Happy Thanksgiving
Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! I was thankful to have pumpkin pie with my coffee this morning for breakfast!
So, in the spirit of keeping things short and sweet like my breakfast, here's a little horse-fail humor for you:
Enjoy the rest of your Thanksgiving! Including leftovers, football and board games with your crazy relatives. Give them all hugs, and be thankful.
I'm sending you away.
This is probably anti-productive, but I'm sending you to another blog. Three, actually.
The first is one you've heard me mention here before. I've told you that she has amazing photography, and that she sometimes frustrates me with her rate of production and her perfect blogsmanship, but this is something you really must see, especially if you are an animal lover.
I've also told you how I feel about animal lovers.
Pioneer Woman's latest photography contest includes all 4-legged animals, not just cats & dogs.
Now, I'm a sucker for cats & dogs, but I think they get too much attention. I like variety. This contest does have its share of cats and dogs, but other wonderful creatures get to share the spotlight, too.
And the photography is amazing. Honestly, I wish I had the camera, Photoshop software, and time to learn it all, but I've got plenty on my plate as it is. For now, I'm content to be a visitor to the gallery.
Please take a look:
The second stop on your blog tour today will be to the south of England, in Dartmoor. There you will meet a lovely artist by the name of Rima who draws and paints fantastical folkloric images, and adorns some of her work onto clocks made of sliced wood. I'd like to have one someday. Her paintings, as well as her words and pictures on her blog, are warm and come from the heart.
click picture for a story about this clock:
A peek into Rima's world will just make you feel good. Like when you were a kid and you went to visit your grandma's house, and she gave you a cookie and told you to go outside and play, and you laid on the grass and watched the clouds, and wondered at lilies-of-the-valley, and spiderwebs twinkling with dew, and ripe sun-touched raspberries. And that's all you had to worry about that day.
Her latest post encourages an interesting discussion about this clock, and commissioned pieces. Enjoy your visit.
My friend Ken, a poet, used his usual humor in describing his recent experience at the SCBWI's Arizona conference.
I've never been to any other state's conference, or the huge national affairs held bi-annually - summer in L.A. and winter in New York. I'd like to, in the future. But our little AZ get-together is done very well. Our regional advisor, Michelle Parker-Rock, does a good job of bringing in some top publishing industry pros. We've seen editors from the big houses like Scholastic, Penguin and Harper Collins, as well as smaller imprints who like to focus on something more specific, like First Second. Since our members also include illustrators, we are always sure to have an art director present. It's amazing what they can do, and to find out just what goes into making a book.
My favorite speakers this year were Francesco Sedita, Vice President & publisher at Grosset & Dunlap (Penguin), who gave a fantastic presentation. He spoke how his love for reading throughout his life brought him to where is is today, and about the impact a book - any book - can have on a kid. And Jill Corcoran, a literary agent who seemed to be one of the most down-to-earth, un-snobby people I've ever met at a professional function. She had such great advice on writing query letters, and talked about the whole process of what happens after you get an agent - what you should expect from them, and what you should expect to do when working with one.
Also, Calista Brill, from First Second really made me think twice about graphic novels. With just the right amount of twisted humor, she's the kind of speaker who is so passionate about her field, she gets you excited, too. Even if it's something you never considered. Good thing she's not a drug dealer.
And here is Ken's take on his conference experience. He was lucky enough to be a guest blogger for David L. Harrison!
And, as a tip of my hat to Calista, here is a picture of my Cat kids:
And, even though I'm sending you away, please feel free to come back and visit anytime.
Colicky Babies and Rookie Mistakes
Some girls, when you ask them what they want to be when they grow up will say things like: "A Teacher. A Doctor. A Fashion Designer."
Some girls actually loved the dolls they got for Christmas, and knew that when you played house, the proper thing to do was to carry the "baby" around on your shoulder and pat it on the back while you cooked the pretend dinner for your pretend husband. When prompted with their career of choice, these girls would say, "I want to be a Mommy."
I never got those girls. My dolls usually had the one lazy eye and a leg missing, due to being swung around by the foot.
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| 1982 Don't hate me because I'm beautiful |
My answer was always "MOVIE STAR," which I thought would be obvious to anyone -- why would you want to be anything else, much less -- a Mommy? Never mind the fact that in reality, becoming a Mommy is much easier to achieve. (Oh, but that's a whole 'nother talk for a whole 'nother day, now isn't it?)
So, when I did get married and yes, become a Mommy much earlier than the rest of my friends, most of them and my family were pretty surprised, but no more so than I. (It's all my husband's fault. He had to be so damned cute and adorable and make me fall in love with him before I got a chance to fill out my employment application for MOVIE STAR. It's a good thing, too, because with me around for competition, Julia Roberts and Jennifer Aniston would have nothing to do all day besides vacuuming and laundry. Those grimalkins** owe me a Thank-You.)
Anywho, when my first son was born, and me not having the aforementioned patting-the-baby-on-the-back experience, I had no idea what was going on when about five weeks into his life, every night at bedtime, he began to scream endlessly at the top of his lungs.
Have you ever held a colicky baby?
Let me rephrase:
Have you ever been horribly sleep deprived, in bad need of a shampoo, sore in all the wrong places from birthing a child and then nursing said child, loved said child so much that your soul hurts, finally rocked sweet, soft, squishy, milk-filled child to sleep, held your breath as you laid child down in the crib, and as soon as you very very quietly click the doorknob into place, adorable tiny baby turns into a living tornado siren?
And then, instead of going to your own bed to luxuriate in slumber pass out from exhaustion, you go right back to baby, softly coo into his ear, pick him up, and begin pacing the floor again, patting on the back saying "Ssh, ssh, it's okay, Mommy's here," while tears roll down your cheeks and you just pray for this baby to get some sleep and stop screaming in your ear?
I feel you.
Seventeen years later, and my colicky baby is now a strapping young man with the world ahead of him. But I was reminded of those hours of floor pacing when my most recent baby, in the form of a 650 pound, year-and a-half-old filly, Keira, colicked this week.
It was a rookie mistake that could have been avoided. How can I still be making rookie mistakes after five years? I don't know. Maybe, as Red Forman would say, I'm just a dumbass.
In Arizona, where our ground is very dry and rocky, it's a good idea to feed your horses from some type of feeder/container so they are not eating right off the ground and eating a certain amount of dirt.
There's the over-the-fence half barrel feeder, which is quite popular, since it forces the horse to pull the hay through metal bars, which makes them eat slower (or at least that's the idea) and keeps the food off the ground.
Or there's the huge bathtub-type bucket (or various styles of trough-type feeders) that allows the horse to hang its head in a more natural grazing position, but still keeping the hay off the ground.
These are wonderful, sensible options. Unless you have horses like mine who knock their feeders around so much, banging them against the fence (and believe me we tried wiring the feeders to the fence to avoid this. Wire breaks. Plastic tears.) And then they proceed to use their big horsey noses to shove all of the hay out of the feeders anyway so that they can snuffle it around with their noses, crunch it up with their hooves, and eat it off the rocky ground.
So feeders don't really work with my girls. I did finally get a load of wood grindings for their stalls, to provide better bedding, maybe help their feather grow in without breaking off so much (another side effect of the dirt - it's horrible on feather), and I figured it would be better to eat hay off of a nice layer of wood grindings, rather than dirt.
But those pesky tasty alfalfa leaves get down into the layers of wood, and prehensile horse lips love to dig around for the very. last. bit. of. green. they can find. Down to the rocky soil.
In which case, if you have exhausted all of your options, (check) you should have your horses on a schedule for feeding psyllium, to help get all of that ingested sand out of their gut. Now, by nature of their personalities and/or constitution, some horses will have problems with sand colic, and some will not. Chroi has never had an issue with it, and I've never bothered with feeding psyllium. First mistake. It's called preventive for a reason.
If you've never "had an issue" with cavities, should you just not worry about brushing your teeth? If you've never "had an issue" with your car, should you just not worry about changing your oil?
You get where I'm going here.
By starting and keeping my horses on a preventive regimen, I could have saved poor Keira from suffering with her tummy ache, having her lip twisted in a twitch to distract her from the rectal exam, and a tube shoved up her nose in order to pump a gallon of mineral oil into her gut.
It was at this point in the vet's visit that I mentioned to his assistant that I should have had my camera so I could take a picture. She gave me a weird look and asked, "you want a picture of your horse getting a tube shoved up her nose?" I said sheepishly, "Yeah, for my blog."
I felt kind of bad using my horse's pain for creative spark, but I thought this is exactly why I started this blog. To share my experiences, including all the slip-ups, for those who might be going through the same things, so that you can learn from my mistakes.
I mean, it's not like Keira can scream into my ear when she's not feeling good, and it would be very difficult to carry her around on my shoulder and pat her on the back.
So write it down: PSYLLIUM. One week out of every month, and you will save your horse from suffering. And a vet bill.
Speaking of which, I have to give a shout-out to my vet, Dr. Longworth, and his assistant Rachel. They are my heroes this month. Thank you
**I originally had the word "bitches" here, but I'm not really sure how much I want to offend the few readers I have, so when checking my thesaurus for alternatives, the word "grimalkins" showed up, with the qualifier: archaic.
I had to use it.
I mean, come on.