Weekly Blog Roundup

Creating Transferable Skills from PONY'TUDE
This is precisely something I always struggle with when I go from bareback to a saddle, or from no stirrups to stirrups. How to really and truly break the pattern and the muscle memory of bad habits?

Well, that's one way to start the year from Four Mares, No Money
Really interesting (and scary) medical story with a good ending + a GREAT offer to commission gorgeous art. Check it out and maybe get some of your own art!

Boston Public Library Photograph Collections: Suffolk Downs

I'm going to do a series of posts exploring the superbly digitized collections of the Boston Public Library, as held on Flickr.

Today's topic: Suffolk Downs.

I can't think about Suffolk Downs without feeling a pang of grief. It was a grand track, a classic track, a real Boston kind of track: the sport of kings, but in a hardscrabble kind of way. It was the place where Tom Smith discovered Seabiscuit in 1936, when the track was a year old, which is such a perfect Suffolk Downs story: diamond in the rough, champion amidst the claimers.

When I turned 18, I celebrated at Suffolk Downs. I could bet by myself! I brought friends and my then-boyfriend and we spent the day and I broke even. It's a place where my two favorite things in life converge perfectly: horses and history.

But racing and horses have been fading fast in eastern Massachusetts for the last twenty five, if not fifty, years. When I was growing up, there were a half-dozen horse farms in my town. There was a Thoroughbred breeding farm that bred for the track. The barn I grew up riding at took in racehorses on layoffs for rehab, a half-dozen at a time. All of that is gone now, except the barn I first rode at: now it's just a lesson barn, no rehab horses. It's all buried under McMansions and suburban sprawl and godawful assholes driving pristine pickup trucks.

A few years ago, Suffolk Downs changed hands around the same time as Massachusetts was desperately trying to shove through casino licensing. The new owners said the only way they could make the track viable was if they were granted one of the casino licenses. They were voted down, and now the track is mostly shuttered. It no longer holds regular racing meets, settling instead for occasional days. In 2016, there were only six days of live racing.

But during its heyday, when it was one of the jewels of the American racing scene? There was nothing like it. So today, I'm throwing it back to those days.

All photographs are courtesy of the Boston Public Library's Suffolk Downs album on Flickr, They're embedded here, so you can click on them and go see the higher-res pictures.













(Caption is "Boston police search stable at Suffolk Downs for Brink's Robbery suspects and loot." Amazing.)

Wordless Wednesday: Mom, make the kitty stop snuggling me

Poor Arya. She can dish it out, but she can't take it.

Dual standards

For about a month now, I have been limping around. 

At first, I thought that I had tweaked something in my right ankle when I made the switch to wearing winter boots. It happens. Big stomping boots change your gait, and I always buy winter boots slightly too large for my feet, because I always end up layering socks within a week or two of wearing them.

Time marched on, I kept limping, and I learned through trial and error that the problem was not my ankle, it was my heel. Specifically, it was the back of my heel, and it was not getting better.

Whatever: I walked less, and I was riding without stirrups anyway.

You can see where this is going, right? It didn't get better. It's still pretty definitively not better. I finally, grumpily, started googling, and pretty quickly made an armchair diagnosis of achilles tendinitis, pretty classically right where the achilles tendon connects to the bone of my heel.

Unsurprisingly, diagnosis did not actually change anything. In fact, things continued to get kind of worse, with the pain sharper when the tendon was expressed and a low-grade burning sometimes even when at rest.

So, for the last 10 days or so I've been resting even more (so many extra holiday pounds that are just not getting worked off, ugh) and icing it every night. That has helped a little bit, but do you know what uses your heel? Driving. And putting stirrups back on your saddle to get ready for a lesson.

I have a doctor's appointment next week. Since I can still flex my ankle just fine - well, it's painful, but mechanically sound - it's definitely not ruptured, but there is a nagging sense in the back of my mind that it's a partial tear. Best case, I'm still looking at quite a while of restricted activity and icing because soft tissue. Damn it.

Sometime last week, while icing my heel and reading, it finally occurred to me.

If this had happened to my horse, I would've had the vet out to ultrasound him a month ago. I would be icing every day, monitoring bute, working to get the inflammation down and watching every step he took with an eagle eye.

It's one thing to vaguely and intellectually know that I treat my horse far better than I treat myself. It's yet another thing entirely to have it so cut-and-dried in front of me. If my horse had a strain of his digital flexor tendon, I would be FREAKING OUT. My own foot? Meh. I'll gimp around some more and after 3.5 think about icing it.

Not that I have any intentions of changing this pattern, mind you.

House Post: Reading Nook

Starting off with my goals of decorating! I've been slowly adding art to the walls of my office, and, drumroll, finally put up Tristan's horseshoes.

Thank you, everyone, for your input on this!

I bowed to the wisdom of the crowd and took out the ice pads. That was not terribly easy, since they were nailed to the shoes, but I ran them under hot water for a while to soften the rubber and then tugged really hard.

Then I took a wire brush to the shoes and rinsed them in hot water repeatedly, then carefully toweled them dry. My bathroom might have looked like a murder scene from all the rust flecks and drops. I did not take pictures. You're welcome.

Then: on to the wall!

I was originally going to put them straight up, but when I put one nail in and turned around after grabbing another I really liked the tipsy look! So they will stay tipsy until and unless I decide to straighten them out.

I also added another piece of decoration to the room thanks to a Target visit (a staple of every trip to Boston).

$3.00 in half-off Christmas lights! I have to get some hooks for the corners, because longterm these lights will go on top of the molding for the windows and thus around the entire top of the room, but they are fine hanging like they are for now.

So, the last finishing pieces for the office are:
- get cavalry posters printed & framed
- get curtains
- finish off wall behind radiator (you can see it in the bottom right corner of the last picture)
- reupholster reading chair (this is more like a 3-5 year goal)