Ah thank goodness for white noise on the internet

And offices that are decent for sound although not perfect. Some people need a volume meter that will flash at them or something when they are on the phone. Or just an automatic door shutting dealio in today's case, but I was surprised that just shutting my door did not take care of things, it usually has made a huge difference and I have not needed anything more. This building is BAD for transmitting sound down the hallways but at least the office walls are decent for sound blocking.

I need to focus better. I'll finish reading the paper I agreed to review this weekend and write up that review. It is SO nice to have a paper that is easy to read for a change. I need to study the equations, I'm weak on equations and whether they are actually correct when I review papers. But anyway I need to wrap that up and start october with some good focus and making progress on something beyond just routine data processing. I've been coasting way too much and need to actually do some thought intensive work.

WooHoo, even better, the bits of high pitched phone conversation in German or something which was driving me batty has ended. I'm going to have to find a white noise source that has waterfall, gurgling stream in it, this one was too much like a machine fan and it was a relief to turn it off.

I am looking forward to the weekend, just want to disk up some goats heads, and do a bit of riding. Maybe I'll see if dad can set me up to practice with a rifle so if I do buy a bull elk tag it won't be out of the question that I could take a shot if I see one up close. Big problem is I am so bad at spotting game it wouldn't pay for me to start early by myself and dad is so bad at getting up and out there early in the day when the elk are more likely to be seen. Oh well, I need to frame it as just vacation. I managed to have fun on the trail riding trip because I went in with realistic expectations, need to do the same with this instead of being frustrated that dad does not care if he fills his tag. I would really LIKE to have some yummy game to eat in exchange for "burning" the vacation time, fuel etc as for me hunting is not fun in the way that actively riding all day, especially in an endurance event with other folks and trotting and cantering the easy spots is.

I put down a deposit for a saddle today

Doing my part to stimulate the economy. No, its more like "buy something that will last before we get Zimbabwe style inflation" I am no economist, I actually expected inflation would have hit a year earlier and be bigger than what we've gotten so far. Lucky for me as I just have not gotten my act together to do anything with my land in WY. I get dismayed that I was so naive and bought a lot that didn't have a decent building and driveway, vehicle parking and turn around or loop around spot.

Mom is out of the hospital. Still coughing some but it doesn't sound nearly as nasty as it did last week so they made some progress. I just hope she can recover all the way. I'm not particularly hopeful of that actually, but hopefully she at least gets back to her normal for the last few years.

I think the saddle will be a good investment. I am impressed with the level of detail they want for both rider measurements and I had to make a cast of Sadie's back. I'll have to check in with them and see if they want to send the cast back and have me redo it since we didn't take pictures of the cast on the horse's back. I have decided not to get my trainers special model she developed. She came up with a cavalry/endurance saddle hybrid with split seat in front and then a 1/2 seat that is the more typical padded saddle seat. I maybe just needed a bigger size but my butt was hitting the edges of the seat, she had an older model endurance saddle that I also tried and it was pretty comfortable me with perhaps a bit too narrow (or high) of a twist that I got used to pretty quickly and didn't notice after riding in it for 10 minutes. I found out from the saddle maker that they can put the 3 point rigging on the older saddle model. As long as one of the trees they typically build that saddle on fits Sadie's back I think its a safer option to make sure I love the saddle as well. When I was in my 20's I might have figured I would adjust to or live with a saddle that felt uncomfortable to me if the horse liked it. Now I figure it should be possible for us both to be pretty happy.

mom is in hospital with pneumonia

She had dad take her to the ER at Presbyterian in Denver yesterday afternoon after a bit of theatrics. I don't know why she felt the need to demonstrate for us that she was really sick. That was counter-productive since she moans and groans almost all the time and we tend to think she's just aiming for sympathy if she amps it up. OTOH when she announced she needed to go in to an ER in a rational manner (I assume it was rational, I was outside at the time) dad drove her in. X-ray showed pneumonia in one lung and her blood O2 was low and then one Doc told dad she was also anemic. They admitted her and are most likely doing the IV antibiotics and all. I am waiting to see if she announces to Ed and Margret or any visitors that we almost killed her off with the trail riding trip. If she does I think I will try to put on my best sardonic tone and go "yeah we were hoping to get some inheritance but you're too too tough of an old bird and will live till you've spent every last cent and then some from uncle Sam and probably from me too" lolz, its not terribly funny but if I take it too serious it just depresses me. Seeing mom parallel gram's whiny, bitch and moan behavior makes me worry that I'm prone to become the same way when I get old. Except since I'm an old maid there will be no one to whine to and if I need assistance I'll have to try to be the kind of person people enjoy helping. (polite, appreciative, keeps a sense of humor and joy of life ) I hate when I can't do something but I have learned that it is ok to ask for help and let someone be the chivalrous knight once in a while. That does also work within the family rather than just relying on blood obligations but I'm too cowardly to try to tell mom that.

OH Good Grief.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/09/20/pielke-sr-on-that-hide-and-seek-ocean-heat/#more-47793

I suppose I should be happy that mother nature is revealing that the AGW scare was based on a few scientists having over confidence in their MODELS and being concerned about genuinely devastating consequences that the models predicted COULD happen and then the nature of government science funding and hucksters migrating to money led to the whole situation.

But since I got sucked into worrying about politics and from there into the deep *liberal* bias in most of the media I have a hard time getting energized by the destruction of AGW theory which is not happening nearly fast enough. I'm more like "who cares about AGW even it were true?" the commies have instilled Barry in the whitehouse * and while this may (please god) backfire on them because it woke up a whole lot of formerly politically and to a large extent culturally apathetic folks like myself*, there has been enormous damage done to the country and it is not at all clear that we will undo Obamacare and the various other hobbles Barry and the marxist congress have put on America and fully recover.

Plus radical islamic cultists seem to be very close to acquiring nuclear weapons. That definitely scares me. Perhaps it will take them getting and using a few WMDs to wake the world up to what a destructive cult Islam is, right on a par with marxism; I suppose I should say socialism/communism since the concept of greedy lazy bastards wanting the state to seize wealth from those who produced, found or inherited it to "distribute it fairly" predates mr. Marx by many centuries.

I should force myself to study Islam sometime. I think that old devil socialism is a huge part of Islamic beliefs, plus their general fear of technological progress and some really odd views about "morality" What *I think* I know in that respect is that Islam is shame based, rather than guilt based. Thus its not that breaking of a taboo, law or religious rule will bring guilt so they strive to live better to feel better like the judeo-christian model, its that getting CAUGHT breaking a taboo/rule will bring shame --so anyone who feels they have power to avoid being detected or outed is free to break any rule they don't like. They hang homosexuals, but pedophilia on boys at least among the 'power set' is pretty common.

LOL, from AGW to communists to islamists in just a few, no doubt quite disjointed, paragraphs. Probably have vented my philosophizing side for at least a few weeks anyway.

Wormed horses Sep 17, 2011

Since I don't keep proper health records for them I'll at least note it here I did not worm the mini's I think they are fine until a hard frost, THEY are keeping weight perfectly fine, as were most of the big horses but shared paddocks means they all get wormed if I think one might need it.

Also had Shade's teeth floated today. Hopefully now she will bounce back to plenty of weight fairly quickly. I know overweight is not good for horses, butI I don't think I've ever had ours obese; not at this place anyway. They don't have any lush pastures to get fat on and I don't feed a whole lot of grain or lots of rich alfalfa.

I do not like seeing ribs on my horse unless she is bending so Shade was too skinny for my tastes. She usually has kept her weight pretty good so I hope the sharp edges on her teeth were the main cause, I'll be bumming if she doesn't bounce back with just light work now and giving her a little extra food. Dr Mike didn't think the teeth were real bad, but he doesn't have power dentistry tools so he doesn't float any more than necessary as it is hard on his body. No one else got floated today, just rabies jabs and RazzMo got his left hind leg checked out. He may have some tearing fairly high, right below the hock. That was the concern area for Dr Mike but hopefully Razz will heal up fine JIC mom actually gets back to riding regularly. I honestly don't think she would get into any serious riding anyway though. She prefers watching football and now I think basketball as well to riding even without any physical issues or at least any beyond what she has had for years. With luck I'll never find out what my discomfort threshold is where I'd rather do something else for more than a few weeks before I get the itch to be back in the saddle.


Hopefully we'll be lucky and not have any sore necked horses. 2% get sore from the shot in Dr Mikes experience, 9 horses done. I don't recall any soreness last time I did rabies 2 or 3 years ago so hopefully it will be ok.

Being In Total Control Herself

Last week I mentioned at the team meeting that the raid on the research CPU was full and I wouldn't be able to keep putting data there for researchers unless it was expanded or some subset of data was removed or something. I hear -- crickets

Monday I sent an email with disk usage counts and "what should I remove" as subject heading. Still only hear crickets.

So today I sent an email to some researchers and our operations group stating that data type BlaBlah is going to be nuked on monday at 5pm except for several days that I know are special research periods and any other data periods I am requested to preserve, plus that last ~ 18 months of data. As time goes on I'll have to reduce the # of months for keeping this data type sunless a bigger disk RAID is set up but whatever.

I didn't really feel like it was my place to say "this goes" but since the supposed manager/supervisors did not say "lets get a bigger raid so we can preserve everything"; nor let me know that the HUGE, intermediate step data type was the thing to remove I had to make the call myself. Its OK, I can be a b!tch as needed; but weak-assed leadership annoys me. It would have been nice to at least be told "well you'll have to find a solution yourself."

Apparently I had some delayed DIMR yesterday

I got home from work to see 3 horses munching down on the alfalfa hay outside of AJ's pen. Oops, didn't latch the gate to the little pasture Sadie, Lady and CJ were in when I brought hay in yesterday. I think they had been out long enough to be getting thirsty. They came right in when I opened their gate and went in with some hay.

Then this morning when I turned on the sprinkler in mom's garden here comes Mia. She had went into the houseyard last night ot investigate something and then I closed the garage doors and she was stuck all night. No wonder I didn't see her when I put her food and thyroid pill outside the front door.

DIMR is Distance Induced Mental Retardataion. I usually get it worse from driving long distances than riding and its only 2 hours from Turkey Creek to home and I had didn't ride any on sunday so there is really no excuse for me to have been so out of things yesterday. Before I found all those glitches I was feeling so on top of things for finally writing thank-yous to all the Ride Managers and the one private land owners for the rides I attended this summer.

FUN FUN ride saturday at Turkey Creek

I took Shade to Turkey Creek and rode a 50 on saturday. What a BLAST. She motored through it like she was just tickled to be able to power trot and canter after having to walk 90some miles through the ND badlands with lame Razz and the parents that cant handle bouncing anyway. We were done before 2pm with a 7am ride start. WooHoo. Only 1 hold of an hour which helped. Part of the course was winding along a brushy fenceline, periodically having to detour a bit away from the fence around patches of scrub oak, boulders, little gullys etc; some of this through gopher dug ground that had to be walked or just slow trotted through so that was a nice break from the two track and gravel roads that just invited a fast pace.

The only stress was riding with just one shoe left from my 6.5 weeks shoeing job. I was too lazy to pull the good shoe after removing the twisted back shoe before the ride and had thought perhaps there would be a farrier riding there and I could pay them to spend 3 minutes doing what takes me 20+ minutes. Well I ended up just using a hoof boot over that shoe for the first 25 mile. 1 mile before the end of that loop one of the riight front hoof boot came off and I just picked it up and carried it the rest of the loop. Well I didn't pay any attention when I put it back on to go back out and repeat the 25 mile course and it popped off after just about .5 mile --the gaiter was ripped. I tried putting it on again and it made it only a hundred yards.

So my laziness sort of saved the day -- I took the hoof boot that was over the one hind shoe off and put it on that right front foot and rode the 24 miles that way. Jim caught up with me while I did that. He had some trouble following the trail the first loop. We rode about 18 miles together and then Shade was wanting to munch a bit and walk when he took off from a water stop and I decided the pace had been pretty fast for her and I should ride the last alone so she wouldn't push herself too hard. I think that was the best thing to do. She walked a lot and acted a bit like she had hit a wall, then grabbed some grass as we walked through a meadow portion and after that she was ready to do a medium trot most of the way to the finish line.

So that was a really nice riding feel, like I had enjoyed at Shamrock where I was able to finish with time left and not feel exhausted. The Sturgis, and Laramie rides had drained me with ending up being all day affairs in warmer temps. *I* could have ridden another ride like this one, but I felt like Shade had done plenty after just 3 days rest between getting home from the trail riding trip and going to this ride. Besides I didn't want to push my luck with the hoof boots.

I dragged Grey along just to keep the chores a bit closer to what they had been during the trail riding trip. He was gang-pressed into giving L's cute little daughters pony(lead-line) rides sunday morning. He didn't seem to think that was too bad. Bugger didn't want to let me catch him on friday; Sadie was all eager and almost went with me but she wouldn't load (I have not ever loaded her into my gooseneck, only into the stock horse BP) so after a few times of Sadie of stepping in with her front feet and backing out I got her to take an extra step with the fronts but still not lifting the hinds in and *I* asked her to back out and called it "a good trailer loading practice session" and went back and took the 10 minutes to catch Grey. I think he was worried he was going to have to do a hunting trip excursion so it was probably good for him to just go and hang out and eat and do no more than give pony rides for a couple laps around the arena.

Sis and I brought em back alive --MaahDaahHey ride

Got dad through 4/5s of the MaahDaah Hey trail. We skipped one leg because the old ford where one could drive a vehicle across was washed out in their early summer flooding so it would have been major effort to shuffle a vehicle around the long way to have waiting after riding that leg and we also heard the horses could make it but the water was stirrup high (with not knowing what the banks were like and 2 short horses that seemed a bit iffy)

Mom rode one leg of the trail. Lady stepped in a soft spot crossing a creek and mom fell off when Lady was surging out of it I guess. She got checked out by a chiro tuesday and did have 2 dislocated ribs.

Lady thought she was a goner, later that same day with mom riding her. (mom expected the horse to watch out for the sink hole -- well DUH horses --especially ones that haven't ridden in that kind of country -- don't think about the fact that there could just be a thin crust on the edge of a hole.) Lady just stepped across one and it gave way under her hind legs. Mom got off and we got the saddle off but Lady had tried to get up and couldn't and she was just lying there, I was worried she had seriously injured a leg at that point, she seemed to have a hopeless look in her eye.

She got one leg out with us tugging on her tail but the other one was in all the way up to her stifle. Lucky she is a small horse and my dad is fairly big and stout. I got a lead rope around her leg, she did not even twitch the leg she had out of the hole while I did it, I couldn't have done it with a horse that was putting my head in danger by not holding still. With dad on the rope and sis and I pulling on the tail we got her lifted a bit and then sis manuevered Ladys leg out of the hole; we pulled Lady backwards so her hind feet would not be right at the hole if she scrambled to her feet and Lady managed to get herself upright and walk forward to a better spot on the trail.

Lady was then standing there looking like OMG I almost died! What have you gotten me into with these BADlands?! My relief humor was to give her a pat and say "sorry kiddo but hey still better than if you had ended up on a slaughter truck" We just led Lady the rest of that day. Mom was going to ride sis' horse Ramsey but the stirrups wouldn't go short enough so Shade ended up carrying her. I rode Doc, sis's spare horse, with stirrups that I could just reach on one side if I went tippy toe. I felt like a total dude, just having to use the saddle horn and let him pick his way in the fading light.

Much more adventerous riding than I remembered from six years ago, mostly due to damage from flooding and little mudslides but we got through it and I got the 3 colo. horses home on tuesday.

Mom was harping and harping that we should have listened to the camp host that the leg from CCC to Bennett was rough. Well it was; but the first half of the Bennett to Magpie leg was pretty rough too and we were riding the last bit in in the dark again. If we'd had mom slowing us down on that one we might have ended up waiting out for daylight there, might have made it to Bennett w/o mom. Who knows.

I do know it was easier riding without her along. I cannot stand riding with people who spew negative statements; either mom or endurance riders who whine that trail is boring, or its hard to follow the way it was markedk or they chose too many rocky technical sections and made the day take too long. If you don't like the ride don't do it again but whining on the trail doesn't help anything dammit. I never ever want to take mom on a trail again, she needs to stick to flat roads and arena work.