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RoutinesJanuary 22, 2006 Eight-day horse-sitting gig started yesterday; I'm now settled in there and doing a drive-by here, which is to say I'm sitting at Morgana IV, having won three consecutive games of FreeCell (one of them required some patience and ingenuity) and trying to blog. Different place, different routines. When there I'm not only out of bed before 7, I'm out of the house: horses to feed, horses to turn out. I start the day with coffee, not tea, mainly because the place isn't set up for (leaf) tea so I have to bring my own stuff. Ditto cereal: I brought three varieties of cold because my usual slow-cooking oatmeal requires a double boiler and there doesn't have one. Last night I rearranged lamps because there wasn't enough light to read by in the living room and reading at the dining table was too much like editing. There's a humongous TV in the living room. When I arrived "SAMSUNG" on a royal blue background was fading in and out like a screen saver. Go away! I already knew better than to go looking for an on/off button on one of these newfangled TVs; instead, I contemplated the three remotes aimed at the screen from a nearby coffee table. I tried the middle one first because it said "SAMSUNG" at the top. Good idea; didn't work, but at least nothing blew up. Take 2, the rightmost, made "SAMSUNG" disappear. Score 1 for the visiting Luddite. The dogs -- Rhodry, Tillo, and Bear -- and I went walking in the woods once the horses were out. Bear is a 12-year-old German shepherd; he doesn't have much control over his hind end anymore but he's one of the gamest dogs I've ever met. He came the whole way, a mile or so. Rhodry, only a year younger but in much better shape, trotted along with occasional pauses to pee where others had peed before. Tillo, not quite 2 and also a German shepherd, bounded ahead then bounded back to check on Uncle Bear (almost knocking him off his hind paws a couple of times), then bounded off into the scrub and back again, probably covering three times more ground than the rest of us. The energy of youth . . . There's plenty of youthful energy in the horse herd too. While I was dumping the wheelbarrow -- the current manure pile is in Osage's pasture, which he has to himself because even at his age (24 or 25) he's over-inclined to chase the girls -- Rieke, the not-quite-yearling filly, broke from a stand of scrub trees at the bottom of the adjacent pasture and charged up the hill, followed by the other three Friesians, manes whipping in the wind of their passing, and long-loping Howie, the venerable Thoroughbred who's the leader of that pack. With live entertainment like this, who needs a TV? Before coming back here I took out my guitar. Jouncing down dirt roads had shaken it a bit out of tune, but not too badly. After a quick tune-up, I attempted a couple of the chords that I could manage pretty easily by the end of last winter. Ay ay ay, we've slipped some: had to fight off the little voices sniggering, You really think you can learn to play this thing? I think that if I really learn to play this thing, I'm not gonna stop, because starting is the hardest damn part.
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