No home internet until Jun 3

Will I get more done? Probably not, I've been substituting reading some humorous books instead of tackling fencing, pen cleaning etc so far. I am gone again this weekend, probably will be home on monday. Maybe I'll be slightly productive then. I bought duct tape to restock my trailer for endurance trips today and found my breast collar. I may buy a new one at the ride. The snap on this one is permanently corroded shut so Its kind of a PITA to loosen it for water etc. I have one last bag of feed still in my car. I need to decide whether to put the whole bag in my trailer, or put it in the bag in the feed room and just take a bucket of it in the trailer. Shade looked great when I turned the horses out on the grass patch this morning. I got my mammogram done. I don't mind doing that every year but I'm not doing the full gyn physical any more often then every 2 years, blech I hate those things, and since I had the hysty so there are no more fibroids I don't think I need it even every 2 years. I should try to find my health fair bloodwork. I never even looked at it when I picked it up. Perhaps I did not want to know if my cholesterol levels etc were bad.

1 mile ride today

maybe 1.5 miles. Mia wanted to come and since I was only planning a short easy ride to play with the centered riding bits from the clinic and it was an nice cool morning I let her. So of course I get on and before warming up hardly any the dogs are cruising up the road and I got nervous they would cut into the neighborhood rather than stay straight so I asked Shade to canter and put herself between Mia and that right hand turn. THEN I started thinking about my riding and cueing correctly etc.

Shade was cool about it, the dogs did not turn off where they were not supposed to anywhere and I was remembering the cues to go or shift to faster gait, slow down, and remembering to keep balanced right to left so it was a successful ride. I took 4 of 6 bags of feeds I bought yesterday out of my car and packed up various things for the Westcliffe ride too.

Now I should be vigorously catching up on some bits at work but I made some good progress on my idl programs and am having a bit of a mental break. The PI is just going to have to live with less than 100% results today, I'm already spending extra time versus budget on this while I work to wrap my head around IDL. I have found some good IDL references on the web and finally tracked down my bug I had yesterday that was driving me nuts. Nested 'where' statements do not work; DOH. Next I have to switch back to my other funding programs and catch up a bit.

Well better get to it, I need to install skype on my desktop and figure out if it works.

Monday headache -hughesNet

Well its monday so its always hard to get back into work groove. My sinuses feel swollen again, and I was slow taking sudafed so had to add some Aleve. Talking to the hughes net support person did not help. She was very polite and scheduled a tech to contact me to come out to re-install the transmitter and set up my new modem. But she had a pronounced Indian accent and used a lot of extra polite chatter and confirming what we said and it aggravated my headache.

The clinic was great. I was struggling with catching on to some of the instructions but learned a lot and the clinician is great. I am just not wired right to pick things up in a snap and handle processing things in a group setting, and also tend to have syntax issues where I hear a word or phrase that most people take as a synonym for (ie into the rail ) and I take it as into the center. But I hopefully will remember some things when I get to ride again. If I don't make good IDL progress, or possibly even if I do I may have to wait to ride until wednesday, and then it will be the endurance ride so I hope I remember a few key bits that are helpful to Shade. I was riding with excess weight on the right side and had stretched my right leather and had to 'punch' a hole to even my stirrups saturday night. It felt better on sunday and I have some visualizations to balance my seat bones side to side and now I least know that I should check myself and correct if I'm heavy on the right seat bone and stirrup.

Lots of folks commented on how cute Shade was, she was licking and chewing when I would stretch into downward transitions correctly and of course she has a cute dished face and is a cute little horse anyway. Sometimes I feel like an oaf riding her, but she manages and hopefully now I will do better with my balance and make that easier for her.

WooHoo, I got a riding slot at the clinic!

It is $150 not the $100 from the first email. That is a fair price and makes the the audit fee more reasonable. I am so excited that I'll get expert feedback on my riding. Hope I am thick skinned enough to handle it. I really need all the help I can get to be more of a centered rider.

RIP Peekaboo

I finally got her buried today. I'm glad I did it but it was not pleasant, the carcass looked intact on top but was pretty decomposed when I went to pick it up. I had Dad dig an extra hole with the tractor post hole auger when he set a post to fence off the trees in the corner of the paddock from the horses. --This is to provide shade into the future. The horses will eat the trees out of boredom if they have access all the time. I took down my crappy fence on saturday so horses could eat the grass growing in that corner. Then I took off my FLAT tire which had gone from having a slow leak to having a super fast leak, replaced it with one of my snow tires so I would not have to drive on the donut spare, and went to the tire store to have it fixed before heading to work. I couldn't remember if I had gotten road hazard but they fixed it for free so I must have done. Now I must get to working even if the coffee refuses to kick in. I need to tend to my neglected network of ground base GPS sites processed for water vapor, and see if I can make a bit more progress on IDL programs today.

And should call the farm hosting the endurance clinic, but perhaps I will just not. Easier to beg for forgiveness if they are annoyed to have an auditor show up with equine in tow. I want to ride from the host ranch on friday and then maybe meet someone on sunday to ride on that side of town or just ride from the ranch again.

4 miles on Shade this morning

I was dragging. Didn't break away from work until way too late monday. But Shade felt good so YAY there. I have made some progress on some of the things that kept me late and had me almost tearing my hair out yesterday. It is a darned good thing I am quite talented at debugging. SHEESH if I were just a tiny bit more paranoid I would think folks were trying to make me fail.

I know they aren't. For one thing I am not fearsome competition at this stuff plus there is more work than hours right now but two separate projects where someone put in edits that break things in obscure ways will make a gal have paranoid thoughts.

Mia the detective dog

I need to get a new picture of her, but will write post while I'm thinking about it, I forgot to snap any pics this morning.

Before my fun ride yesterday I took the dogs for a walk. I was annoyed to find that someone had dumped a load of old furniture right in the road on the utility road. I like to drive .2 miles and park the car in a super wide approach to some oil or natural gas facility and the junk was about .1 mile up the road. Tried to take the dogs the other direction up a driveway to a cellphone tower but bullheaded Mia went across the road and up her utility road so I cussed and parked my car on the corner and Ole and I followed Mia's lead -straight to a stolen, stripped and abandoned vehicle. Hmm, so now the dumped furniture seems like deliberate road block vs just extra inconsiderate moron who dumps stuff on the utility roads rather than drive it to a landfill or rent a dumpster. So I got the vehicle make and memorized the license plate. I was going to write a draft text on my cell ph rather than trust memory, didn't have paper and pen --but I couldn't make it take #1, it was just giving me punctuation marks. I am such a luddite. So when I got the dogs home I phoned the county sheriffs with that information before I could get myself going -running 10-15 minutes later than I should have taken off, but luckily L and her group run on horse people time too and were even a couple minutes later than I was.

When I got home I was slow getting the driveway gate closed and Mia was across the road nosing something. It was Peekaboo's body. So now I know Peekaboo must have been hit by a car rather than falling prey to a coyote. Oh right now I am feeling bad thinking of the cat dragging herself into the grass after getting hit now but at least I know what happened to her. If I shake off laziness maybe I'll bury her tomorrow morning.

Shade is a rock star 18-19 miles today

Whenever I come home with her after trailering out every equine on the place is calling to her. She really rocked today. We met L and 2 of her buddies at Chatfield. We all went their favorite loop of 5.5 miles. Ones horse was a bit tender footed. Owner skipped shoeing on last farrier visit but has not been working to condition her horses feet to be barefoot. I am too lazy to do the barefoot hoof thing so I just have Shade shod in mid to late spring when I expect to ramp up my riding. And L's ear got hit by a branch. It bled pretty good for a bit and was sore so they made plans to ride tomorrow but I have to work and I wanted to get a good conditioning ride today.

So I took Shade across the road and up Waterton Canyon. She was SOOOOOOO good, I would not have even tried to take her up the canyon alone a few years ago. She even had to go past some BigHorn sheep. Funny, the sheep are so used to people that they were practically getting scritchies but they moved up the hill when Shade went by. I waited until no one was coming down and let Shade go clear to the outside edge of the road. She snorted a bit at the sheep but she was good. She would latch on to bicyclists a little bit after they passed her as we were going up the canyon. We went the full 6 miles +? a bit past the dam and up the colorado trail. I am not sure if 6 miles is to the dam or to where the road part ends and it becomes single track trail. With the distance from the parking lot I'm sure we went at least 18 miles total. What a fantastic mare. I would not have taken her unless she was fine with bikes but she was fine with bike trailers, kiddos on bikes etc too. The only thing she was looked hard at was fishing poles. Lots of anglers hike up the canyon to fish in the river.

The day gave me faith in the country too. I saw so many family groups hiking and biking and everyone was so polite. Not just to the OMG someone on an AYRAB but to everyone in the canyon.

Saturday we went 5 miles riding out from home. I think if injury does not bite this will be the year I do the pioneer ride at Shamrock.

indulging in a private snark

I guess I am a bit anti-social, I frequent a bb or email list for a while and develop dislikes for people who go on and on about pet subjects, or only ever whine or brag etc. I'm a big girl and I learn to just skip or delete w/o wasting my time. Lord knows I still waste a lot of time but I won't waste it on repetitious downers. But sometimes just the title/header puts thoughts in my head.

Current example "I am screaming angry 11!" ok I put in the eleventy rather than just !!! If I read the post I will just regret wasting the time because my thought on reading that title from that person was "When are you not?" They usually don't post that right in the title but a huge portion of their posts are being angry about something. A 'favorite' of mine is the rants about someone not providing good enough care after they dumped a high needs critter. Umm, if you were not willing to keep the high needs critter don't complain that the dumpee recipient only gave said critter basic care. I'm being cowardly not saying it to their face but I don't want to start a flame war there and get banned. I still lurk there because some people I still enjoy post mainly there and I pop on with 'Happy B-day', 'well done' 'prayers' etc and I don't want to burn the bridge to those folks. I just had to vent this snark attack.

5 miles this morning.

It was sunny this morning, so warm I decided to put on a coolmax tee and l/s shirt instead of the sweatshirt I put on first thing in the morning. Next time I must grab a full sleeve length shirt for over the top. My forearms got a bit sunburnt. Shade was pretty good but she spooked at something coming home, not a horrible hard turn but she was snorting and "ooh I don't want to go on" I have NO idea what she saw. I was teasing her afterward that she must be eating locoweed and having hallucinations. Ole was pretty good. After yesterday he NEEDED to be. I think I must buy a GOOD electric collar and put it on him when I let him come with me riding, or taking him and Mia for walks. Rotten dog went down the subdivision road and attacked the chow as I was honking at him to stay on 6 and then come back to me

I was mortified. Ole even went into chow's unfenced yard after him. He has got to let go of the grudge he has from the chow and buddies jumping Ole and Mia this winter. It is insane that he keeps wanting to go after that dog now months later, and I am scared he is going to be like this with any other dog he has decided is an enemy. So I will tell parents they cannot let him roam, and buy a good rechargeable shock collar and use on him and push for fence reinforcements so he can't slip off without a lot of effort I guess. I am a big weenie and don't want to just put him down and really dont want to fight the parents on "put him down" but if he cannot be trusted to be always friendly and can't be contained all of the time there isn't really a choice.

I am such a perfect fit for this project

Everything I do lately is a clusterf*ck. And with the other snafu's all over the code on the experimental cpu its just tons and tons of fun. My mood fits the weather perfectly.

7.7 miles today

I would not have gone that far and would have done the 6 or up to 6.5 miles faster but they are putting water in the ditch. First day. I failed to make Ole come to road 4 and go over the culvert. Silly me believing he would/could come across. He likes to play in water but he is a very weak swimmer. So I ended up going to road 8 so he could cross on that culvert and then coming 1/2 mile to the utility road alongside the highway so I wouldn't be taking Ole through the backyard that bordered the ditch on my (homeward) side. There was a string of trucks coming down road 8 too. Shade was acting a bit goofy so I got off and led her after back tracking to a spot to get off the road when we met the first one. I didn't get to work until after 2pm. Yuck going to be a long day. I must try to get in to work earlier tomorrow as a snowstorm is forecast to come in tuesday night.

I need a hardier dog, but since that won't happen I need to make arrangements to trailer out and ride longer distances with hills on the weekends! But I do feel like Shade can handle the 3-day ride July 2-4 if I keep up my end and get some miles on her and she does not get injured.

9 miles saturday 5 miles sunday

Ole and I are wimps. We were both pretty tired sunday morning, after just a 9 mile ride yesterday. And Ole didn't go the whole distance but being a dog he may have gone that far checking out stuff. Ole got hot and dry again but I was prepared with a plastic dish in my camelback and the water bladder full so it was easy to give him a drink after I had turned around and got back to where he was trailing along. A little water perked him up and he went the longer way home with Shade and I instead of taking a shortcut. Then he was dragging again at the corner of our road so I offered him another small drink and led Shade the rest of the way. She was really good for eating the whole ride instead of just at the start. I hope that carries over to competitions.

Later on sunday I rode Shade and Ponied Sadie and we went 5.3 miles. Ole came too. I rode to where he could get down to water but the dumb dog didn't go down and wet his paws. Oh well he made it home and was a good couch potato the rest of the day. Sadie had some Ayrab moments. Finally some proof that she is arabian LOL.

Saturday afternoon after I recovered from my ride I cleaned Cindy's stall a bit and then let her out with a halter and lead dragging to eat grass. She is BETTER. I was coming with a curry and she thought I might put her back in right away so she went trotting a bit. VERY carefully thank goodness and didn't seem to aggravate the injured tendon. I have been applying microTek, trying to get her skin back to par after all the rubbing from being in wraps for almost 4 weeks.

It worked out well that I didn't get any riding plans made for today. Mom and dad ended up borrowing my p/u and trailer to go to a little trail ride at her riding instructor's barn. Dad found out there are shorts in his trailers wiring. Drained his p/u battery overnight from having the trailer plugged in. Well I am tired and the toothbrushes should be well sterilized so off to bed.

Well it was a wonderful morning.

I rode Shade 6 miles, the temps and wind were decent. I took off my windbreaker before I got on I was feeling so warm. I didn't really miss it but it was borderline a couple of times when the breeze picked up. Clouds rolled in around noon so having my schedule was such a blessing. I was on cloud nine, thinking that if I couldn't afford to go to rides anymore I wouldn't miss them all that much I enjoy just riding my girl at home as much as going out somewhere. I do really like having the endurance ride factor though, its is a great excuse to go ride when I would wimp out or feel too busy, and to leave Mia at home because I need to condition not just piddle and Mia does not NEED walks when she has ~ 5 acres to patrol every night. Heh that sounds so martial like we make the dog do patrols. She does go around the yard, although not to the pack of the horse pens where the dog proof fencing is a few times a night. I know this because she barks as she does it and I hear the ones I'm not sleeping through. Funny GP dog and her instincts. I took her and Ole for a walk yesterday so she is not deprived of outings either.

Well I am feeling better and getting a few things done after I took sudafedPE and generic alleve, better living through drugs baby! They are kicking in fairly quickly so that is good. I just hate getting enough of an allergy/sinus attack that I need to take the pain reliever as well as the decongestant twice in one week. But really May probably is my normal allergy month. This year some things bloomed really early with our mild spring, then we had a strong rain Apr 22-23 that must have washed all pollen away and a few cooler days and now those flowers must be producing pollen again.

I am getting a new project at work. Totally new, looking at some CO2 data instead of my GPS projects. Its good to be busy, keep me away from the political blogs somewhat so I wont get all depressed and a few months more job security is a very good thing in this crazy economic time. But I hope I am not spreading myself too thin, and really getting into jack of all trades but master of none of them territory.

Whew, found my purse

I looked for 10 minutes this morning and finally just grabbed checks from the box to pay the chiro thinking I must have left the purse in the office. I do that about once a month. But I had not. When I got to the office no purse and I remembered I had put cards to mail with intention to get stamps and addy labels from the house and mail them today. No I don't think I'm having early old-timers, my mom called me 'absent minded professor' when I was 10. Anyway I was looking again at home and beginning to think I must have left the purse in the bathroom at the office and a janitor turned it in even though there was no note or email and finally I found it hiding almost under the vacuum cleaner cover. Mom bought one of those cutsie vacuum doll covers several months ago. I usually leave my purse in the porch but I took it past the doorway and then dropped it by the vacuum last night.

Meh, only went 5 miles tuesday morning

It has slipped into wednesday so I should go to bed soon. Not only did I not trailer out and ride 15+ miles but the wind was so intense I shortened my morning ride at home from the 7 miles I thought I'd do before I stepped out the door to only 5 miles. Shade was a trooper. Wimpy Ole was bouncing around to go but he went out about 1 mile and then I didn't see him so I think he went home after chasing prairie dogs for just a bit. He was laying in the grass near the gate when I got home.

The regime and some DNC committee are PUSHING this meme of "we have our boot on BP's throat" over this oil spill. Good grief, that is not imagery of goading BP to clean up as quickly as possible,pay costs of cleanup undertaken by the U.S. governement etc , its imagery of killing them while they are down and the Dems are embracing the imagery for their campaign fund raising ads and things. I knew the Dems are anti-business (except for fascist gov/bus partnerships) but I still naively thought much of the horrible policies were the Dems not understanding they were injuring productive businesses. How do they think the world can function without any businesses? Everyone knows how badly the government running commerce model worked in the USSR and China. I think they blot it out because China went to the "You can have capitalism as long as the commie party retains all this power model ???. I should be enraged at OUR regimes response to the oil spill, the attempted Times Square bombing and general crap but I just feel tired. Must snap out of it and at least donate to a conservative again this week, but right now will toddle off to bed.

Maybe his name is really Houdini?

Boots slipped his collar yesterday and hid it somewhere to make sure it stayed off. Well we don't need it to keep track of who he is in a one cat household, he just better not slip outside and get lost. Of course cats that wander off around here are more likely to become a coyote meal than get scooped up and taken to a shelter.

I'm bummed, my planned trailer out ride is canceled. My friends horse threw a shoe yesterday and is a bit off today. The wind is so strong I don't even want to ride out from home before going to work either but since I DO still want to do the full 3 days of Shamrock I had better cowboy up. Shade will feel that she is having to do 90% of the cowboying up, well maybe not, she is not bad about wind if its not cold and it is pretty warm today.

I'm so lazy about writing

Catch up day. I rode 7 miles on saturday. Shade felt great after she warmed up. I set up to trailer somewhere and meet my friend to ride tomorrow. Worked about 6 hours on sunday. Stopped at Walmart for lemon tea. They only had 4 boxes left and I was so bummed before I spotted them and wondered if they were going to stop selling it that I bought them all. I had planned on stocking up with at least 3 boxes. Target doesn't carry the lemon flavor anymore so I have to get it when I'm at Walmart. While I was there I bought a new sports bra, another item that I cant find models I like at Target. I am so happy I don't need $$ brands like title IX.

Took the dogs for a walk sunday before I left but they didn't get much exercise. I spied someone else walking their dogs just a 100 yds after parking the car and letting Mia out, so got a twine around Mia, turned around and we went across the road. Mia was done after just a short ways on that road so back into the car. The other dog walker turned west on the main road so I went back down the utility road but Ole was just fixated on the chow so I didn't even let the dogs out, just drove them home at that point. I bought Boots some food at Walmart, he is eating dry food better, I bought him a small bag of dry so it would be fresh to the bottom of the bag, but he was eating some of the old stuff while I was gone.