My nominee didn't get HOF horse

But I was relieved cuz the gal whose horse I had nominated wasn't at the convention.   I thought she had planned on coming but she wasn't there.  I was thrilled for the gal and her horse that did get HOF, but this is the second time a horse that was part of the Pardners award for the horse and rider that embody "team" has been nominated and awarded HOF a few years later and I'm torn on that.  Obviously people should not refrain from nominating someone for the Pardners award because of not wanting to hijack a possible HOF for the horse down the road a bit; but OTOH the Pardners award in my mind is supposed to reward riders who don't compete at the higher level to qualify a horse for HOF but have a really special bond with a horse  over many years of riding and I don't want it to become a thing where the same small pool of people is getting both Pardners and then HOF awards.    Most folks are going to have a special connection with a horse to get it to the HOF level, and not every one of those teams should get a  Pardners award as well as the HOF in my opinion because that would freeze out the Partner teams that enjoy the trail together for many years riding relaxed 50s and LDs.

I never heard if the HOF committee even got my email

So,  I'll be in as much suspense at the banquet as everyone else which is cool.   They probably got a set of last minute nominations including horses that are totally not on my radar and S's owner posted something about more to come with him on her FB feed so its quite likely he'll have to wait.  It used to be an unwritten rule that only retired horses were eligible but they have awarded to at least one active horse so I'll just have to wonder what horse might get it this year.

Sister FB messaged me this morning that they will probably come Thursday night from Hotchkiss, seeing B's dad first.  So I should suck it up to do the housecleaning and I will definitely not take the xmas lights down yet.   I was thinking they had decided they were just too busy to come since I had not heard from them and I could punt on the cleaning until a cold snowy day.  Well they'll suck it up if the house is not perfect but I'll get a few indirect comments about its crappy state.

Sure hope I don't get the bug that has been going around.  Last night I felt like I might be getting sick, my eyes felt itchy.  When I went to bed if was just the one that is always red -- I think I have a leaking blood vessel but its only on the white.  First time that happened I went in right away JIC it was an issue and the nurse and optometrist were nearly laughing at me as a hypochondriac.  I am overdue for the routine eye screening now, so I should call and see if I am still on the insurance or not.  I am going to be pissed with HR and our admins if I got bumped to  the high deductible plan because I didn't fill out the new workday form because they sure did not send out warnings and with the previous system if you didn't fill anything out you kept your last year's plan which is what I wanted.  I didn't set out to blow off filling out the form, which they did notify everybody 'needed to do' but our group ended up super busy that week and I ended up at 10pm on the deadline day going "oh I am so tired and this should be OK w/o me wrestling with this PITA system."  

Equine dentist is coming on Thursday.

I'm relieved he scheduled so quickly after I finally got him called.  It will be a great relief to taper Bee off the extra concentrates as I have a fear of giving him laminitis.  Now I just have to get myself scheduled for eye exam, dentist and routine health screenings I've been punting on for too long, but baby steps in the right direction are still steps in the right direction.

I may need to take a break from FB.  So tired of reading people who are done riding seriously whining that AERC shouldn't co-sanction 100 mile rides with FEI.   And a lot of the whiners  also whine that AERC doesn't give RMs ENOUGH control of their own rides as far as fudging distance if the ride is over tough terrain.  What a sorry group of people, they probably don't even have a clue how wildly inconsistent they are being.   I am with the 2nd group to a fair extent, but I feel kind of bad if a ride seemed significantly short.  Would be nice if AERC would just give the RM more leeway to adjust time to complete and sanction rides for 45 miles if RM requested it.  Then everyone that loves that scenic ride but wants to have 12 hours to finish it could still be happy (well some would still carp that 'this ride is tough so we should get a 10% add on on the mileage' for yearly records.)

I nominated for regional awards Partners the end of Dec, and yesterday the award organizer said on FJ "we received no nominations for HOF either person or horse" so extending the deadline to Jan 15. So I had some fun looking through some ride records, initially I was looking at a horse I nominated last year but the rider/owner while a nice guy doesn't come to convention so I was pondering and then  thought "how about Stu?"  Had some fun noting highlights of his career which is pretty awesome, he misses only the 3000 or more miles highlight but awesome little horse with 11 100 mile completions 5 of them on tough courses.  

I can think of some possible HOF people too, but for the one candidate I'd need to reach out to some folks for details of their riding career(s) before they became solid RMs as the online records don't go back that far.

Great start to the New Year

WooHoo. the tree trimmer came on Jan 1 and Jan 2.    The dead trees are not down to short stumps but they are not a threat to outbuildings or vehicles.  The neglected live trees that I had them trim up look awesome.   Wednesday I took some black plastic from the garden shed and spread where I still needed weed block along the Russian Olives and used bark from the cut trees to put over the plastic.  Today I asked them to put the mulch from the chipping they do in the back yard where mom had tried to start a mini orchard but the plum and apple trees died.

While they were cutting I cleaned out a big box of garden odds and ends with a couple boxes in it and put those and some other boxes in the shed down.   Then I spread  a few inches of the mulch over the boxes after they dumped the mulch.   Its an ibuprofen evening and I'll take an Alleve tonight but definitely moved the ball on the de-cluttering efforts.   Now I must work on contacting the equine dentist and catching up my dental, eye doc and health screenings.

The Holiday turkey is not consumed but I made my pot pie and rice casserole and soup last night.  I'll freeze up leftovers this weekend.  Not too bad.  I never did make haystack cookies that I thought I might do for the holidays, but I can make em anytime.  

No new horse

I did my budget and all the extra money I thought I had, where I could maybe get another horse is not there.  Possibly will look brighter next month,  depends on whether dad pays some of the tree trimming bill.  I put aside my petty "they treat me like an ATM" feelings and sent bro and Sil a check and a check to her son and son's gf for Christams.  I did write in the son and gf card "check out KenColeman.com"  A reasonably polite way of telling them to GOYAaGaJ methinks.   I could feed another horse but there isn't really money to pay market price for an adult horse and I'm pretty leery of rescuing one;  I'm no super keen horse judge.  I can spot some obvious 'probably wouldn't hold up for distance riding' but not enough to feel confident and we already have great plenty of horses I don't want to try to use for distance riding. 

Wrote a slightly overdue paper review this morning.   I did not catch every poor sentence but did give several  cases where a bit of word change will make things more clear.  I could hardly write "I have no idea if this is novel research because I've been horridly lazy about keeping up with reading the research journals but meh, thats why they get more than 1 reviewer.   The basics seemed fine, although I would not spot if the equations were wrong.   Got 15 cards addressed and very short notes added to the form letter on Sunday and mailed em this morning.

Saturday I finished cleaning up the horse pens from the half ass job the skid steer guy had done.  I am going to search for a new person but it wasn't sooo bad, certainly it was much easier for me to finish up the cleaning after he had moved the heavy piles of hay and manure that I had tractor raked up last week.  Also on Saturday got dad to help me get holiday decorations down, did 2 loads of laundry but skipped doing the towels and made CF steaks.  Steaks were fairly meh, but better than coming out tough or me thinking they tasted bad.   Sat evening I set up our artificial tree.  I'm going to have to get a new(er) one next year I think.  Its shedding needles and looking a bit ragged to me.  Turned out it was good I had not gotten outdoor lights put up because I remembered that its getting too hard to get enough lights for the tree with the bigger size bulb indoor lights we had always used so I took one of the strings of little indoor/outdoor lights for the tree instead of putting along our roadside fence. 

Sunday dad and I got the outdoor lights up,  he put up his laser and LED lights, which are sure a lot easier for lighting up the house and trees/shrubs next to house than actual lights.  I made fish for supper.  I have decided I like baking fish sometimes instead of frying it.  I'll still fry cod, it seems to taste good fried, but the other grocery fish benefits from a bit of soaking in lemon juice and and then bakes up fine.   I've also convinced myself its OK to use foil and make my life easier for baking a couple pieces of fish for supper.   

Well I am working FOR horses. Certainly not working the horses

I'm coming to grips; but with plenty of pissing and moaning; that upkeep of the place is 90% or more up to me now.   I'm trying to appreciate that dad is still taking care of himself and handling the routine bill paying rather than melting down because he simply is not up to doing much yard maintenance or doing the floors like he used to do.   Key word: trying, but I know that being grateful for the blessing of not having to take over the paperwork and bring in a health aide is the only way to keep my spirits up.    I know lots of folks are juggling the duties of full care for a parent or even a spouse's parent along with trying to keep their jobs and lives going and I am fortunate not to be in that spot and I am very grateful that dad took care of mom when she needed to be driven to drs. and so on.  He really did quite a good job of supporting her.

I got lucky and a tree trimmer who is moving into the neighborhood left a door tag with his information on our gate a couple weeks ago.  I called him, and he came on Sunday and gave an estimate and will come after Christmas and take down the 2 dead trees, plus do dead limb trimming on 5 still live trees that I was concerned could be a danger to the house, garage, vehicles .  He  really knows trees and the live trees will be much healthier and safer after getting this professional care and I don't have to worry about my safety nor the safety of the neighbor's friend that has a firewood business but no cherry picker to safely take down huge trees starting from the ends of the high branches.  A big relief to me to get that situation dealt with.  Barring a freak very high wind storm before Stefan gets to the job the outbuildings and vehicles should be spared.  We've been very lucky with getting away with just letting some other dead trees fall on their own; hopefully that doesn't evaporate when I FINALLY decided to be proactive and bring in a professional.

Sunday I also fired up the tractor and used the bucket to 'rake' built up manure and hay from the fence line where I feed so the skidsteer guy could just scoop it up easily and then can bring in some sand to fill in the low spots.   I meant to stay home and do more supervising/requesting of extra sand being hauled in while he was here  but I   Just   Could   Not   Do   It and left for work.    Maybe I'll try another guy advertising on CL or FB next time.   I can't help kind of resenting this guy for not being more complete.   He charges by how long it takes so its not like he gains anything by always doing only the 'quick and dirty' job.   Plus he was all grouchy with our dog today, and I never completely trust folks that don't like dogs.

Tanza is looking good.   I cut his feed back from the OMG I have to hurry up and get some weight on this horse amounts but will err on the side of him getting a bit fat this time,  I don't want to feel like "I HAVE to just end the season and get weight back on my boy" next fall.    The trailer was lame this year anyway so at least the reasons to not try hauling to a late 100 or multi-day were overlapped.

I have been kind of wanting to get a 2nd horse to do LDs, support local rides this year if I am able to attempt the 100s adventures I want  (but with a good amount of nerves) to attempt with Tanza in 2020.   But someone posted some young arabians at a kill pen.  I don't know if any of them would even be 4 to ride next year but I'm tempted.  Hopefully I'll see that someone else 'saved' them soon.   I don't really want to gamble with getting a horse that might be just another paddock decoration.

I'm probably going to put Bee(tle Baum) in with Tanza for a while.

I felt Lady's ribs today and she's getting plenty fat.  Bee is not bad but has the least fat between his ribs of all the horses here and he and Tanza are often visiting over the fence so I'm sure they'll get on fine so I think I'll just give Lady her every other day previcoxx in an apple slice and put her in the big somewhat diet pen group and have Bee with Tanza for a while.  Probably I'll have to rotate who is in with Tanza so I don't have a too fat horse.

Tanza is also looking pretty good so I'll cut down the amount of hay to him and whomever I have with him as well, but I still want him to have a bit more hay.  I don't need to have maximum high octane food going into my already energetic boy.

I've been pecking away at tree trimming.  I got a new chain for the pole saw and got smart enough to grab the 3-step mounting block to reach higher branches.   I don't have the arm strength to use more than 2 of the 4 lengths for the pole saw and its also no good reaching too high so the block is nice.  I need to drag out the ladder for some branches I feel I should cut down to reduce risk of branches damaging the house or garage roof but its getting there.  Tomorrow I want to move my little horse trailer and hook up my gooseneck.   I should have done that this weekend and dropped the trailer off at the repair place today but I guess I'm still kind of hoping dad would take the trailer in to drop it off, but he would wait until I need it next spring if I just wait on him plus I'd like to have the trailer gone and see if I can get someone to cut that dead tree down.   I'm thinking we'll have to move panels where the mini's are so the tree or some of its branches can come down in those directions and not break the panels.

Saturday we got the new TV I got dad to buy last weekend delivered and set up and the old 37inch tube TV that quit working hauled away to be recycled by Best Buy.   Last night Clint Eastwood movie Pale Rider was on and I enjoyed watching it on the high resolution 43" screen and getting to enjoy the mountain backdrop and so on.  Of course the downside is I might have done something else if dad was watching it on the little portable TV he had been using for the last few months.  But it was ridiculous, he pays $$ for direct TV and then just using the old portable TV to watch when new TVs are relatively cheap.

This morning I did some raking up of the area around Tanza and Lady's half barrel hay feeders.  That is the other reason I'm going to cut back some on the hay to Tanza and whomever I have in with him for a buddy.   Too much wasted hay.   I try to keep raking up the stalks they don't eat and give those leftovers to the mini's but I need to have dryer ground around the feeders to make that work better.  My arms are whinging that I did too much raking,  I need to have dad call the skidsteer guy again.

Sis had invited us for Thanksgiving and I told dad I guessed we could.  Now I don't really want to spend the time driving because there is so much I need to do.  I'll have to call her.  I don't want to not go and Dad's health takes a bad turn but we did get a good visit in August.