Saturday, I was feeling stuffy in the morning and decided to let the horses graze and do more grass pulling in case it developed into feeling dizzy or a miserable headache. Then it clouded up, sprinkled some, finally had a clear patch and took a short ride. I was feeling in a bit of tizzy about not training and worked out my frustrations with a fast ride instead of the long ride I should gotten in that morning. Oh well, I think Sadie is OK. I'm not wild about her trim(barely) and shoeing job. May have to haul up to WY just to get some endurance vet feedback. OTOH Duncan is not some newbie or a disciple of this or that goofy hoofcare theory so perhaps he is correct that Sadie did not have much foot to take off. At any rate with shoes to keep her feet from just flaring she'll hopefully have a nice rim of wall to take off next time or if I get a lot of "what is your farrier thinking?!" I'll have to shop around and find someone else.
Sunday it was cold and wet and I didn't do much other than read 1632 by Eric Flint. Fairly decent story, I had heard good things about it so I pushed past my initial 'give me a break' over the UMWA as being super-heroic. I suppose in a smallish town situation and something like mining that can actually be dangerous maybe a union can be kind of a civic/fraternal pride organization rather than a shield for lazy drunks to hide behind so they don't get deservedly fired.
Other than feeling a bit over the top with the union cheerleading it was an interesting alternate history sci-fi. Flynn credits the Swedish King as being a good leader and general. I'm kind of interested to read more about the 30 years war now, although Flint spilled the beans that Gustav died in battle in about year 14 or 15 of the war and it drags on with much misery for the area with another 15-16 years of war and probably a much worse ruler vs if he had lived and ruled over what he had won to date.
When we Americans wring our hands about Putin grabbing back pieces of the Soviet Union I think most of us just have no historical perspective of how much time Europe spent warring amongst itself and how that will drive belief (not sure it can be called paranoia) that one needs to control buffer territory around your core country.
After reading the story Flint is defending the school/students as a good thing and that a HS senior proposes to and marries a 'camp follower' --an unwilling one, who was doing it as the only way for her remaining family to survive after her parents were butchered by soldiers. It strikes me as sad that he feels the need to defend those things that rang pretty darn true for me. When conservatives bemoan schools we are talking about the mandatory aspect and using them to warehouse kids who are just killing time before they can draw a welfare check or live in jail cell vs being there for kids and parents that value education and thus making it hard for teachers to teach the ones that want to learn.
and nowadays the commie crapola of distorting not just history but math, biology etc. And I didn't have to suspend any belief to think that a young man would fall in love with a woman who hides her young female relatives (blood and 'foster') in a latrine, has the old crones make themselves unobtrusive and stands to face the conquering horde she expects will rape the women --and happens to have a good body if not soft pretty face the way Flint describes her. How sad to live surrounded by people who actually believe in a kind of new nobility and that common folks need a cadre of 'elite' bureaucrats to order their lives for them. Ah well I guess that is common among the writers he knows.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment