January 2010     

• Planning
• Moccasin
• Fifth Consecutive Day
• Chain Saw!
• Chain Saw 2
• Jackit Goes for a Walk
• January Snow in Britain
• Hop-a-long Uno
• Ponderosa
• Let the Monsoons Begin
• We have Pus!
• Monsoons (Cont.)
• Mid-week Schedule
• Investigating Sliger Mine Road

Back to December • Forward to February

Planning
Tuesday 6th

In the time-honoured manner, January is the time you look at all the rides available to you and vaguely pretend which ones you might like to do. Should you have a horse. With legs. Which work.

So here are the rough possibilities:

I'm not thrilled about Cuyama being so close to NV Derby, and truth be told, I wouldn't do NV Derby at all if it wasn't for the Triple Crown, but at least it's not too far away to haul to.

I like the six weeks between WV-NASTR 75-Tevis.

I will only commit to Tevis if I think Roo is strong enough. He's going to have to work hard at both WV and NASTR to see if he's up for it - no dawdling allowed at either of those two rides - and if that pans out, then we'll go for it. Otherwise, we'll just aim for VC100.

I like the fact that I've got the two horses because it means I can still do some "in betweeny rides" like NV Moonshine and Bridgeport that I'd otherwise have to miss because they're too close to other rides.

DVE Cups - you can never not have enough of them

Wednesday 6th
Moccasin

Stumpy, my long-lived work fish finally died over Christmas, so I have a new work fish to ring in the New Year. His name is Moccasin and he doesn't like flash photography. Also on the calendar for this day, a visit to the dentist. Dentist says they must put a crown on my remaining dodgy-filled molar (all the other molars-with-fillings already reached their Sell-By dates). Once this is done, I'll have nothing but shiny white molars in my mouth.

Friday 8th
Fifth Consecutive Day

Well, I made it - five consecutive days in the office for the first time in nine years. It wasn't pretty at times (like the two evenings I came home and went straight to bed) and I didn't quite manage the "get there by 9 a.m." part, but it was a start.

Getting to leave things lying on my desk and walking away from them at the "determined end of the day" was quite pleasant and a lot less stress. Trying to figure out how to condition horses, buy dog pills, get to the post office, and have the energy to deal with everyday chores at home was less pleasant.

On Thursday night we even managed to squeeze in a trip to the cinema to see Sherlock Holmes which was a lot of fun, but I was pretty comatose by the time we got home at 10:30. Luckily, pft kindly fed the pones for me.

Next week will be better.

And I vow to make my weekends count.

Today I had a good day and managed to write some coherent stuff. 
So coherent, someone asked to "publish me" as a guest on their Blog.

Forgot to add, we have identified two problems from having to appear in the office five days a week. 

• One is avoiding going out to lunch every day (my lunch excursions used to be limited to once a week).
  

• And the second is not having enough presentable clothes to put on. It seems that the grungy, horse-feeding sweats I wore twice a week aren't going to work. 

  To help me produce more outfits, we made a second excursion on the way home from work to buy me some black boots. Notice how these boots aren't actually black, but we tried. These boots are fluff filled, ultra-easy to wear, and have sufficient tidiness to be worn in the office without me having to resort to stupid-girl-shoes.

  Now I have to have a leggings-making session. I can get cotton lycra, either from Rainshed or I can have a batik-ing flurry and dye my own by fishing at Dharma Trading Company. I'm leaning towards the fun of Dharma, but suspect it might take a while to get around to dyeing and sewing.

Saturday 9th
Chain Saw!

Mindful of our pathetic grasshopper status from last month, today we got our Stihl chain saw and accoutrements (bright orange chaps to keep you from chopping your leg off) (are they bright orange so that you notice you have legs?) and set forth to work on the downed trees PG&E had kindly left us. pft did most of the chopping, while I did the heavy lifting - carrying the logs from downed tree to cart (which was, of course, uphill and one of its tyres was flat).

Our log pile has tripled in size but unfortunately is made up entirely of green wood. So off we went, up to the old-dead-oak in the front garden to chop off its lower limbs. This tree is tangled in the overhead lines, so we need to get a Professional to take the entire thing down, but the lower limbs are relatively substantial and worth the effort.

Woe - the water heater stopped working. The pilot light won't stay lit. 
Man has been called and is coming Sunday morning.

Sunday 10th Chain Saw 2 So far we haven't managed to chop our legs off (what with noticing them because they are bright orange) but I did manage to smack myself in the face with a piece of wood stomping on it to break it in half. My arms are aching, I've tweaked my back, and pft has a tweaked elbow. Chain sawing is fun. Yes.	Before:	After:
The water heater is fixed and $95 later there was much rejoicing.

Jackit Goes for a Walk - when the late afternoon rolled around and I started to get sleepy and wanted a nap, in the spirit of "making my weekend count", I decided to go over to Meadowbrook for a hike. Chili has a stiff hip at the moment, so she doesn't get to come riding for a while but I thought she'd enjoy an excursion - and if I was taking her, I might as well take Jackit too.

Practising our trot-out before loading into the trailer. I feel stupid trailering him, since he's so tiny and the trailer is so huge.	Jackit did really good considering he doesn't get out much and we'd never done anything like this before, he took it all in his stride.  He mostly seems to get into trouble if he doesn't have something to do, so the more complicated the terrain, the better he concentrates. To this end, I made sure we took the trickiest routes and clambered over the everything we could find - pushing through spiky bushes (apparently scrub oak is edible)(?), stepping over logs, slithering down rock piles, boulders, crossing three bridges (each several times), etc. His attitude was "ho hum" to everything and he carefully picked his way through it all.  He did some very fancy footwork getting up onto one of the bridges that has two steps up - the first being a nasty, rock-filled one which he opted to avoid, daintily stepping onto the next (narrow) step and then hopping up onto the bridge without a stumble. <applause> I also got him to straddle a log and stop dead, which he was quite happy to do. When I once tried the same maneuver with Mouse, it resulted in a very long overwrought session where she got very upset because she couldn't figure out what I wanted, and certainly couldn't stop (!) halfway over crossing a log. The only over-reaction Jackit had was from an 8" wide trickle of water that he took a dislike to and thought he ought to jump like it was about 8' wide. And the part he liked best? Getting to eat whatever scrumptious brown-crunchy vegetation he found at the side of the trail as we went along.

Friday 15th
Hop-a-long Uno

Few things are more pathetic than Uno with a poorly foot. He appears to have a foot abscess firmly ensconced in his right front (same problem foot from 14 months ago). Apart from hopping around and practically holding up the offending limb like a dog with a sore paw, not much has changed over the last few days. I've dug around in his foot, pared down the sole as far as I dared, raped his heels (which is, I suspect, where it is located), packed the foot with ichthamol and duct-taped the whole mess up. Now we're at the "wait and see" stage.

Saturday 16th
Ponderosa

Leslie took me to a new place to ride on the north side of Foresthill Divide. You ride down three miles to the river (1400'), over the bridge at the bottom, and up the other side three miles (1100'). Near the top, you turn around and come back down again. Great butt training for the horses and a good chatty trail for when everywhere else is sloppy. (North is right in this Google Map).

Miss Banana Face	Leslie multi-tasking with Nugget in tow
Roo on alert in case of Attack-Kayaks	The bridge at the bottom of Ponderosa
	You have to be careful of the holes covered by bits of dodgy plywood. Roo did the whole 12 miles barefoot - mostly because I couldn't face scraping off the mud to get his boots on
	Nugget inspecting the kayaks
Roo keeping a careful eye on them, just in case of any eye-plucker activity	American River water - apparently not as tasty as orange puddle water on the way down
Starting up on  the far side	Roo was very game for this - surprisingly
Suspicious-looking pipe - more potential eye-plucker possibilities - you need to be ready to leap sideways at any moment	Most excellent tree-on-a-rock
Looking back down at what we'd just come up	<squeak>

Direction of weather flow, NE. My current location, NE

Monday 18th Let the Monsoons Begin pft has Martin Luther King Day off today, so I drove to work on my own. The rain which started yesterday is still going strong so it was highly entertaining when the driver's-side windscreen wiper suddenly lost interest in working. After jamming under the other wiper for a short while, it shot out sideways and came to rest on my side mirror. Hmmm.  The rest of the journey on the freeway was spent peering through the center part of the windscreen, trying to stay away from other cars and praying that the remaining wiper didn't also crap out.  pft tells me that it's possible that the wiper arm just popped off its spline, so repairs might be minor. All I have to do is wait for a lull in the current monsoon to nip out there and fiddle with it.

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Tuesday 19th We have Pus! Uno's abscess finally burst yesterday (lovely) and he looks a little better - still hobbling, but at least he's no longer hopping. It vacated the premises via his heel in the hair line and that area is very red and tender - no surprises. He also has some filling in the leg, but no surprises there, either. We glopped yet more ichthamol on - this time going up the back of his foot and rewrapped with duct tape and vet wrap. Hopefully that'll draw it all out with its Wonder Powers. Uno and his tiny friend

In the meantime, the windscreen wiper got semi-fixed during a lull in yesterday's monsoon - enough to get me home, anyway. Unfortunately, during its escapade, it wore most of the splines off so isn't terribly trustworthy - a new wiper arm is in order.  Here is this morning's radar loop. Don't make me go to work! <whimper>. In any case, who needs a gym membership when you can muck six stalls of soggy manure twice a day? It's very bracing doing it in the rain and wind.

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Sunday 24th
Monsoons (Cont.)

Was this Wednesday's radar loop? Or Thursday's? Who can tell - it has basically been doing this solidly since last Monday and the promised weekend break wasn't long enough to be noticeable.

Wednesday morning Fergus and Jackit got out and trashed the sodden quagmire and manage to kill-by-smooshing the tiny chooklet pictured above :(    A glass fell off the deck and smashed onto the concrete below, flinging glass everywhere... and so the week went. By the time the snow appeared Friday morning, I was pretty much done. Packed up early from work and went home in disgust with work to finish up over the weekend.

pft was gone Friday evening, returning on Saturday night - visiting brother Jon for his 60th birthday celebration. He had a good time and actually enjoyed the 8-9 hours of driving accompanied by a good books-on-CD, and especially after buying new wipers for the BMW - ones that didn't go "GRAUGHHHHCHHH" each time they wiped.

Saturday was spent looking at properties - one of which appealed greatly - but when I got home I realised that I didn't want to move anywhere else - I love it here - I just want more time and more sleep. 

So the trick now is to find myself 30 minutes a day - which I can do if I don't have to obsessively clean six stalls twice a day. And the reason I do that is because the horses eat off the ground and I don't want them eating off poop. If I can find hay feeders that keep the hay off the ground then I could probably do away with at least one of the twice-daily muckings. That's the plan, anyway. So far, these seem like a good possibility.

Being perpetually tired lowers all tolerance for clutter and mess - of which we have lots. Not a good combination for two tired, irritable (one PMSing) people. Trying to get things under control (and only slightly succeeding), I spent four hours today sorting through clutter-paper, burned a sack-full and filed the rest. Combine that with cleaning two toilets, dremmeling Chili's toenails, sweeping the kitchen floor, and removing some more clutter-boxes, even though I feel like I wasted the whole weekend I did actually get stuff done and it's looking better in here.

On the plus side, after being glopped and wrapped all week, Uno's abscess is progressing nicely. He stayed in his shelter and so kept the whole thing as dry and clean as possible - until yesterday when I caught him outside, fetlock deep in mud. The bandage had turned into a bracelet, so I cut it off and am leaving the whole thing open for a while to let it breathe and see what happens. The skin had the look of dead fish and like it could use some daylight. So far, 24 hours into being open, the cut still looks good - no ooze, just a bit spongy.

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Wednesday 27th
Mid-week Schedule

6:35 - Wake from a comatose sleep, feed cats

6:40 - Put on grubby sweats and poke at email on computer in an effort to wake up

6:50 - Look at time, scuttle to put on grubby woolly, grubby coat, wellies and go out to feed and muck. Realise headlight isn't necessary - it's almost light enough to see since it isn't pouring with rain for the first time in nine days. Admire the efficacy of the clever plan of closing off the Preferred Toilet-stall - only two stalls to muck in the barn - hah!, plus the sloppy area under overhang. Sweep out uneven-holed-floor in furthest stall. Think on how much easier this task will be when I get those stall mats in at the weekend. Threaten Roo with death as he sets up to pee in said stall. Throw hay into newly-cleaned stalls. Do a chook-count to make sure everyone is present and correct. Fill Uno's hay net and Provo's pellet bucket. Fight off Evil Rooster. Squelch to other shelter area, hang Uno's bag, do a Speed-Skip (good Corner Pooper!), squeeze through panel with broom and do an Insta-Sweep of the corner Provo is standing in, put his pellets in his feeder, and set to mucking the two worst stalls - Provo's and Hopi's. Think on the fact that it's actually easier to muck when it's soaking wet, since then everything slithers better across the mats. Work on the standing urine puddle in the corner by trying to un-dam the drainage hole. Fail. Grab empty hay bags, squelch back to barn, fill two hay bags, squelch back to shelter and wrestle bags into position hanging from roof. Give Hopi his enforced hug and scritch (whether he likes it or not). Check gate latches, squelch back to the barn, check gate latches, secure feed room door, squelch back to house, admire startled-looking deer in front garden

7:45 - heat coffee in microwave and slurp down while writing email

7:54 - dash to bathroom, scrub at tub with foot+scrubber while cleaning teeth while showering

8:12 - wish I'd done some laundry so there would be a wider variety of clothes to choose from, crowbar dog out of bed, clothe and feed dog, shut down computer, bag computer, put dog bed outside, rinse outdoor dog bed tray, rinse indoor dog bed tray, microwave breakfast sandwich, put bark-collar on dog and insert raw hide treat into mouth, avoid fingers being yomped off

8:35 - procession of people and belongings to car, listen to book-on-CD on the way to work, try to stay awake while pft drives, fail

10:00 - arrive at work, trudge up stairs; work on flow diagram, work on organization chart, work on revision of flow diagram, work on sampling map, work on revision 2 of flow diagram, work on sampling map, work on revision 3 of flow diagram, work on sampling map, work on revision 4 of flow diagram. In between working think about patio doors; about how tired I am; about how I should probably start taking my meds again; about planned rock project for the weekend; about how tired I am; admire Moccasin and his Pepper friend and their Bubble Love Nest; write emails; bite nails wish I wasn't so tired so I had more of an attention span

7:00 - call pft and announce that "I'm done"

7:15 - get back in car, listen to book-on-CD on the way home from work, try to stay awake while pft drives, fail

7:45 - "quick visit" to supermarket in Auburn for breakfast foods (and many other items not previously thought of including, most importantly, string cheese)

9:00 - arrive home to be greeted by cheerful dog

9:15 - put away fud, feed fish in tank, put on grubby woolly, grubby coat, wellies and repeat mucking and feeding duties only without the Attack Rooster or the loud chorus of crowing in ear while trying to stuff hay bags. Inspect Uno's nicely-mending heel. Wonder if the ground is dry enough to feed Provo and Hopi along the fence yet without them slipping and falling over in the mud, decide it is and therefore avoid mucking two more stalls - yay

9:50 - finish up and spend a few minutes returning to house - admire new stall mats waiting to be installed, admire night sky with fat moon, enjoy lack of noise, listen to owls, feed even more cheerful dog

10:15 - think about possible supper options, try to avoid a) Ramen noodles (again) or b) frozen meatballs (again).

11:15 - make it to bed

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Sunday 31st
Investigating Sliger Mine Road

	Although the monsoons dwindled slightly after ten days, the ground was still pretty soggy so Ann and I went to investigate Sliger Mine Road as a potential slop-free zone.    Poverty Bar river crossing  is behind this hump
	Starting from her house, there was a short slippery section to be negotiated at the end of Roquerro Cerro, but otherwise the footing was pretty good - and very dry on SM.
	I hadn't ridden on the lower half of Sliger Mine Road for about twelve years and had forgotten how pretty it is down there.  We only rode as far as Green Gate before turning south towards the Oleander (site of the bear from last year) and back up French Hill. Hopefully next weekend we'll make it all the way to the bottom to Cherokee Bar.
	This Google Earth map shows the Ponderosa track (in red) and the Sliger Mine track (in orange), as well as a couple of Tevis landmarks. Funny how close everything is as the crow flies, but the canyons and  American River Forks mean we have to go around. (North is left)

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