil, drink anything inferior to Macallan, check the room for bloodsucking insects, figure out how to make Product of Hungary bacon edible, or listen to shitty music just because someone thought it made our camp seem more like a 1970s Vietnam movie.

I may reconsider my lifelong CCR ban, though, now that Finland has revealed its strategic reserves of AWESOME WTF.

Dear Australia, all is forgiven

Sure, we've had our differences. There was the whole thing about not exporting your Tim Tams, which, right, some strong words were exchanged and we ultimately compromised that they would be called something boring like Arnott's Originals (nobody wants to do an Arnott's Original Slam), and we've moved past that not that I'm bitter about the delay and all those years of having to tell visiting Australian friends to leave their clothes at home the better to fill their luggage with crinkling boxes of joy. Then there's the part about your fauna being bizarrely aggressive, what with the hissing spiders and adorable blue-ringed octopodidae and unnecessarily large crocodiles and even venomous platypuses (what, were you out of shrieking eels?), and I think that with counseling we'll be able to agree to disagree on whether that makes for a habitable continent or not. Then there's the whole aspect where your people are aggressively cheerful even before alcohol gets applied ("Let's hike 30 kilometers before brekkie! It'll be bonza!"), doubtless because you're so happy to survive all the lurking animal menaces. I won't even get into the part about your being so far away that we almost never see you.

But I still love you.

Then these guys from the ABC comedy show, The Chasers War on Everything, are able to put together a fake Canadian diplomatic motorcade of a limo with 2 escort SUVs with little Canadian flags flapping, and that was good enough to get past $A165 million dollars worth of security planning and three security checkpoints and pull up to the front of the Intercontinental Hotel where President Bush was staying on the 29th floor.

The comedian actor Chas Licciardello, who was dressed and disguised as Osama Bin Laden, popped out of the limo at the hotel and reportedly shouted "Where is my friend Bush? It has all been a misunderstanding!!!"

"And I do my little turn on the catwalk"

Oh come on, like I could've used anything else as the subject line.

Saturday night was my friend Teal's debut as a model, walkin' for the cause of international media coverage and general festiveness at a local embassy. The chance to see Teal, who is a low-maintenance individual possessing neither cosmetics nor a guilty "America's Next Top Model" habit, doing the catwalk stomp in full makeup and glittery clothes was irresistible. Since being one of the few really tall skinny models in an all-volunteer show provides a certain amount of bargaining leverage, she was able to score six comp tickets to the SRO event. I dragged mah fabulously impractical Shanghai Tang threads and strappy shoes out of the closet's tangled depths, got my hair be-spiked, smeared on a little bought complexion, and clattered out the door.

Some backstory, for the curious: Teal was originally recruited by a friend of a friend at a party, and she was promised that the show would be a low-key community production, involving maybe three or four rehearsals over the summer. This was what is known as a flaming lie of the very highest order, although in charity perhaps it was supposed to be that small and snowballed. Doubtful, but possible. Anyway, rather than the promised mellow, there were weekly rehearsals for most of the summer, despite which the order of the show wasn't decided until about ten minutes before the music started and the models never saw the clothes until the day of the show, and the models were hit up for all kinds of costs, including tipping their stylists. Miss Tyra would clutch her weave and swoon dead away, because demanding that volunteers subsidize the show is a different level of sketchy from the usual pills-and-ciggies stereotypes. But Teal, because she's fundamentally nice, put up with a lot of it, only drawing the line about the four-inch lucite heels and $140 facial.

The show went well from our perspective, although we heard later that there were all sorts of entertaining backstage dramatics, what with the screaming and the frantic clothing shifts and the I already told you I'm not gonna wear the stripper shoes. After we the audience sat through some diplomatic blather ("Hey, the ambassador blames the mainstream media too! Is this what it's like at Republican events?"), the music kicked up; Teal, looking all kinds of fierce in a long peach outfit, stalked out, rocked it on down the runway, popped a hip at the photographers at the end of the stage, and betook herself back; and the show was on. For the next...however long, an hour maybe?...it was glittery things and sexy outfits and, occasionally, male models who generally looked as though they had no idea what they were doing and were either terrified, depressed, or trying not to giggle. Teal got an audible gasp and a ripple of applause in one of the wedding outfits, and all of us conveniently forgot her admonitions about not cheering.

We hit the afterparty for a while, but the Ritz's loudest bar on a Saturday night in Georgetown is very close to my idea of hell, even if I'm knocking back Macallan on an empty stomach, so eventually G-Clef and I prevailed on Teal to come out for a late-night/early-morning meal of some sort (second breakfast? elevenses? tiffin?). We ended up at American City, where the busboys were drowsing in the corners, to rediscover that ancient truth: greasy diner food really does taste best in the wee hours. We probably aren't the oddest things they've ever seen at that time of night, but it was a Hopper-esque scene, G-Clef in his formal suit, me in scarlet silk and falling spikes, and Teal still AquaNetted and Cover Girled to the nines, all of us punch-drunk and falling on the food like wolves. This fashion stuff is a hungry business.

The observant will note that the embassy that hosted all this crazy fun hasn't been named, for the simple reason that sometimes odd people find the blog and I don't particularly want Teal catching flak because of something she didn't write. Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego catwalking?