BLOG #5: Horses, Reading/Writing, and Blogging

BLOG #5: Horses, Reading/Writing, and Blogging

Not much has got done in the last five weeks. By now, the basement was to have been sorted out, the living room rearranged,  the garage tidied up, and the rough work in the back garden completed. I blame my lack of productivity on my busy social life, my time spent out at the barn with the horses, my willingness to jump in a car and go off on a road trip on short notice, and the catching up with friends.

Now that my mind isn’t chewing on work-related problems or solutions to projects, it’s free to meander and wander and make weird connections and so the connection between horses, reading/writing, blogging, and retirement is obvious to me and, I hope, it will become obvious to you.

HORSES

I’ve been a horse woman for, ummmm, maybe 60 years give or take a year. I’m not sure when I began my love affair with horses, but it may have started with the piebald cobs that pulled the rag-and-bone men’s carts around the neighbourhood. Yes, I am that old and yes, we still had some horse-drawn transportation back in the day. Those piebald/skewbald/pinto cobs were just Heinz 57s back in the day. Now they have pedigrees and go by the name of Gypsy Vanners. Then and now they were/are lovely critters.

 

Regardless of the equid’s breed, unless you grew up in Northern England and are of a similar vintage to me, I’m betting you have not a clue what a rag-and-bone man was? Think recycling. If you’d like to have a little bit of information on English history, check out this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rag-and-bone_man and check out the lovely horse in the bottom right image. Rag-and-bone men and their horses were an everyday occurrence back in 1950s/1960s northern England. But where I first got a taste of riding equids can only have been on the donkeys on either the Blackpool sands or the Morecombe sands. https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=blackpool+beaach+and+donkey+rides&view=detail&mid=14EAA687F4B27CDCDD7A14EAA687F4B27CDCDD7A&FORM=VIRE. A hard life for the donkeys, but great fun for kids.

The love affair began and continues.

A week or so ago I was at the Charlotte Dujardin clinic at Rocky Mountain Show Jumping (Anderson’s place just south of Spruce Meadows). I reminded myself that even though I couldn’t achieve that level of riding with my current horse (or any horse for that matter), I could still enjoy dressage at my level, and I find that I am now (finally)  content to be what the Brits call a Happy Hacker (aka trail rider).

The clinic was marvellous. Charlotte is a great instructor with an excellent eye for small details and small tweaks that make a big difference in performance. I aspire to be that kind of teacher when or if I find myself back in a classroom (face-to-face or online). I was also impressed with Charlotte’s ability to talk non-stop for about six hours . . . and I enjoyed her British humour and sarcasm (which I can only assume she toned down for her Canadian audience). There were a few ladies-who-lunched in the 99% female audience, but most were horsey folks who had shown up looking like horsey Calgarians. Remember my concerns about how to dress for this event and settling on well-creased jeans and lipstick? I needn’t have worried and most folks were in jeans (and many crumpled rather than deliberately creased).

Attending clinics such as Charlotte’s and watching young women coming up through the ranks in their sports reminded me that I have not always felt so confident and comfortable with my acceptance of being a recreational rider. There have been many times when I have seriously questioned what the heck I am doing having any aspirations around riding and working with horses. Many of those times involve nasty tumbles and ending up in hospital, but two times do stand out. When I was 21, in Vienna, Austria, I watching the Spanish Riding School horses perform and I was ready to just give up because I’d never be able to work with a horse at that level (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Riding_School). Another time I was around 25 y.o. in the Sydney, Australia, area riding in the Outback and I watched a cowboy gallop his horse down a steep incline. Nope. Not me – and I thought I knew how to ride. Think that iconic scene from The Man from Snowy River where the dashingly-handsome cowboy rides his lovely dun horse down the mountain side (https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=the+man+from+snowy+river+with+poem+and+music&view=detail&mid=4B17184615BF031076894B17184615BF03107689&FORM=VIRE – just watch from 2:39 to 3:09).

And the connection to retirement? I now have the leisure to ride during the week rather than trying to cram all my horsey stuff into the weekend because, well, I was always too pooped after work to drive out to Cochrane. Many of the folks at the barn are retired and so there’s always someone to hang out with and ride with. Hasty is now a well-seasoned 24 y.o.; and although our first eight years were a bit rocky,  we’ve now been together about 16 years so we know each other very well and work together very well.

And so while Hasty’s more mellow than he was as a youngster, he is also 24 and getting just a little stiff. Just as I’ve moved into semi-retirement from paid work, Hasty’s moving into semi-retirement as a riding horse. . . and so more of my efforts can go into my hubby’s (David Thompson) young Icelandic gelding, Bear.

READING/WRITING

Just as I’ve always been a horse woman, I’ve always been a writer. Not that I think for one moment that I have the Great Canadian Novel in me, but I do think there are writings yet to emerge from me that may delight, entertain, inform. And not that business writing isn’t creative – drafting and honing proposals, reports, and workplace memos is indeed a creative process. Now that the stress of being in the paid workforce is leaving my mind and my body I find I have the energy to think creatively and to write. I am delighted to discover that I still have a desire to write especially as I thought I’d lost that desire completely. My scribble book of ideas is being well scribbled . . . so who knows where that will take me.

I’m hatching ideas for a children’s book (horse related, naturally) – and this is something I would not  have had the intellectual energy to consider even five weeks ago. So, I’m right on target, right? Don’t many retirees say they want to write?

And reading? Well, two to four books/week depending on how busy I was at work and whether or not I was on vacation . . . plus at least one horse magazine and at least one technical document usually related to teaching or curriculum design. The more one reads, I find, the better one writes. One can learn from other writers about how to elegantly craft sentences, cleverly manipulate meaning through carefully placed punctuation, evoking emotion though carefully places words and phrases and images. It helps, too, I find, to move out of one’s favourite genre (for me that mystery novels) and into other areas. S.t.r.e.t.c.h.i.n.g. one’s ideas. I was ruminating on the connection between reading and writing this morning as I was sipping my tea on the kitchen deck. Of course, reading may also be a contributing factor to none of the housework and reorganization getting done.

BLOGGING

Remember that technology basically hates me. To borrow an expression from a  friend, I am a techno peasant (or digital immigrant if you want a more official term). My computer spends its down time plotting how to thwart and frustrate me (seriously). Until a couple of weeks ago, what I knew about blogging could fit on the head of a pin with plenty of room to spare. But with my niece Katherine and friend Marian as my guides, I managed to get started. If you sense a rabbit hole coming up, you’d be right. Now I want to figure out at least one more blog and I want to figure out how to make money from that one. Apparently it’s possible (who knew!?) Thank heavens for the library and the Dummies series of help books because they are my guides on this venture. Thanks to Dummies, I've now learnt how to add photographs.

My growing knowledge, which is easy to grow when one starts from zero, is leading to all sorts of ideas popping up. The connection to retirement? Well, I think there’s one blog about retired gals and their geriatric horses in the making.

Miscellaneous:

Added to the ever-growing list of things I can do as a retiree is going off on all-day field trips midweek. The latest one was to Rowley (a ghost town near Drumheller, Albert), where I met the delightfully chatty 10 y.o. Jesse who happens to be the great, great, grandson of the original owner of the livery barn. Well worth the trip, especially if one is a photographer. Cross country (a very pleasant trip this time of year) about 2.5 – 3.0 hours from west Calgary. https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=rowley%2c+alberta&qpvt=rowley%2c+alberta&FORM=IGRE

Remember I said that I’m unlikely to be successful as a fully retired person? Well, I applied for a job as an enumerator with the government. Stay tuned on that one. And I’ve been invited to co-author a couple of education-related articles . . . so it would seem that work and I aren’t quite done with each other yet.

I just finished reading a novel set in 1901 Edinburgh and, for no reason I’m aware of, an old expression popped into my mind: “You’ll be right as nine pence.” Which caused me to wonder what is so magical about nine pence (this is in the old British currency) and what was the problem with eight pence and ten pence. Any ideas? . . . and as for me, I’m right as nine pence myself and off to be a gopher at the Working Equitation show this weekend in Cochrane. J