Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Black Hills trip was pretty good for fandamily

Three days of great riding.  I had a little trouble with hoof boots popping off.  Maybe Sadie will need to use the epics on her front feet and non-wide gloves on her hinds -- I had epics on hinds and wide gloves on her fronts and things were a bit too loose.  

Sadie was much calmer with group of horses by day three and she got lots of practice crossing water.   I got off and led her a few spots where she was anxious and I was concerned she'd tangle in a fence or land on sharp rock etc if she took a wild leap but she walked nicely through most of the creek crossings.   On the 2nd riding day we split it into morning and afternoon rides and I tried my re-fitted saddle on the afternoon ride. 

 Dad was just sure Ole needed to go along and get some exercise --so we tried it and only about a mile into the ride I notice Ole is not hanging with the ranch owners dogs anymore.   I had been tired and not even sure I wanted to go so we turned around to make sure Ole had gone back to camp or if he hadn't have a good chance of him hearing us call.   But the saddle stayed in place real well so I used it again on day 3 which included hills and it stayed in place very well.   A very good thing as the treeless was causing a swelling on her back on the left side.

I did get a little testy with  dad and sis.  On Saturday dad announced we should clean the pens and not leave it all till Sunday morning when we were leaving.  I said "OF course, we have been cleaning the pens every day"   "I didn't know you cleaned Friday, -well no I hadn't felt like making myself hoarse just to announce to him that I was doing it,  it was not a big enough job that I needed help or anything and sis jumps in with "*I* only cleaned my horses pen, not yours" at which point I got pissed at them -- I'm not lazy and I've never felt the need to announce every little thing I do, and it was high annoyance for them to be acting like a thing hadn't happened just because I just did it.   and Sunday sis was griping at me for 'rushing' to give leftovers to the dog after everyone was done and I told her to quit bitching at me.   She had got to quit thinking she needs to improve my language or manners,  I am not bad enough to be an embarrassment to her, and she should trust her riding club to not judge her by me anyways. 

But overall it was a good trip.  Dad drove the whole way up and back, we took his pick-up because he feels like he doesn't have enough miles on it and I also had in my mind that my pickup seems to have some issue every hunting trip so maybe using it for family travel is just not a good idea.   Food was great, that riding club always buys great food for their trips and I contributed a bit to  cooking a couple of breakfasts and didn't feel like too much of a slug but didn't have to do any major cooking.  We rode out with the owner every day since no one in the group was comfortable to just use a GPS and the owner's waypoints.   He loves to ride and was not just taking out our group, we just joined rides that other folks were taking anyway for the most part.   

Got back home early on Sunday and found that my processing at work had stopped that morning.  The RAID the sys admins had been warning me about kicked the bucket.  So I was in emergency mode Monday getting processing re-started using a different data area and I'll be in fairly urgent mode to get processing moved to the new computer.   I had hoped to be able to have things going with the new software version so I didn't have to do things twice but no such luck.  


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