Damn I seem to have invited myself to a snipe hunt.

I felt like I was begging too much to join the fun group I have been riding with so reached out to someone else.   And  person A responded in a way that I thought I had a riding date lined up so I told my friend I was committed today.   She was working yesterday and it turned out I had to do an emergency fix as on-call person for work so it was good that I didn't have to do a last second cancel.

But A has now not responded back to me with a time, or even  "something came up and I won't be able to ride."   Sighhh.    If she didn't care to ride with me I wish she would have just said so or at least said she has other plans this weekend.  

This is a big part of the reason why I go to so many organized rides in normal years.   I'm not good at networking and I have a tendency to feel crushed by rejection when people bow out, especially if it is last minute.  Oh well.   I'll reach out to fun group and see if they are going to camp/ride in the coming weekends.  I want to get a mini vacation from the endless work of trying to keep this place up before I have a meltdown.

I actually enjoyed riding in the rain on Sunday after getting up early

I never would have went out to ride with rain scheduled and used to beg off riding with people who wanted to meet very early.  But riding with this group is SO fun that I knew it would be worth getting less sleep and was worth riding in drizzle.   One good thing happening this year is the expanding of my zone of when riding will be fun.  I had gotten into a bit of a rut.

Nice ride at IC yesterday

I think the extra sheepskin I put on my saddle is helping with comfort level for Tanza and the new longer Skito pad worked out well.   Tanza led most of the way.   He and I set a fairly slow pace, but it was still 14-15 miles of good hill work.  B's friend L was with us on her 28 year old horse.   Prince did well but aside from being 28 he is coming back from a long lay off while L was laid up with broken hand injury from her 12 year old horse spooking.  I guess she got a bad angle on the hand/arm on his neck or the saddle when she was catching herself from pitching over his ears.    I don't hurry through rocks and roots anyway, though sometimes Tanza does keeping up with a speedy horse in front of him.   L was not wanting to walk the whole way so we trotted the nice footing sections.   I got home, put the horses out on the downy brome to graze for a bit  and had beer thirty, then I barely felt competent to burn some branches afterwards.  No pole or chain saw work when I was feeling so fuzzy.  

Sigh, so many sheeple in the world

And many of them are nice folks that seem sensible in general but they can't or have not yet grokked that the covid-19 is not as dangerous as we feared at first so all the lockdown crap, wearing a mask, and contact tracing at this late stage and so on is not about preventing a lot of deaths, its about controlling people, or killing economy that the globalists and/or commiecrats could not control.   They hated having folks able to make a good living w/o having to beg and scrape to some mandarin for permission.

I had a good riding weekend

It was not Medicine Lodge, which is a fun AERC ride in WY, and it was not camping which was the original plan B but still managed to have a good weekend of riding.   Started rough on Friday when I checked my phone about 2:45 and found that I was missing a short notice ride with the gal that I thought I'd ride with on Sat and one of the can't go camping folks.  But I decide to ride by myself on Saturday.  Tossed and turned a bunch overnight with nerves about riding solo at a trailhead instead of just from home or from an endurance basecamp and then it took me an hour of asking before Tanza would let me catch him.  So that made it a good thing that I didn't have a deadline of meeting someone.

Tanza was quite good for me and it was really nice to be able to canter on the easy footing gradual stretch w/o having to 'slow down a bit,  T feels like he'll buck' and then go slower on rocky or technical sections that M goes.  I need more practice riding fast in rough country so I don't get out sync with Tanza but it was nice to be able to relax on Saturday and it was just awesome to be riding my horse,  the bluebells and violets were blooming and I found my way to do the loop I wanted to try.
I figure it was about 18 miles and we did it in 4 hours.

Today met B and her friend L at Barr lake and we did the easy flat 9 miles.  There was a nice breeze that kept the bugs away most of the loop.  Got home, let the horses out to graze and did a couple rounds of burning in the barrel.   I have a whole lot of decluttering left to do but made a bit of progress.

Must remember to share how-to's with team

I did do that this week.  It would have been a tiny bit easier for me to just edit and run my script but I get so annoyed with the adjunct team member who drags his feet on sharing HOW to run any of HIS scripts as though he needs the extra job security of being the only one who can do whatever.  Its absolute BS,  there are a number of things, especially dealing with binary data that only he can do and the leadership likes him and would work to preserve his job if we had a funding cut, even if he didn't have specialized skills that would be hard to replace.

But I can only control my own behavior.   I try to remember how annoying I find the 'oh I have to do this myself, when I have time' response; and share things with the team.

Yesterday I managed, just barely to remember that 'comfort food'  is not all the comforting and avoided just stuffing my face in the evening after my normal weekday eating window.   Yay me,  I actually got a fair amount of work stuff done late in the day after a frustrating mess of not being able to get onto the work VPN which is a needed step to do 90% of my work for 2 hours, and then dealing with the neighbor we hired to clean our pens.  I was very angst that he ripped huge areas of the pens because in the past working pens up has led to an explosion of burrs.   Hopefully all the spraying I've down the last 5-6 years will help prevent that.   Maybe we will get weeds the horses like to eat, but that's a long shot.  Even if I have to spray more I guess its not a big problem since the 'rona lockdowns are shutting down most rides I would have gone to this year.  I'm bummed about that and still don't know what rides may still happen.  

I think the virus theatre is going to end before too long

Evidence from places that did early antibody testing shows infection rates were 50-80 times higher than those that felt so sick they went to a doc and got the active virus test.  Which means the virus does not put 1 in 9 that get it in the hospital but 1 in 450.   And I was onboard with 'wear a mask to make other folks feel safer so they don't shriek and wail "NOOO, people will die' about re-starting the economy.   But yesterday I was just going through the motions wearing my dumb mask.  As summer heats up more and more folks are going to decide comfort is more important than reassuring the fearful and only employees mandated to wear masks will do it and they will be thinking 'this is a PITA, maybe I should quit and say I can't find child care or I'm worried that I'm high risk for severe case if I get cover-19 and just take that generous unemployment that congress set up'  so their employers will feel pressure to end the policy as well.

I am nervous with Trump saying he could use the war powers act to force packing plants to stay open after Tyson chicken was making noises about shutting down some production.   I don't want Tyson, and Smithfield and other outfits that are owned by the Chinese or home grown commie scum squeezing food supply to try to affect the election but I don't like the government saying they can force someone to produce food either.  I pray that god guides us through this mess and we don't end up spiraling into full on tyranny or a mix of tyranny with pockets of anarchy.