Wrangle wrangle

Tickets: Too much money.
Car rental: Not very much money.
Dental insurance: So very much money.
Wrangling cattle for a cowboy who once hollered at you because you declined to bulldog a charging cow: Absolutely priceless.

Which is to say: Tickets to AZ, I has them. Last year's fun was tempered by the need to get up at o-hell-no-thirty in very chilly predawn darkness. This year the weather should at least be warmer, since we'll be down there in May, and instead of layers of shirts I will be toting SPF Avogadro's Number to protect my neo-Victorian pallor. I'm almost more nervous this time, because working later in the season means more of the calves will be big and ornery, while I have not added much mass. Last year there were a couple of times when I had to yell for one of the guys to lean on my shoulders lest the calf on which I was resting my entire weight still manage to get up. I suppose I could line my chaps with lead plates, but that's some spendy smelting tailoring right there.

Dressaging this week was the usual fun. I got there early enough to snag Cappi, hah! And after just one week on Laura, I had to relearn to find his barrel. It's tough having long legs and a teeny horse. He was great, though; at one point he considered going back to his old left-evasion ways, just as I was bending him and asking him to reach down for the bit. But a little leg pressure, and suddenly he relaxed, reaching down like a champ and keeping his energy forward even as his head dropped. Bless. Max the square peg was back in class, doing his usual routine of "oh God, cantering, so much work, two strides is all I got, boss!" riiiight up until his rider slipped the crop behind her leg and smacked him smartly. Suddenly, as twere a miracle, he found all sorts of energy; she never tapped him again, but he had gotten the picture. Turns out he has a very pretty canter, too, so kudos to her for determination and timing.

Western was...well. I love me a Western saddle, I love having a single hand on the reins, give me a smart cow pony and watch me try to hang on. But it is ridiculously frustrating to work with horses that aren't consistently trained to respond to Western cues, and yet be told to improve my cuing. Not sure that this class will stick; I'm having trouble working with this teacher. It would be different, as would so many many things, if I had the money to keep and train my own horse, but for now I'm trying to grit my teeth and be zen with every bone in my body. "You get all tense," says Teacherwoman MkII, and it takes my limited self-control not to snap anything smart-assed back. (This counts as personal growth.) So we'll see.

Dinner tonight with Mr. and Mrs. JackZodiac at Restaurant K was a lovely treat. I got the chocolate pie, which comes with homemade sour cream and sour cherry coulis and which The Voice had gotten during our Restaurant Week dinner. It's still toe-curlingly, pass-me-the-cigarette, I-just-got-religion good, but I'd better do a hell of a lot of running around at the kite festival tomorrow to compensate. Swope's recipe makes the kind of dessert that can single-platedly shift your center of gravity. The fact that I had it after an orange/jicama/spinach salad with hibiscus vinaigrette and some luscious rockfish Veracruz did not help. Well, okay, it helped with other things. But I'm betting Danny wouldn't thank me for squashing his calves flat.

Thanks a latte

Fun and games with my favorite bendy boy again. Eventually I'll get around to asking Pat to snap some pictures while we're working together, despite past evidence that seeing those kinds of pictures sends me into insta-despond at how gawky I look on a horse. I've taken some quick shots of Cappi while he's been on cross-ties, but they're never very good: He's always peering around to see whether I've manifested treats, or he's squinching up his face at something, or he's just glaring, ears back and mouth wrinkled, because I am taking pictures rather than FEEDING HIM or GROOMING HIM or otherwise making his life as he wants it to be NOW RIGHT NOW. He's kind of an enormous whiny toddler about the whole cross-ties and photos thing. Which is a pity, because whenever I see him being ridden I'm struck again by how cute he is, all glossy roundy black Morgany body and long thick show-pony tail, and I would like to share the adorableness. One of these days.

Cappi had been nicely warmed up at a jumping class, so as soon as I was in the saddle he moved out with a fine swinging walk, barrel rolling from side to side and helping loosen up my hips and back. He resisted some of the moves once he figured out that I wasn't going to let him just run around (in fairness be it spoken, he will do all the moves at speed), and at one point he thought about spooking at the wind, but overall we did pretty well. We even did some cantering, although to keep him from bolting we limited it to three strides of canter and about thirty of trot, repeatedly. He grumbled but obeyed. At one point Pat called for me to reset my inside leg, which had drifted forward, so that Cappi would bend more smoothly into the canter. "I can't just flail around and hope for the best?" She said no. "Well, hell, that's my whole philosophy of riding; now what'm I sposed to do?" The best part of the lesson was watching another student try to canter the new Halflinger pony, who runs with all the grace and coordination of a crate of beer falling down a flight of stairs. You don't want to laugh, because someday it could be you on that horse, but wow does it look as though cantering is something Max was not designed by God to do.

My reward after class is to spend a few minutes with QC, Pat's big pinto mare. QC greets me with a nuzzle and immediately stretches out her neck, suggesting that I might scratch along her crest and down her shoulders. In return she rests her head on my shoulder or arm and nibbles the seams of my jacket. When I turn to go she looks despondent. Pat is certainly her person, but QC has enough love to go around.

Hello Cappi my old friend

Moohahaha, now you'll have that song stuck in your head for a week.

We're suffering the revenge of February, as a batch of nadger-freezing air direct from Canada keeps us all from enjoying the extra hours of sun. I went to dressage last night all y-bundled up, silk tights and fleece breeches and three sweaters under a fleece jacket and down vest, gloves on my icy claws and a pair of chemical packs tucked into my boots (in vain, because when the mercury drops too far, my lamesauce corpuscles won't be tempted past the knee line for anything short of booze-induced capillary dilation). The indoor ring isn't heated, but it blocks the wind and is generally bearable for the riders if not the instructor.

After my long hiatus from dressage, it was a nervous joy to be back with Cappi. Joy because he's fun, nervous because who knows what he'd been up to while I was off. Smoking! Drinking! Lascivious conversation and crim con! Needless worries, as it turned out. He didn't display any bad habits, even when horse A spooked at invisible tigers, causing horse B to ditch his rider in sympathy, causing the horse C to flee the commotion, thereby convincing horse D that he was next on the bogeyman's menu. But Cappi, who had been trotting along, flicked an ear at the noise, slowed to a walk on my cue, and then sighed. Sighed. This is the same horse who three months ago would climb trees if a deer walked within a mile of the gate? The horse who would panic and flee if asked to work away from the other horses? The horse who to this day gives his Western riders fits? I do not pretend to understand. I am only grateful. I confess that I truly love getting him to bend and flex and show off. Pat's trying to make things more difficult for us so that he has to listen and can't assume he knows what he's supposed to do, so the class is never dull, but Cappi seems to have found his groove in dressage.

Apart from the cold fingers, what I really don't like about lessons in the winter is dealing with the blankets, which cannot be laundered every day and inevitably smell of urine (reason one, there are straps under the belly and the horse can't exactly hold them out of the way when nature calls; reason two, the horses lie down in their stalls, wherein they've usually relieved themselves). The blankets are big and bulky, so you have to sort of heave them up and wrestle them into place, and then you have to reach under the horse's belly to get at the surcingles, and what with one thing and another it's nearly impossible not to end up smelling of horse wee. That's my story, anyway, and I'm sticking to it.

So we meet again, my furry friend

Progress! Last night's work on Cappi was excellent, all things considered. We're getting to the point where he's stopped the major misbehaviours and I can notice subtler problems in him and in my cues, which is the first step toward fixing same. Man does it feel good to come out of a lesson without having ridden through a bolt. Pat was very chuffed; she says that Cappi's getting much more flexible through his back and neck ("Look, he's letting you compress him and stretch him out like an accordion!" For my next trick, I will play "Lady of Spain" at the trot). She also thinks that he's working harder to do well in this class than in others, although since I rarely see him in other work I can't tell. He still speeds up a lot given half a chance, especially if he's behind a horse he thinks he could beat in a race—which is to say, any horse at all—but he's listening to cues and responding more promptly when I tell him not to be Speed Racer. He even reaches for the bit, stretching down and forward as the reins loosen, rather than fighting the contact or trying to evade contact by going sideways. In other words, I'm feeling somewhat warmer toward him than I used to, and it may be mutual.

This time I was S-M-R-T about putting him away: I untacked him and groomed him one aisle away from his stall, so he wasn't constantly trying to duck out and check on his bucket. Like most of the schoolies, he knows enough about tailoring and human nature to recognize the potential of pockets, and I was loaded with candy cane frag. With that to distract him from his missing dinner, I got him cleaned up (and smellin' minty fresh, too) in record time. He's shaggy at this time of year, but with indoor riding and its lack of mud he isn't too hard to keep neat.

Doc got the rest of the candy cane. It may not be as high on his list as apples, but he knows enough to whicker when I reach into a pocket. Then when it was gone he tried to nip me on the hand and I decided it was time to go. At least he hadn't pinned me against a stall wall so that I knocked a water bucket onto my breeches, Grayson. (ETA: I wasn't the one who ended up wet. Grayson has tried that with me in the past, but I've been lucky or fast or both, and these days I bribe him to keep him facing the right way. Another student was not so fortunate.)

Caramel corn in the office

As a chilly-blooded member of our species, I spend a lot of the winter whining quietly about the fact that it has, again and completely unpredictably, gotten cold. Yes, yes, cold is relative; I have endless admiration for my friends in New York and Chicago and Minnesota and the plumbing-free outskirts of Fairbanks and other areas where man was clearly not meant to live. I pile on layers of tights and silk shirts and sweaters and scarves and insulating footwear, and sometimes I even reach for chemical assistance, either following my former choir director's very Slavic advice—"[3pennyjane]ochka, you need to do a shot before you come to church. Just one: It will warm you up and give you stronger voice"—or slipping heated insoles into my riding boots.

And yes, now that winter hath gone and descended on DC, riding has lost some appeal. Not only do I have to pile on the long tights, fleece-line breeches, wool socks, multiple tops, polarfleece jacket, down vest, and fingerless gloves under the thin riding gloves, the nippy weather tends to make the horses bouncy and more likely to misbehave. Add to that the challenge of trying to adjust cold stirrup leathers with stiff fingers, and I start to lose track of the fun.

But I rode last night. What with uncooperative weather, travel, personal distaste for riding in a windstorm, and one teacher's season tickets to the Terps, it had been about three weeks since I'd been on a horse. Three weeks! I wasn't sure I would still remember how to find the saddle. But it turned out well: Although the dressage class was full, at six people, for once Cappi and I were not the problem children. I even got him to correctly shoulder-in, walking diagonally with his body in a straight line, rather than bending until he looked like a parenthesis and oodling sideways withers-first. "Hm," said Pat, "That was good. He's getting too easy for you." I thought of his previous bolts and leaps and wondered how likely that was. Conclusion: Not very. But when he is good, he is very very good, and when he is bad I am coping.

Putting Cappi away after a class usually involves some dancing to keep him from bolting back to his stall to make sure that thieves don't make off with his precious bucket of grain. Last night he was particularly difficult, and at least three times I reached for the second cross-tie only to realize that he had gotten behind me by spinning to point back at his dinner. This is the creature who doesn't think he can turn on his forehand in class? Hah. I brushed him down, picked out his feet, and buckled his heavy blanket into place across his chest and under his belly, then I finally stopped being such a cruel bitch and led him back to his stall, ducking past his well-gnawed Bizzyball. He graciously stood still for the two seconds it took me to undo his halter before he dove into his grain bucket, and I got to go back inside where it was warm and there were treats.

...What do you mean, a resemblance?

How awesome are couches?

Now we know: Stereotypist's "50 Things" explains, "Couches are exactly 34 awesome. Lamps are 35. There is some tension."

Thursday night's Western lesson was not an unqualified success. Na rabote, we are gearing up for our big meeting, and there are many things that need to be done quickly and well, and what those things are changes a lot. I was doing well staying zen until an unannounced last straw was set in place late Thursday, then I had a quiet mental fit (the secret of being considered calm and level headed in the workplace, it turns out, is making your inner monologue have the meltdowns). The resulting off-kilterness hadn't entirely faded by the time I got to riding, where dammit I was paired with Cappi rather than Doc. To be fair, Mr. Cappuccino behaved well for the first half of class, apparently because he and Evil Grayson were turned out together during the afternoon and celebrated by running, full speed, for most of an hour. All that goofiness had left him stiff and tired, so riding him was like sitting in a chair with one leg just slightly shorter than the others. Teacherwoman Mk2 insisted that he wasn't lame, but he felt just that tiny bit off, a tiny bit that was like fingernails on a blackboard two rooms over. When I tried to canter him, too, I got a pretty clear response: "Okay I will canter two strides and am stopping now." Over and over, that's all I could get. No doubt I was doing something wrong, but it got to the point where I was angry with myself, ready to snap at the teacher, pissed off at the horse, and generally having a crap time, so we went back to walking exercises and then called it a night. (Horseperson wisdom is to end each class with a success, so that the horse walks out thinking of the ring as a place where he is competent. It works on riders as well.) In the past I have ridden while angry or really upset, and the guilt about how it must have felt for the horse has lasted much longer than the memory of whatever got me torqued. These days I make an effort to fix my mood; if I can't, I just call it a day. Why did the Scots invent Macallan, if not for such occasions?

The weekend calls for packing and purchase of essential travel items, such as meal-replacing Clif bars (we're pretty close to developing the food pills of 1920s' SF, it seems), yarn, and an iPod. The veterans of past iterations of our big meeting emphasize the importance of small comforts, due to the lack of larger ones in the average 18-hour workday, and knitting is a useful boredom-alleviation device for those of us monitoring lectures we don't understand. Perhaps I will knit a red blood cell.

Pony onner string

A tip of the hat to the famous Mr. Pratchett, for his "onner stick," which became hilariously real to La Mère the moment that her roommate bought a deep-fried starfish on a stick at the Wanfujing Night Market in Beijing.

I got Cappi again tonight, and even taking him out of his stall I could tell he was going to be a handful. The chilly weather had filled him with energy, not that he's a poky creature at any time. I cinched my helmet a little more tightly, adjusted his martingale, and hoped for the best. We didn't do too badly during most of the class, what with the trotting and bending and even a laudable shoulder-in. He's listening better or I'm riding better or both.

But then Pat had us canter one at a time at the end of the ring, and that's historically been a troublesome thing with Cappi, who tends to get to where he's supposed to turn left away from the other horses and keep working on his own, decide that they're having more fun, and bolt (see also: adventures in unplanned jumping). I was nervous, because while I've always stayed on it's a bit stressful and makes me feel lame for letting him get away from me, but Pat had a plan. She snapped a longe line on the inside corner of his bridle and sent me out.

Boy HOWDY did Cappi find that confusing. We started trotting, and Pat twitched the line to remind him that she was there, and although he was a little confused, the nudging was fine. Then we got to the Magic Trouble Spot, he bent his head and bolted...and you could have drawn a cartoon thought bubble full of exclamation points right over his ears, because suddenly he was having to spin back around at the pressure of the line, all, "Whoa! What the hell was that!" I clung on and tried not to swear. We slowed down, I got my stirrups back onto the balls of my feet (in times of stress, the human reflex is to go fetal, legs contracting and upper body curling inward to protect the squishy bits, which leads to my stirrups turning into anklets), and we began again at the trot. This time when Cappi bolted, Pat's line almost caught under my foot and pitched me sideways. "You're trying to make sure I fall off this horse someday," I accused her. My adventures in horse-spooking are becoming a barn joke; I really hope that correlation isn't causality here, except in the sense that I'm taking on more problematic horses. She chuckled and promised to look out for the line, now that we had a good fix on Cappi's reactions. And it was only five or six times after that that we got a solid circle at the canter, with no running away or other evasions.

My seat is still not very solid in the English saddle. It's mental, because I do fine bareback and in a Western saddle, but Pat agreed that some more longe work, where I don't have to worry so much about steering and can focus on leg position and seat, will go a long way toward improving my riding. It will also, and this is the BIG SEKRIT, help Cappi be a better partner. If he learns that it's more fun to do what he's asked, rather than whatever he wants (which is followed by people hauling on his mouth to make him stop), he'll be a much better school horse. Fingers crossed.

Oh hell and death and yay!

I sometimes get very frustrated in dressage. I've been working steadily with Cappi, who as I've mentioned is tiny and makes me feel sometimes that I'm trying to balance on top of a tootsie roll, which is a problem because I've got relatively long legs and find myself having to pretzel myself up just to get some contact with him. (Wow, after that sentence I suddenly want a ton of junk food. Back in a sec.)

But he still runs away, and sometimes he's not responsive, and it's tough to tell whether I'm not getting the right results because I'm doing it wrong or because he's confused or both. No cabe duda that I've managed to improve my seat and hands, vide my ability not to fall off when Cappi takes off in terror of invisible cthulus, but basic stuff like bending the horse at the walk, getting the leg yield, and turning smoothly so often evade me. It's a little like those annoying yoga teachers who tell you not to compete with other students, but when the intern on the next mat has tucked her heels into her armpits and looks transcendently smug, you always do anyway (it's either that or reach over to tickle her to see what happens); I am trying to be happy with my own progress, but I want to be doing more. In other words, I'm perfectly pleased with how I'm doing, I just wish I were doing better faster sooner.

Tonight went fairly well, with only one runaway, and we tried some bending work that I kind of sort of managed. But after class, as I was rinsing off Cappi's bridle, Pat came up and said firmly, "Put your helmet back on and come ride my horse. I want you to see how the shoulder-in should feel." I couldn't decide between "ohshit" and "fuck YEAH," because Pat's horse is (a) enormous, (b) super sensitive, and (c) highly trained. She's universally popular, because she loves spending time with people and will happily snorgle you for hours, but Pat's told us enough stories about her training adventures that I was a little nervous about putting a heel wrong and finding myself hanging from a treebranch. Pat snapped on a lunge line, though, so I probably wasn't going to get a fast trip anywhere exciting and therefore had no excuse to chicken out, and I climbed up feeling like I was reaching the third story of a building (Cappi: 14.2 hands; QC: 17+, or about a foot and a half taller). We did some simple bending work that was noticeably different from Cappi's intermittent responses to my confusing signals. It was like dancing with other dance students and then briefly getting paired with an experienced partner; there was a real clarity and sense of relief from having my signals interpreted correctly or at least seeing QC react when I fixed my hands. Cappi is probably not the best horse for me (Seesterperson: "I do not trust this Cappi. He seems to be a wild one"), but my goal is to understand him better and make it easier for him to do what I want, so each step is helpful.

But it still feels like I'm building a sand castle one grain at a time.

It's easy, there's a trick to it

I am pleased to report that Cappi did not have a jumping fit about boogers in the woods during last night's dressage lesson. He did, however, strongly object to being told to stay on one side of the ring, doing spirals at the trot, while the rest of the horses stayed on the other side of the ring. After his initial arguments met with failure but seemed likely to be repeated on appeal, Pat put up some low poles to remind him of where to work. Confident that he would get the message, what with seat and leg and rein and fences, we began again, Pat coaching from the center and me riding from the top.

Which is approximately when we all learned that (a) Cappi loves to jump, (b) Cappi is quite good at jumping, and (c) Cappi believes that the safest place to end up is about 2 inches from the butt of the barn's most ill-tempered horse, whither he will run at speed. Sweetie, you're supposed to be smarter than poor young Edmund; chasing death at Grayson's heels with a shell-shocked rider on your back is no way to go about proving that the years have made you wiser.

On the plus side, I'm told that I looked less spastic than might have been expected, given that I don't do much jump work. It turns out that Pat really has improved my seat; now we've just got to work on learning to control the horse.