Friday Night Feeling

It's Friday night! I'm on the sofa with the cat and Cowboy has gone out to play poker with the boys. Living the dream.

Earlier this week, I came down with a strange headache thing that meant I missed a day of school. This is very sad to me, because school is much more fun than it used to be when I was eleven.

I finally got our thank you notes for our wedding gifts in to the post and they are on their way to the lovely people who showered us with kindness several weeks ago.

Sir Richard is getting ridiculously big, and now when he sleeps on my chest in the mornings, it's less adorable and more suffocating. I still can't help being utterly besotted with him. I am powerless in the presence of his little face.

He continues to tear things up, climb on things he shouldn't, and shove his paws under the bathroom door and cry every time I go for a wee.

Occasionally he pushes a toy mouse under the door and we play instead. We have that kind of relationship.

Today, Cowboy pestered me into riding Sunshine for the first time in over week. We've had a lot on our plate, and I hadn't felt up to doing much in recent days. Sunshine has been out in the pasture with Beau, getting as much good grass as possible as the winter closes in.

Well, I brushed her off and saddled her today (ok, Cowboy threw the saddle for me... I'm puny...), and we went out to the round pen to see how we would do.

Bill Dorrance writes about feeling for the horse; true horsemanship comes through feel. I've been working hard to put aside my frustrations at my lacking horsemanship, and to leave behind my annoyance when I step into the barn. I've been focusing on putting out a good feeling whenever I am around Sunshine, and keeping in mind that she is my partner in this work.

We've worked on little things on the ground as I've brought her in and out from the pasture - she's stopped being pushy and impatient and has begun to feel for me when I'm leading her. When I'm brushing her down, I try not to be brusque about it, but to feel for her response to the work and to give her the sense that I'm there to help. She has stopped dancing about while I'm grooming now. She watches me with one eye.

Today, the weather was cold and damp, and both of us were feeling a little stiff and sore. I made an effort to tack her up quietly and gently, and to invite her with me to the round pen. We both stretched out a little bit. We both heaved a sigh as if to say "Goodness, I am out of shape for this sort of thing." That's entirely true...

We stretched out, we moved, we got as loose as we could, and I thought all the time about how she felt. She felt stiff, tight, unfit, but willing enough. She did everything that I asked without a fight, but she couldn't offer me the flexible, pretty thing. That was ok. I could feel her trying. I could feel her feeling for me.

"OK," she said, dropping her head and trying to round, "I hear what you want. I'll give it a shot. This is all I can manage today. Is that OK?"
It was more than OK. She and I have got ourselves into battles before. Finally we're learning to talk to each other without yelling. We're learning to meet in the middle.

It was possibly the best ride we've ever had together.

I'm going to go and throw hay at her now.

13 days in

I've been in the US for 13 days. I have finally got a US phone number, and waved a sad goodbye to the phone number that I have had since my very first phone, the trusty Nokia 5110 with the changeable covers...

I've cleaned all the things - most things more than once, and the dirt keeps coming. It doesn't help that we have a juvenile feline who likes to shred anything he can get his adorable little paws on. We invested in a laser pointer in the last few days, just to keep him busy.

Sometimes we can wear him out, just for a moment.

I've started to learn where everything lives in the supermarkets. I've learned that you can't get anything for a good price without giving up your personal information and getting the store club card.

I have a pile of recycling in my kitchen and my shed because I haven't yet deciphered the recycling system. It involves crates with very similar contents listed on them. How exactly do "scrap paper" and "newspaper" differ in any significant way? Why is there no crate for plastic? It is mystifying.

I have fed Cowboy some real food and he has repaid me with some manual labour, heavy lifting and getting up early to get the horses in while I snooze for another hour or two.

The horses have been a joyous challenge to me. Sunshine is teaching me about how to say "I mean it!" and our new addition, Beau, is teaching me about lightness. Sunshine has been so desensitised that you could do just about anything with her and she barely blinks, which is wonderful for keeping people safe, but it also means she needs a louder cue. Beau is so light and responsive to anything and everything that just thinking something seems to be enough for him.

His little quirk is that he has spent so much of his 4 years in the arena, he has no idea how to pick up his feet. So we spent some time teaching him the other night.

It took him a few goes to catch on.

There is something magical about watching this little horse think something through for the first time. He tries so hard. He wants the right answer, and when he understands the question properly, he is ready for anything.

It was a beautiful evening, and it reminded me why I came here. Me, the cowboy, horses and the fresh air. I am so lucky.

Obligatory 2014 post

2014 is the Year of the Horse (so they tell me), which seems to me like a pretty good start. I actually started 2014 in the bathroom, picking at in-grown hairs on my legs, because I'm just that glamorous and exciting.


I hear Sunshine has turned into a bit of a snarky biatch whilst she's had some time off over the festive period, so Cowboy has gone back to ride her fat butt off and remind her not to be so uppity.

I spent a few hours yesterday with a notepad and a pen, and scribbled out two pages' worth of things I wanted to achieve, acquire and investigate at some point in 2014. Some of them were urgent, and need to be done two weeks ago, including renewing my passport so I can go to the US in February, which is cutting it really rather fine indeed... Well done, Bee.

My two page list has been streamlined and formatted into a colourful Excel spreadsheet of a checklist, with headings like "URGENT", "SH*T THAT NEEDS DOING" and "SOUL FOOD". There are other, more boring and business-like headings for more boring things like my business.

"Soul food" is the biggest category. It's a list of things that I want to experience, skills that I want to practise and improve, new things that I want to learn about. It includes conquering my fear of making bread, learning about how to keep chickens, finally learning how to use my camera in a more advanced way than just pointing it and pressing the button, and going back to do more horse archery.

As I enter 2014, jobless and living with my parents (again, the patient souls), with my partner in crime on the other side of the planet, and having given up something that I worked extremely hard for when I eventually admitted it wasn't what I wanted, I put together this list of soul food in a bid to seek out happiness and success this year, without having to radically change my entire diet, appearance, wardrobe or daily habits.

Yes, I would like to develop gluteal muscle mass, I really would like to have an arse to fill out my jeans, so I will probably need to do something different there, but generally I just want to enhance what I am already very lucky to have in life.

Wishing all of you a successful, happy 2014. Spend time with your friends and family, give some things away, go outside and play in the rain. Be excellent to each other. Etc.