Weekly Blog Roundup

Here are some posts from the wide world of horse blogging!

Non-Judgment Day from Confessions of an AA Eventer
What a horrible, horrible winter. Suzanne's barn lost their indoor, and this was posted on a day when another barn in MA lost their indoor. I know the people at the second barn, and in fact nearly boarded Tristan with them a few years ago. This winter fucking sucks.

The Many Sleeps of Harley from Dandyism
omfg, cute overload.

Cute Overload from No Hour Wasted
omfg, part 2.

My Favorite Mug from Pony'tude
I love this story! Such a nice IHSA memory. I'm a sucker for good IHSA stories.

3 Winter Items I Wear from Work to the Barn from The Maggie Memoirs
I admit, I work really hard to keep my barn clothes separate from everything else in my life, and most especially my winter clothes. There's nothing like a barn to ruin a piece of clothing, and I am protective of my work wardrobe. Separate coats, boots, the whole nine yards. But I love the look of everything highlighted in this post!

Twelve Money-Saving Strategies My Family Uses from The Simple Dollar
I use all of these strategies on a regular basis, except maybe the haggling over soon-to-expire items. (I hunt the clearance and day-old racks instead.) I spend $50 per week on groceries for two people. It's a major part of how I'm able to keep overall household expenses affordable.

Breed Showing Encyclopedia Part One from Hey Hey Holly
Thorough, comprehensive, and fascinating overview of AQHA and APHA hunter showing, about which I knew precisely nothing beforehand. Great read & well-illustrated.

A Review: Complete Printable Horse Binder from Wilbur, Ellie, and Emily
LOVE this idea for a product, and this is a great overview.

Exercise vs. Turnout from Equinpilot
I really like this. I wish Tris were on 24/7 turnout, but it's just not possible for him right now for a variety of reasons. Honestly, if I were ever to move him, as much as I love my current barn, it would be to somewhere with more turnout. Seeing the data laid out like that is really compelling.

[Help Me] Follow Friday!

I am a fairly obsessive blog reader. I just checked the RSS feeder I use, The Old Reader, [insert obligatory moment of silence for Google Reader] and it tells me that I follow 262 blogs on a daily basis. Some of those are dead, and I need to do some cleaning; some of them post multiple times a day. It averages out to about 180-225 blog posts a day. Do I read every single word of every post? No. I do some serious skimming for some of them - I'm looking at you, Harvard Business Review. (the signal to noise ratio of useful thought leadership to pure assholery is...less than ideal.)

I held steady for a long time, but I'm now at a point where I'd like to add new subscriptions. Over the next few days, I'm going to add a "horse blogs I read" function to this blog - possibly to the sidebar, possibly as a separate page.

I'm looking to expand my reading. I love finding fun new blogs to feature in my weekly blog roundups. I want to go out of my comfort zone and read different blogs, different point of views.

SO. I'm going to do a sort of reverse Follow Friday.

Please comment and tell me one (or two, or three) blogs that I should be following. Please include the URL and if you have an extra moment, a sentence or two about why you like that blog. I'd really appreciate it.

Thank you in advance!

Filtering and Blog Honesty

One of the many (many, many) reasons Lauren at She Moved to Texas is a great read is that she so often posts really thoughtful statements about horses and blogging.

Today, she wrote about "filtering" your blog, ie, how does your blog reflect your life? should it?

I've been thinking about what she said on and off for a little while and trying to honestly reflect on how I approach writing about my horse and my life in this space, and here's what I've come up with.

I always write openly and honestly about my own experiences and feelings. I can't think of a single time I've left something out for fear of the internet comments. I started a hoof thread on the COTH forums, for crying out loud. I have a (perhaps unusually) thick skin. (Or I just don't give a damn, which can be both a good and a bad thing...)

What I do make deliberate choices about filtering are other people's experiences and feelings. This is my blog and my space. I'm not going to use it to intrude, speculate, or otherwise impinge upon someone else's life. I will write all day about my own lessons, but I don't feel the need to write in detail about other lessons around the barn, or horses in training. They're not my experiences, and my interpretation of them would at best be sketchy and presumptuous. I don't post openly about my trainer, her horses, or her actions and statements that don't have anything to do with me. I haven't about any of my previous trainers, either.

The most obvious example of this is the Vermont Moonlight 50 ride I went to last year. I crewed for Hannah. Here's my recap of that ride. It's entirely my point of view, but it is not everything that I did at that ride. While I was intimately involved throughout the ride, it wasn't my story to tell.

Hannah later wrote about the ride (which ended in a completion but her horse, Tucker, on fluids for a dehydration colic) and after she did, I posted again here to let people know where to find the rest of the story.

I'm not going to say I wasn't impatient to see her story, but I never had the slightest temptation to blog about it myself. I am not the center of attention of everything! Very far from.

Of course, I write this from the perspective of a fairly small-time blogger, with a relatively limited audience, and I blog for reasons that tend to fall more on the personal side than the public. Would I change my tune if more people actually read my blog? Lauren probably gets 10x as much traffic as I do (and deservedly so!) and anytime you increase your attention on the internet, you increase your chances of attracting assholes.

So, there's my point of view. I'd love to read more about what others think, though, and how they approach this question. I think it gets at a lot of the fundamentals about why we blog.

Road ID Gift Card

I am a big fan of my Road ID, and bought my fiance one for Christmas to use while skiing. They sent me a gift card to use - but I am not planning on making any orders in the time allotted.

So, do you want a $5 gift card to Road ID? Shoot me an email: beljoeor@gmail.com.

TOABH: Costly

What has been your horse's most expensive injury to date? Let's exclude maintenance things, like hock injections and the magical monthly package of MSM. What single episode blew your savings or left you boiling ramen? If you want to get technical about it, time is money, too.

hahahahahaha.

 

ha.

ha.

I've covered this at length in the blog, but for newcomers, here's the short version. In August 2012, Tristan blew his first ever abscess. It was really bad. He blew at the coronet band, and then at the toe, and then a few weeks later midway down the hoof. Cue 6 months of NQR; he would almost come sound, and then he wouldn't. On and on. In March, he had surgery to remove the cause of the abscess: a bone chip from his coffin bone that had become badly infected, as well as portions of his coffin bone that had died from infection. Upon recovery from that surgery, which took months (if we're counting the time back to normal hoof status), he came sound and has been ever since, though I would not call him 100% recovered - he still has to wear front shoes to keep that foot stabilized, because it is still not growing evenly enough to stay balanced barefoot, 2.5 years later.

Here's what I call the foot progression collage: photos taken at monthly intervals from initial abscess to final recovery.

Here's the post about his surgery.

And here's the post where I broke down and tallied up every penny I spent on that injury and what it went towards (three sets of x-rays, supplies, surgery, umpteen vet visits, specialty shoeing, the whole nine yards). So, to answer the original question: $6,100.08, which does not include lost opportunity costs or even begin to approximate time.

If you're really feeling in a reading mood, check out the abscess and surgery tags. Dozens and dozens of update posts there.