Green Thumb

It’s been a few weeks since I planted my flower boxes. They are doing really nicely. All of the flowering plants have grown new blooms except for the lily. All of the blooms on the lily have died, so we’ll have to see if the plant itself lives or not. Here are some new pictures for comparison.

Bungie Warms Up

In the past few days, Bungie has exponentially begun to show affection towards me. She either crawls into the space between the inside of my elbow and my side, face first, or she climbs up onto my shoulder and plays in my hair. Either way, she naps, then periodically bruxes and grooms me, before dozing off again. She has definitely gotten comfortable with me and keeps getting sweeter and sweeter. I think she may have just started to rub off on her sister a smidge. Today, Jet bruxed at me for the first time, but she didn’t slow down one iota to do it, of course. She was running around on my lap and wouldn’t sit still, but she was bruxing nonetheless. She also let me scratch her a few times today without darting off, even if she didn’t stop for very long to enjoy it. I think she just needs more time to come around than her calmer sister. I managed to snatch a few shots of Bungie while she was on my lap without disturbing her too much, since the camera was within my reach. The flash startled her each time a took a picture, but I was always able to lull her back to sleep.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/schmickie/tags/bungie/

New Additions

So after years without rats, I finally gave in to the cuteness of some babies in my local pet store. I just couldn’t resist. They had two baby blue hooded females. I couldn’t stop thinking about them for about a week after the first time I saw them, on Saturday, 4/28/07. So the next Friday, 5/4/07, I went back up there and got them, along with all the necessary supplies. I hadn’t had rats in so long that I no longer had any of the things I needed. It was just at $100 to get all the supplies and the rats, which were more expensive than usual, being blues, but still cheap at $14 each. I had the easiest time naming them that I’ve ever had with any pet. They are Jet and Bungie. Bungie’s markings are kind of unique in that the markings coming down her back off of her hood go all the way down to the base of her tail. I don’t know if that’s rare, but I haven’t seen it before. She also has a little gray spot on her tummy as well. Her color is a silvery gray. Jet’s color is much lighter pale gray. Jet is the trouble maker, always wanting to be out of the cage, and when she is, she explores and gets into everything. She also moves the fastest I’ve ever seen a rat move, hence the name. Bungie doesn’t come out the cage nearly as much as Jet does, and when she does, she mostly sticks close to me. Neither one of them has gotten to the point yet that they want to be held, although Bungie does like to hang out on my shoulder, tangled up in my hair. They have both cleaned me at least once and bruxed at least once from me petting them, so we are making progress. You can see pictures of Jet and Bungie on my Flickr site.

Spring is Here

I realized over the weekend that since I’ve been in California, I haven’t had any kind of garden. My current apartment has a concrete patio with a rock bed border, which isn’t really condusive to gardening. However, I found some nice redwood planter boxes at Orchard Hardware this weekend, so I bought some flowers and plants to fill them up and now I have a nice bright and lovely patio.

Apache Anecdotes

I don’t know why, but today I was thinking about all the times that I have come off of Apache.
The first time was during the first month or so I had him. He was very clumsy for the first few years, frequently tripping and stumbling. That first month, we were cantering in the arena, and he tripped so hard and fell so far down that his face hit the ground. In fact, he had sand all in his nose and his eyes. As for me, I suddenly had no horse under me anymore, so I flew forward and ended up on all fours in front of him. In the end, I wasn’t really hurt. I had some pain and swelling in the knee that hit first, but it went away within an hour or two.

The second and third times were on two consecutive days, around 2 years after I got him. Both times, we were crossing a steep ditch by our barn to get to the trails. On the way up the far side, on both days, he went into bucking fits. On both occassions, he threw me straight up, then moved to the side so that there was no horse under me when I came down. I found it a little strange that he did that two days in a row when it was so out of character for him. When I got back to the barn, a massage therapist was there looking at a friend of mine’s horse. I asked him to look my horse over and see if he found anything without telling him what had happened. He came back and told me that my horse had fairly bad pain in his lower back and it had probably been there for a long time, but he had a high tolerance to pain and probably mostly hides it. It fit the fact that Apache usually didn’t do the crazy bucking thing, but that when going up a steep hill with a heavy western saddle pressing down on his lower back, he complained loudly. I hired the massage therapist to work on him for a few months and noticed a dramatic change in his personality and attitude. I felt bad that he had been in pain and I hadn’t known it, but I was glad to finally get it resolved.

The fourth time was the only time I’ve ever known my horse to do something purposefully malicious. It was around 3 years after I got him and I had started working with a trainer for the first time since I got him. I was working with the barn’s dressage/hunter trainer to learn jumping and more advanced dressage techniques to fine tune him. We were working on lead changes that day and he had gotten to the point that he was bored and didn’t want to do what I was asking him anymore. I had just cross the diagonal and asked for the flying change and he didn’t give it to me. My trainer was telling me keep asking as we reached the rail and headed into the corner. He suddenly started pulling at the reins, running through my hand, and speeding up into a gallop. He had done this before when trying to avoid giving me a change and in this instance we were switching to his bad lead, so it wasn’t a surprising reaction. The suprising part was that as we reached the corner, he wasn’t bending to make the turn. He was barreling stiff as a board straight for the fence ahead. He had a history of playing chicken with me like that as one of his avoidance techniques. Usually about 10 feet out, he’d pull a cow horse move, slamming on the brakes and rocking back onto his haunches and sliding into the fence. He always just ended up with his chest in the fence, so I never quite understood how he thought that affected me. Anyway, at this point, I figure he’s just up to that old trick again. But at 10 feet out, he doesn’t slam on the brakes.It occurs to me that he might mean to try and jump the fence. We had taught him to jump and been doing a lot of it recently. Of course, there was no way he could jump a 5 foot fence so if he tried, it would be disasterous for both of us. But maybe he wasn’t thinking about that. I sat tight and waited to see what he would do as I continued trying to halt him. Another stride and he didn’tt slam on the brakes. At this point, just in case, I slipped one foot out of the stirrup and shifted my weight to one side. If he was going to try and get over the fence, there was no way I was going along for that ride and I was preparing to bail. As soon as he felt my weight shift, he slammed on the brakes and flung his back end around into the fence, effectively tossing me off of his back and into the fence. I covered my head waiting for his hooves to land on me, but he was planted and didn’t move an inch once I came off. I was pinned pretty tight in between his legs and the fence though. I squirmed my way out and reached for the reins and the second he saw that, he yanked his head away and took off galloping and bucking across the arena. My trainer in the mean time was running towards us yelling, “Oh my god, oh my god, are you okay?!” I said I was and she said she couldn’t believe what he just did. She said, “I have never seen him do anything like that before. That was deliberately malicious.” Given his normally sweet and hammy personality, it was astounding, and a bit scary. I never could have imagined him doing something like that. I never went to the doctor, but I think I broke my pinky finger that day – maybe a hairline fracture, nothing major. He flung me into the fence right where a little gate was and my hand hit the metal latch. A few minutes after the incident, when the adrelanine wore off, my finger started hurting. Over the course of the day it got worse and worse until my entire hand was throbbing. I took some pain killers and went to bed and after that it was never that bad again, but I couldn’t bend or use that finger for a while and it was a long time before I could entirely straighten it out again. Apache has never done anything like that since.

The fifth time was right after I moved him out to California in the summer of 2005, about 5 1/2 years after I got him. I was riding in my flat saddle doing a flat work lesson with my trainer at the time. She asked me what my long term goals were and I mentioned that I eventually wanted to get back into jumping. Well, she set up an X right then and there and asked me to go over it. I felt pretty uncomfortable since I had taken a year off from riding when I first moved here and Apache was still in Texas. I hadn’t gotten my bearings back quite yet, nor had Apache. Not to mention I was in a flat saddle! I mentioned that I was concerned, but she was insistent. In retrospect, if I wasn’t comfortable, I should have stood my ground, but I had the attitude back then that trainers were to be trusted unquestioningly and wouldn’t ever ask you to do something that would be dangerous for you or that they weren’t sure you could do. After the incident I’m about to describe, I no longer feel that way. I do believe that you have to be a with a trainer that you trust, which is why, after this incident and my loss of trust in this trainer, I moved to a different barn. However, at the end of the day, if your trainer does ask you do something that you aren’t comfortable with or that you aren’t sure you can do without putting yourself in danger, you are responsible for your own safety and have to insist on it. So, at the time, I naively went ahead and did what she asked. Well, Apache, still being a very green jumper, having not jumped in a year and a half, and having always been frisky on the landings, went into a huge bucking fit on the landing. I was already off balance when we landed because I also was a very green jumper and hadn’t jumped in a year and a half either, or been riding at all for very long after my year off. So when he started bucking, I came right off, especially in a flat saddle. I flipped over in the air and landed on my back. The first thing to hit the ground was the back ball of my pelvis on the right side. It was pretty painful, but I did get back on and ride for a few minutes (no more jumping though). I won’t even bother to go over the conversation that trainer and I had after I fell. By the time I got home, it was hurting pretty badly, so I laid down in bed. I didn’t get up for about 2 hours until I had to go to the bathroom. When I tried to get up and walk, I fell over and started crying because of the shooting pain in my thigh and I thought I had broken my pelvis. My boyfriend at the time wanted to take me to the emergency room, but I just wanted to get back in bed and lay down. I couldn’t imagine having to sit up in a chair all night in a waiting room. By the next morning, the pain in my leg was gone and I could walk with no problems, so I decided nothing was broken. I did have a bruise on my back and sitting was pretty damn painful. I took a pillow to work with me for a week to sit on. When I was still experiencing some pain two weeks after the incident, my boyfriend finally convinced me to go to the doctor. Up until then, the fact that it was getting better every day made me think it couldn’t be anyting serious. The doctor ordered some x-rays and the results showed that I had slipped my last lumbar vertebrae under my first sucral. She said it wasn’t severe enough to require any surgery and eventually would correct itself, but I wasn’t to ride for 2 months. By the way, I am very happy with my new trainer. She has taken a slow, steady, repetitive approach to jumping with me since I first started up again, which took about a year for me to even work up to.

So that’s it. I’ve had him for 7 1/2 years and I’ve come off of him 5 times. Hopefully it will be a while before I come off again.

Leaps and Bounds

So I jumped Apache twice last week, with two very different results. Up to now, all our jumping lessons have been going over one or two poles on one long side of the arena, then riding around to a small X on the other long side of the arena, basically making our path around just inside the rail. My trainer says that my timing and my feel for the jumps has gotten good, that my confidence has improved, and that I’m very patient with my body up to the jumps. We’re ready to move onto the next step. She has started setting up courses for me, so that I can start learning how to work on geometry, memorizing the patterns, putting in lead changes where necessary, etc. That has been the focus in the two lessons we did this week.

The first jumping lesson was on Thursday and it was extremely cold for this time of year, with temparatures in the 40s. Due to the sudden drop in temperature, the horses were all really frisky and distracted. Apache was no expection. He was running through my hand, racing to the jumps, and running off on the landings with some lovely bucks thrown in occassionaly. In the worst of the landing fits, he threw his head up to avoid my half halts when he started to run, took off galloping, threw in a big buck and got me high enough up in the the saddle that I cut the inside of my right knee through my jeans on the stirrup leather buckle. It was stinging the rest of the lesson. Well actually it was stinging until I got home and put some ointment on it, but after that it was fine. After we finished jumping that day, I started to let him canter a few times around to blow off some steam, and he did it again… He threw his head up, lunged sideways, then took off galloping. It took me a quarter of the ring to get him stopped. He has not acted like that in ages.

Fortunately, Sunday was much better. It was unusually hot on Sunday, with the temperature almost hitting 90. Needless to say, with the extreme shift to the temperature being so high, the horses were very low energy. Apache was again no exception, although as always, he did perk up when we started jumping. He just loves to jump. However, having energy did not mean misbehaving, ignoring me, or trying to evade at all. He was good about coming back to me when I half halted, nice and quiet on the landings, and very straight over all the jumps. That was actually what we were working on in that lesson. My trainer pointed out that in our Thursday lesson, he was pretty crooked over all the jumps and not centered. I’m not sure I am a strong enough jumper yet that I would have been able to get that out of him with the way he was acting on Thursday anyway, but admittedly, it wasn’t remotely what I was worrying about. On Sunday, it was much improved. I got him going very straight in and out of all of the poles. Of course, I never did get him to go entirely straight over the jump, although we did improve.

Regardless, we ended the lesson with a big victory for me. Apache is a head strong horse and he likes to be in control. For a lot of our jumping history, I have felt like I am just along for the ride. He usually insists on the speed we’re going to go. Even when I’m trying to slow him down, he’s very strong. When I’m trying to slow him down, it’s usually just because I’m trying to work on keeping a consistent rythym, and of course being in control of what the speed is, not because I have a certain distance that I know I’m shooting for. Whether he listens to me or not regarding the speed, he pretty much decides the distance, and I just make sure I stay on. The lesson on Sunday ended with me taking him over the X four times. The first three, he kept speeding up to the jump about 5 or 6 strides out, despite me checking him to keep his pace, then putting in an extra step at the last minute over the jump and hitting it with his front feet, because he was feeling lazy and tired. So, the last time around, I made him stay in my rythym until about 3 strides out, then I pushed him up to the jump, then when we hit the distance, I kicked and he went for it, completing a nice big, round jump without hitting the poles. It was the first time that I felt I was able to think through everything in the short amount of time you have before it’s all over, and execute it just how I wanted, and that I made the decisions about how it was going to go and they were followed. It was a great feeling. I think that we still have a long way to go because Apache wants to be in control and he needs to learn to trust that it will be okay if he gives that control up to me. He obviously has learned that in general, but jumping is new, challenging, and sometimes scary, and I think he needs to learn to apply it to this situation as well. That being said, this lesson was a first small victory down that road!

One other thing I wanted to mention was a lovely compliment I got from my trainer, other than the nice things she said about my jumping. She said that Apache is so cute over fences and such a great horse. She said that people in the barn are always amazed by and comment on my horse. She said they are amazed by the fact that he knows no bounds. He doesn’t realize that a lot of horses just do one or two things and has the greatest attitude about doing everything and anything. It is always great to hear that people other than you are impressed with your animals. : )

DChocbucks

A fairly humorous misunderstanding came to my attention today.

Yesterday, Digital Chocolate announced yesterday that we are releasing a new product line called Cafe, which basically adds a layer of community on top of a suite of casual games. Trip mentioned (or perhaps was misquoted) as drawing inspiration for Cafe from Starbucks. Then, this morning, one of my coworkers sent me this link:

http://mobilegames.blogs.com/mobile_games_blog/2007/05/mobile_gamers_u.html

Starbucks better watch out.