Gulp, our orbit scientist is leaving

I knew she would leave in the next year.  I just figured it would more likely not happen until 2-3 months from now and that there would be 4 weeks notice rather than 2 weeks so the handoff of what she developed would not be so rushed.

The good news is that I drove over 450 miles to northern Wyoming and rode 100 miles this weekend.  Tanza did well.  Our pace was slower than what I'd like to be at but I haven't done enough conditioning and on day 1 it was ride with folks who were going to go over 8 mph or stay with the slower group.   Slower group ended up with 6 mph pace, rather than 6.5 to 7 I would have liked.  Oh well.   On Day 2 Tanza stuck with young riders who were doing 8 mph pace on the first loop.  Actually he insisted on passing them towards end of loop.   And then starting loop 2 he was getting tired and as they started out cantering and passed us he was "meh, I don't need to stay with them."   I don't love that our pace slowed down so much that overall ride pace was only 6 mph by the end of the day but he was on day 2 and I have not done enough conditioning miles on him to push him past the pace he was volunteering.  

I enjoyed the weekend overall,  a few minutes here and there of feeling over heated and over tired but I remembered to enjoy being on the trail on my awesome horse most of the time.   Met a gal on my route and had the wonderful blessing of having her drive a good part of the way from where I picked her up on Friday (I only drove 90 miles after her place and she drove the rest which was about 180 miles)  and she drove around 120 miles on Sunday which made things much easier for me.  She also crewed for me a bit on Sunday,  she was hurting from riding on Saturday and just volunteered in camp on Sunday.  

That gave her lots of time to visit with the other folks attending the ride and she had a great weekend and is excited to get into the sport here.   She used to live in upstate New York, moving, having a saddle fit issue that ended up with getting bucked off and a back injury had resulted in her not riding much since moving to WY a couple years ago.  So I helped promote the local rides to a new person, yay me.   She recently got a rescue Akhal Teke horse and one of the gals at the ride is a huge lover and promoter of the AT breed so that was a nice side benefit for S too.   

Its snowing

Not unusual,  I remember loading horses in a light snow to head to memorial weekend rides in SD and having nice weather to ride in, although the horses always thought I was nuts loading them up to go ride when it was snowing.

Tanza and Lady got bute a couple hours after their vaccinations and no reactions.  So Tanza should be good to go ride.  Because of the forecast, my vaccination reaction worries and general OMG I'm so behind feelings I decided I will ride on Sunday.  So current plan is to haul to Casper or hopefully Thermopolis on Fridaay and overnight at a fairgrounds and then a short drive to ride site Saturday morning.   Donate the unicorn poster and half chaps as ride awards.

Work is continuing to be a madhouse.  It should not be so, but the group manager wants to maintain direct handling of low level tasks and then doesn't have enough hours in the day to keep track of and communicate the big tasks that need to be done to the team.  Plus he, or he and/or  the program manager keep refusing to hire another software engineer and admin support person so both the ops group and the admins are stressed having to be 100% all the time and still feeling like we are falling behind.   I am going to have to ding all the management for this when input for *their* APRs is sought by the higher ups.    Sick and tired of their attitude of pinching pennies on things that are needed and then being lavish on extras.

Yay its Friday.

Boss is gone,  the simulation is done.   The defective switch that caused extra work and stress for me and the official ops monitor last weekend and the whole team through Wednesday was replaced on Thursday.  Yesterday one of the horses was in pasture (had stepped over fence.   I let all horses out for a bit, while I organized supplies and replaced one broken off post and did a temp patch of the wires to that post with string, then called it good and told dad he had to help me fix fence on Friday.  Today I dug 3 post holes and Dad tamped in the posts and did most of the staples.   He was not going to tighten the one section of fence but I found where a splice was and proceeded and he helped me get that sorted and done.   Now that paddock fence should keep the horses in.  And since neighbor A helped dad fix the pasture fence a few weeks ago its not like we have to panic that horses will go through the pasture fence and be on the road if they do get out into the pasture overnight, but I still want to limit their grass and introduce it gradually.

Lady seems to be doing pretty well.  I will have vet look at her when he does vaccinations but I think she will be fine for D and her kids to ride this summer.  I am a bit nervous about vaccinating on Tuesday and planning to enter a ride on Saturday but it should be OK.  Tanza has not had reactions to the shots that I have noticed.

Wed I have to take my car in for servicing by 10 am and the boss has scheduled for me to join meeting to discuss how to work on next set of CWPD.  Well at least I was coming in early anyway but I don't know why I have to be in that meeting.  I was not wrestling with that group's data two years ago so I have no back knowledge.   Perhaps they want D to hand more of that work to me because they need him to get something else done,  who knows with the stupid chaotic management.

Group boss wanted me to give him raw data not plots for stats on Tuesday evening.  I did this but we run stats on two parameters and I ran the stats #s for the old parameter that *I* think of for stats and not for the newer parameter.  Then he didn't recognize that the numbers were normal for that old parameter and just tell me "I wanted the new parameter" but emailed me asking didn't I think the values were too small.   Finally he sent me a plot with "isn't this the normal?"  late Wed evening.   I hadn't registered myself that the raw #s didn't show in the header what parameter the stats are for but only the height level, mean, RMS and # of obs used.     Luckily since I still had all the tabs up I was able to generate what he wanted pretty quickly but I was not thrilled that he isn't familiar enough with both stats plots to have recognized "oh these are the old parameter and just asked me right away to generate the stats #s for the newer parameter instead of having to have the back and forth and me not get the info I needed to know what he wanted until so late.

Tomorrow and Sunday are the charity ride I like to do and then next weekend I am off to my first competition of the year.  I feel so ill prepared but I keep reminding myself that Tanza is a rock star and I will muddle through.  Its not like the course is horribly steep or long.  I loved it last year for a first ride of the season.