Ice Trees, December, 2011

Rapid City SD Ice_trees-12-13-11

Ice Trees, Rapid City SD

Winter wonderland 2010

Growing up in California and living in the Arizona desert, I didn’t know ice really formed on trees like this. Just like the ‘sprayed’ xmas trees in the store, only natural and much more beautiful. And more dangerous. Solid ice was not only on the trees, but on every surface. Including the roads it was like trying to drive on a giant ice cube.

Hawkeye, Horse Extraordinaire

This and the photo at the top of my blog, is Hawkeye. He was a palomino, half-Arabian x Appaloosa. He could do anything, and most things he did well enough to win if we were competing. He drove single or as half of a pair when I had young horses I was teaching to drive too.  At those times, I called him my ‘Anchor’. He’d pull anything you hooked him to, including a motorcycle from the mud in the river bed. He would obey voice commands or even just my body language, even if i was dozens of feet away from him. I used him to compete in anything obstacle, driving or riding, pleasure driving, log pulling and competitive trail rides.

He also jumped anything you aimed him at and I showed him in hunter/jumper classes. He didn’t show well in pleasure classes. The judges said he was too animated for Western classes, and not animated enough for English. For driving he had the best ‘hang time’ in his extended trot of any horse I ever saw.

I got Hawkeye when he was a month old, for a high school graduation present. When the woman that owned the mare got the money, she took the mare away from him and left him orphaned at the breeder’s ranch, where I worked at the time and raised him until he was three months old. Then I took him home and his training started then, I literally bomb proofed him. I wanted to prove that Arabs didn’t have to be flighty crazy horses. When someone, usually a kid, would get lost in the riverbed or desert by where we lived, I always participated in the search with Hawkeye. In the middle of the night, with choppers hovering over our head to tell us to meet up, or that the kid had been found, didn’t ruffle him. Once, we saw a hot air balloon coming down in the desert and raced to where it would crash. It barely missed a saguaro, and the balloon pulled it along the ground for a hundred feet, but the people were okay, and I got to have Champaign with them to celebrate a successful, though unplanned, landing.  It was the only time I had Champaign. Must be an acquired taste.

When he was 24 I retired him to someone with a barn that wanted to learn to drive a cart because they couldn’t ride anymore. I had gotten married and moved, and we no longer had horse property. That’s a mistake for another blog.

 

Hawkeye, Mia at the reins

 

Snippet from Quirt and Brody Ride#2 – Doppelganger

 

Quirt and Brody: Ride#2 Doppelganger

Snippet from Quirt and Brody Ride#2 – Doppelganger.

Today’s Smoothie

Smoothies, as healthy as I can stand

Celery, apple, banana, spirolina, vitB-100, CalMag, chocolate syrup, milk.

My writing.

As many of you know, I started writing fan fiction in 2008 after I lost the bookstore and moved from Williams, AZ. It was a rough couple years, still is, since the job I found only lasted a year and I am once again unemployed. I got lost in the fan fic and wrote a lot of it. Just out of curiosity, I went back to one of the sites where the fan fic i wrote is posted, and people are still reading my stories. A few are for a more popular show, but most are for a rather obscure show that most haven’t even heard of. Readers have found typos and such, and pointed them out, but no one has ever left a negative comment on any of them. The only two stories that had no hits last month are short fluffy pieces, that didn’t get many readers even when i wrote them.

When I look back, and reread those, especially the first ones, wow, I can really see how much I’ve improved. I know i still have a long way to go. I have come to think of the time i spent writing fan fic was teaching me how to write at all and marketing research I think i have a pretty good idea of what a section at least of teens like to read.

The stats in the image below are for November, 2011. About three years after I wrote them, and the one show went off the air after only one season.

My dream, is to have that many readers per month buy my own, original Quirt and Brody stories that I’m working on now.

Burning

Burning wood burns a million different colors, long after the flames go out.

I said that, probably not the first, but I said that. I just read a poem that started off about a man’s eyes being dark, like burning wood. Maybe burnt wood, but burning wood is not dark at all, it’s brilliant.

I think i found a scam!

For times when I’m not writing, I really need a job. My first book has come nowhere near supporting me in the manor I’ve become accustomed. I want to pay my electric bills and I also like food.

It’s been 6 months now since I quit the job that was giving me chest pains and hives. At first, when I returned to South Dakota from Arizona, after my friend died, I looked for employment on the internet and applied and begged at every business I went into to hire me, part time, full time, temporary, contractual. My schedule is open. To this day I haven’t even been called for an interview. I am looking for work with more enthusiasm since it’s been so long, and even decided to try “Craig’ List”.

On Craig’s list there were jobs for Rapid City SD. One of them said it was office work in a chiropractic office. Sounded perfect for me. I would expect a job that would require moving around, answering phones, setting appointments, keeping daily ledgers and generating reports, filing, taking people to rooms for the doctors as well as sitting if I needed too, and probably other things I haven’t thought of.

I responded in an email and attached my resume even though the instructions about how to apply were vague.

I few days later I got an email from someone who called herself ‘hiring manager’ or some other title. Never gave the name of her company, but the URL had ‘hiring’ or some other buzzword in it.  Other than that it sounded kinda professional.

She stressed that the business that hired her to do this for them was wanting to hire as soon as possible, so I had to hurry. [it took her several days to reach me] She instructed me to go to a URL and fill out a form, the next step in the hiring process. She also wanted me to get a credit report on myself saying it my credit good or bad wouldn’t change my eligibility for hiring, [then why ask for it?] She gave me another link for that. She stressed again the urgency her ‘clients’ felt about hiring someone, yet told me after I did as she requested, she’d get back to me in 3-5 days.

First I went and filled out the form. It was just a simplified, one page, ‘are you white or Hispanic’ type form. I followed the link for the ‘free’ credit report and of course they wanted my ssn. They also wanted a credit card, for this free report because if I didn’t ‘cancel’ whatever I was signing up for, they would bill me $19 per month. The site looked like freecreditreport.com, but even if it was, why would I sign up for something I’d have to cancel right away just to maybe be considered for a job, that I knew nothing about at the time?

Is this what ‘hiring managers’ are asking for these days?

I have applied online for many jobs and the ones that I know to be real, never asked me to do anything like that, not even for the job I was offered.

I wrote the woman back and told her everything that I thought was wrong with her request and never heard back from her after I requested more information about the job first. If there really was an actual job behind all of that, I guess I won’t be getting it ^.^)

Being in a horse’s dance space

While in the saddle, if you ‘stay in the middle with your legs on both sides’, you can usually make it safely through anything that happens. A good rider uses balance and mindfulness, not muscle.

But in some ways, handling a horse from the ground is more dangerous than being in the saddle. When you’re working with animals on the ground it’s like ‘dancing’ with a thousand-pound unpredictable animal – with very hard feet.

Even if you’ve been around horses all your life or perhaps especially if you’ve been around them all your life, you know how unpredictable they can be, given the right circumstances. And still, because you’ve been around them a long time, you become lax in your handling of them. It works out fine, most of the time.

Even the animals that seem mean to us humans, never start the day thinking, “I’m gonna get him today.” Many new horse owners are clueless about an animal’s nature or its natural ability to hurt you without trying to and if someone is hurt, they blame the horse, ‘oh that’s a baaaaad horse!’.

So many animal owners seem to have been raised in a Disney movie, where all the animals sing and just love ‘people’ and will save ‘people’ from danger. I read once it’s called anthropomorphize or something.

Animals start off pretty neutral. It’s how humans interact with them that makes them seem a certain way. One of the basic horsemanship rules is ‘don’t ever stand directly in front of a horse’ and newbie dudes often follow that rule better than the old hands.

Allowing a horse to man-handle a human even in a way that seems affectionate or harmless can lead to problems. Horses don’t rub on people because they like them. They do it because they itch and they’re just using their human for a scratching post. Horses should respect their humans more than that. Given the right circumstances, not respecting their humans space could result in the injury of the human or even the horse.

Allowing a horse to be too close or too ‘familiar’ can result in the animal thinking he can be too close at other times and even try to dominate their human as though they were another horse. If they are too close and they are spooked by something for example, they horse could just run over the human to get away. Horses bang and bump on each other all the time in a herd. The horse must never think you are part of his or her herd.

Brody lets his horse, Archer get away with breaking all the rules sometimes, but the teenager is athletic and most of the time, can get out of the way. He and Archer also have an unusual understanding between them, and even the horse seems to know when it’s important to respect Brody’s space. Not everyone is as athletic or strong as Brody is, and not all horses are as well mannered as Archer is.

If rules are broken, sometimes . . . there is no place to go to get out of the way.

Four Noble Truths – The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism

Even hair is not permanent…

1. The truth of suffering (dukkha)
2. The truth of the cause of suffering (samudaya)
3. The truth of the end of suffering (nirhodha)
4. The truth of the path that frees us from suffering (magga)