I still love this horse but he had 20 seconds of monster this weekend.

My ankles today

His legs today

No fill in his legs after doing about 106 miles (that were only counted for 100, grrr) over two days and no poultice or wrapping after the 2nd day cuz of my bruised ankle.


Was long hot days of riding.   The trails had a good bit of rock on them and between B and her horse not ready to go very fast on Saturday and it was hot, and then Tanza having a stupid meltdown on day 2 about 14 miles into the ride and and it was hot we took over 11 hours with the two 45 minute holds to complete the roughly 53 miles each day.   Even if the rides had been sanctioned as the 55 mile rides they should have been or the distance reduced to be just 50 miles or a wee bit less like almost all other rides do the pacing was slower than at Medicine Lodge.

But we did gitRdone.    Tanza's meltdown happened when I had noticed my camelback was dripping water down my back and butt as we came into a water tank with volunteers and ham radio guy.  I found the leaking plastic bottle and got it handed to a volunteer eventually, but the old timer I was riding with was not aware that I was dinking and had started to leave.  Tanza got his fear of being left behind on and started trotting to catch up to him and then freaked out about the camelback flopping and making extra noise as I had it twisted around to my front.   Tanza was crow-hopping and I lost all brakes and steering and he was headed right for the wire gate that was just left lying only 90 degrees open since they intended to close it after the riders were done.   I came off and Tanza, thank GOD, swerved away from stepping in the wire gate trap but came down on my ankle with a hind foot.

But it did not hurt too bad for riding, since it was only a fraction of my weight on it as I was posting and B, that hauled to the ride with me and was not riding on Sunday trotted Tanza at the vet checks and helped me out A LOT, so we were able to complete.   I don't know if I will ever go back to that ride.  I don't like rides being longer than sanctioned for; and this one also had a 3 mile lollypop stick in and out of basecamp, with like a mile of rocks over the 3 miles  for all 3 loops of the 50 as well as having a lot of rock overall and not really being scenic enough to justify a lot of rock IMO.    If you can't avoid a lollypop its better to try to just have two longer loops or something but I don't know that they were really that limited in trail options.    Also on day two we were riding new loops and the markings were confusing.   I was lucky to be with the old timer or I would have turned the wrong way and done an extra 5 miles on Sunday, but he had studied the map and followed that rather than confusing markings.  4 gals riding together just a bit behind us were not so lucky and did do the extra miles; 3 were able to complete in the 50 mile 12 hour window anyway.

Last night I fed the horses late, giving them grain because Shade and Lady needed their herbal powders for their arthritis even though Tanza did not Need to replace calories burned in any big hurry, he looked good and was trotting out with a big floaty gait once we got home.  My dad was "I would have fed hay for you"   then this morning I tell him he will have to clean Tommy's (cat) litter box downstairs for a few days so I don't have to go up and down extra stairs " So you did not clean it last night?"   NO I sure did not.

And at work I am trying to get the stinking senior software engineer, who is now going more science track, but is still the highest level software position level at my work to fix his stinking code after he put in an option for the next gen. satellite missions that is breaking processing for our old missions.  I get so disgusted with him NEVER, EVER running a small test batch on a couple days of old mission data with standard configurations that we use to make sure his changes put in place for the new mission(s) are not breaking the old processing.   Testing backwards compatibility is software engineering 101, and it is not so time intensive that he needs to just hand that off to a junior person in our tiny little group.  It takes like 5 minutes to launch a test batch job;  it only gets time intensive if a bug was introduced and has to be corrected and of course he should be able to fix any bugs way faster than anyone else when he is the one making changes.   Snotty lazy twerp.