Must call farrier and contact my cell ph provider today

I am not going to tear my p/u apart to see if my cell phone is in deep hiding so I need to contact them to get a new one, see if I can retain the # etc.   Part of me wants to wait until after the election to avoid all those texts but overall that is foolish.

Must call my farrier, I can't remember if we even set a day.  I have such a mental block on writing the next shoeing appointment on the calendar.

The last two days I got software debugged to work with a new orbit prefix.  Thought I'd had it before but had to redo the fetching and had not got it into the TEC software.  Now that is all in place though.

 I need to email my PWV folks and see if any of them have the freely available software and/or I need to download that software on the laptop or desktop MAC and start playing with it.  I don't want to walk away from this job, I love my PTO and flexible schedule but I need to have some fallback options.  The manager is oh so polite to the software people when they discuss problems or new tools but then does NOTHING different from his pre-conceived plan and 3 good people will probably quit within two years and the program will implode for sure if they all departed within a few months of each other.  And I feel like I may be being strung along on the "oh yes we want to get funding and keep up the PWV"

They know it is important to me and lately I feel like they are stringing me along because they don't want to have to replace me RIGHT NOW, but figure they'll risk that I'll stay out of inertia or they won't need my historical knowledge if they get a few months down the road.    I've had the luxury of trusting that management was trying to keep good people happy and funded up till the past couple years and I did get a bit soft.

Well I did first cut TIAA beneficiaries

Online forms for that were confusing so I'm not sure what is there for contingency beneficiaries.  Shouldn't matter.  I can adjust that if any of them die before I do.  There was supposedly a select option but it would not scroll and only showed the first default option.  Main thing is it is done so it doesn't just default to "estate"  which would suck since I haven't written up my will yet.  Been procrastinating on that for 2 years.  But at least having sent for the kit, it did get me to set up for the bank accounts, life insurance policies and now the TIAA retirement accounts.  I have to find my IRA login name and password.  Hopefully I have that in a drawer or file at home that I can find.  I don't know why I didn't bring the info to work after I signed up at home months ago but I did not.

I should get the tax ID numbers for all, and the full name for my friend with the animal rescue.  I named her, not the rescue and I don't have a middle initial.   Thankfully having tax ID SSN was optional so I could do this first cut even though I keep forgetting to get that info.  I think it would be good to include to ensure they pay out to the correct person but first cut.

I have got to buckle down at work.  I need to make a list of steps in order for some of what I want to do to break past the mental block of "this is too big, I don't know how to proceed today"  that I've been having.  But today I'm able to just work on routine PP because the latest set of eraInt data came in.  Fortunate timing for my very Monday mindset today.

Lady is back for the winter

I took Sadie along and took a wee ride on her during the hunt for the horses.  DL and R walked out.  I rode up the other hill just in case the horses were hanging there where they could maybe see horses in an adjoining pasture.   But they were where R headed.   That worked out for Sadie to go a wee bit farther which was good.  It was getting too late for them to saddle Lady and take a quick ride so they just fetched her things and I got home relatively early.  I try to limit politics on FB but don't hide that I'm conservative and I wondered if R was put out to have to spend any time around an eeevil R voter. Of course she could have been put out because I've been immune to her damsel in distress act.

Only this morning after graining did I get Lady and Tanza in the side pen.  I have been sleeping late and not having much energy all month.  Probably job stress plus the fear that I might end up on the endurance BOD although I think that getting on the BOD is not too likely with a field of 18 for 8 slots.  I don't want to just renege if there are a lot of folks who feel that they want a director with my philosophy but I fear it would be a 2 year time sink without me getting anything done in that direction if I do end up elected to the BOD.  Plus shortly after folks started putting their DAL statements online one gal posted about all the people emailing or pm'ing her with whines of "its not FAAAIRRR, this ride was short (I guess it was a long drive and they think folks that can get to more of that RMs or areas rides have an easier path to year end awards?)  

 and "I was not treated well as an LD rider ....."   Thankfully I have not gotten one contact like that.    If the org has become so full of entitled whiny babies I don't want to be too deeply involved.    Are LD riders treated poorly?  Maybe at some rides and when being passed by hot shoe 50 riders.  But Ive ridden many LDs and been at common checks as 50s and I suspect there is a big subset whining over 'slights' like asking them to wait for completion vet checks so 50 milers can get on the trail for their last loop and stuff like that which is not really slighting the LDs,  at rides with 50s and 100s in the same day the 50s waiting for end of ride completions will be asked to be patient so the vets can get the 100 milers on trail w/o going past their hold periods.  Plus hot shoe 50s that are rude when passing are also rude to the slow 50 milers as well if its a multi-loop trail.  

Took Sadie on a short ride Sunday evening.   Riding her at home is pretty fun, that nervous energy magnified by a group of horses makes taking her to organized rides not fun; but at home its cool, almost like being at a ride energy level with Tanza.  

YAY

I felt compelled to nominate myself to run for the BOD of the endurance conference in response to a few issues.   Today the current board announced a motion that addresses one of those issues.   With a bit of luck all the concerns I had will be adopted by other candidates or addressed by the current board, and most folks will not vote for my nobody self.  That would be such a win/win scenario since I really don't want to have to go to the semi-annual meetings plus several conference call meetings each year, a quick scan of recent minutes shows its often 26 people trying to put forth new ideas in meetings with all the time wasting and lack of clear direction one would expect from that and I do not have the charisma or gravitas or whatever to bring order to things like that.  I could have only tried to lobby to set an agenda and have competing proposals written down for members to view ahead of time.

On the bad side I tried to go to the local political breakfast today.  Apparently they do not want people to just show up so they have not updated the location which is a closed down business.  You have to have called or emailed and gotten current information.  So much for "just show up and talk to some folks to find out if I can volunteer to knock on doors with someone and discuss some of the ballot measures with like minded folks to see if they are also thinking about potential bad consequences to proposals that sound good at first scan."  Oh well.

p.s. whine.  I miss the days when I mistakenly thought folks on some bbs or blogs gave a damn about my goals, accomplishments, tribulations.  Turned out that it was only politeness, chance to brag back, or opportunity to be important by offering advise.  But at least it helped me a bit for a time when the fandamily would show boredom if I blabbed for more than a couple minutes about MY life instead of only being their sounding board, shoulder to cry on etc.

Tanzaknight got his 10th ride completion on Saturday

But it was not easy.   Cold wind all day.  Parts of the trail had terrain or trees blocking the wind but the basecamp and vet check area was full wind all day.   I need a crew to remind me to blanket when its cold.  I kept forgetting for a few minutes and then having to fight him being chilled.  Plus I need to work on his recoveries.   He has strong legs but I did not get the speed and hill work in this year like I intended to.  Really need to make that a priority now that his legs have the great base.   So we equalled his 2017 season for # of rides completed.  Finished very strong with the 3 days at Virgin Rim and then coming in 3rd at Greenland.  I was surprised that at that placing as we took over 7 hours to complete and I had thought there were 4-5 folks ahead of the largish group I started with, plus Jimmy the greek passed us.  (He got BC, strong horse, Jim led him out to avoid him getting too wound up at the start, it was great to see him practicing such great horsemanship and it paying off for them)

Tanza is such a trooper.  We started the last loop a few minutes behind the folks I had rode with because of the slower pulse recovery but he caught up and ended up leading them in.  They were great trail partners to ride with.  At the finish line Tanza drank up and then got chilled even though I took him to the trailer to block the wind and got a blanket on him right away.   So lots of walking him tying to get him warm enough to pulse down to 60.   But using the cantle bar for the crupper and the shimming I put on the saddle kept his back comfy.   The pad worked forward, I have got to figure out how to solve that issue.  I'm thinking adding girth straps that velcro around the girth will help and probably a ring at the back of the pad to tie it to the cantle ring would be a good thing. 

I should also figure out what to do for browband.  The band that snapped to the halter was rubbing Tanza's face so I switched to Sadie's browband.  It is too loose for only being on the bridle w/o having the halter through but I like being able to quickly take off the bridle . 

Ugh, Tanza's back is still sore

He is not tender to my finger touch on the spot where the crupper snap rubbed off hair, but I set the saddle on him to check if it was too wide and he was flinching.   Poor guy.   I will try to shim the saddle to make it fit like a more narrow tree.   If I can't get it the way I want I will try to have the saddle maker adjust it.   I feel bad for not picking up that this was going on before now.  But its the nature of horses, they lose weight or whatever and things that had been OK become irritants.  I should know by now that I always have to keep checking things but I got lax.

So I probably will not pre-register for the ride this weekend.  If I can't feel like the saddle will work I need to just skip it.   I really want to go, try to ride faster, see how the crupper change works, equal last years # of rides etc etc but I need to put Tanza's comfort first.