Liebster Award

Hey, so Jess over at Riding Rainbow tagged me for this Liebster Award.  Show, meet road!

HOW TO ACCEPT THE AWARD: The Liebster Blog Award is a way to recognize blogs who have less than 200 followers.  Liebster is a German word that means beloved and valued.  Here are the rules for accepting the award:

    Thank the person who nominated you and include a link back to their blog.
    List 11 random facts about yourself.
    Answer the 11 questions given to you.
    Create 11 questions for the bloggers you nominate.
    Choose 11 bloggers with 200 or fewer followers to nominate and include links to their blogs.
    Go to each blogger's page and let them know you have nominated them.

RANDOM FACTS:

I should have saved the belly-button thing.  If only I'd known!

1) I was supposed to start college, then take a leave of absence to go hike the Appalachian Trail.  Instead I bought a horse.  Tucker's show name almost ended up being Katahdin instead of Rebound.

2) Fried pickles: slices, not spears.

3) I am an accidental bandwagon Bruins fan.  I decided this winter that I miss having a team -- it was just too hard to keep tabs on my baby Bulls from half a country away with no cable and no access to Chicago sports radio -- and could not warm up to the Celtics, but I've long admired hockey and literally my thought process a few weeks ago was, Maybe the Bruins.  It's too bad hockey season is over; I will have to remember for next year.  Only then did I discover that we were deep into the playoffs and doing great.  On the one hand, fun time to start paying attention!  On the other, I keep feeling like I should explain that "bandwagon fan" is too generous a term for me: I was too oblivious to even realize there was a bandwagon!

4) In related news, my superpower is Being Interested.  In what, you ask?  Dear reader, in anything.

5) The summer after my first year of college, I walked myself up to the stable gate at Hawthorne and asked about a job.  The security guard took pity on me, put in a call to a trainer, and I spent the first part of that summer walking hots and the second part as a track vet’s assistant.  My favorite was a bay two-year-old filly named Tipaza, by Cobra King; I still wonder where she ended up; I would have loved to have her as a sport horse.  The trainer that I started with offered to keep me on and teach me to gallop, if I'd would stay past the summer.  I don't exactly regret not going for it, but man, that is an alternate universe that I would love to be able to see.

6) My younger dog is named Lilo, as in "...and Stitch."  She is a shelter pit bull; it seemed like the perfect name for the world's happiest monster truck in search of a family.  I am amazed by how few people recognize the name.  I figured that most kids would get it even if the adults didn't, but no!  Can't win 'em all, I guess.

7) My family takes board games very, very seriously.  There is no such thing as a "friendly" game of Boggle in my world.

8) Writing was What I Did, after and then before/somewhat overlapping with horses. Science fiction, fantasy, horror. Sold -- oh, maybe a dozen short stories?  Worked as a fiction editor for two semi-pro and one pro-paying webzines.  Most of my stuff is as long-vanished as anything can be in This Internet Age, but there was this one story that found a home...and then got reprinted...and then reprinted again...and ended up in this anthology that has apparently sold pretty well.  So this one story of mine is still in print and still being read a couple of years after I opted out of the field and it looks like this will continue to be true for some time.  I find this equal measures baffling and delightful.

9) My current favorite thing is the Welcome to Night Vale podcast.  Comes out on the first and fifteenth of every month and just celebrated its one-year anniversary.  It’s dispatches – community radio, really – from a small strange fictional desert town.  Somebody elseweb described it as “An Arkham Home Companion” which is pretty spot-on, except that I don’t like Prairie Home Companion (sorry!) and I do like this.  Also reminds me of something that would have been playing over the radio in Fallout 3, if the Lone Wanderer had been able to turn the dial one more station down.  It is the overnight deejay as comrade in the darkest hours turned up to 11, the best-ever combo of reassuring and unsettling, and operates on atmosphere and immersion – so please give it a full episode or two if you try it.  I would recommend maybe "Poetry Week" as a sample episode, or else just start at the beginning.

10) I am an ice cream snob and one of the best presents I’ve ever received was the ice-cream maker my parents gave to me for my birthday a few years back.  Maple ice cream!  Goat cheese ice cream with roasted red cherries!  Savannah buttermint! And a plain old-fashioned vanilla that even I the chocolate fanatic adore, especially with chocolate-raspberry port poured over ton and/or a chocolate or ginger mug cake underneath.  Ice cream: it’s what’s for dinner.  Also lunch.  Breakfast, too.

11) I love airports.  Every time I travel by plane and double-plus if I am traveling solo, I secretly hope that my flight(s) will be delayed so I can spent more time in the airport.

11 QUESTIONS FOR ME:

1.    Would you rather ride a mule or not ride at all?
Mule!  I have zero personal experience with ‘em, but I appreciate smart and tough, so…

2.    List your three favorite books about riding or horsemanship.
Working Trot by Jesse Haas, which I swear I will post about at length eventually.  It’s fiction, about a boy who goes to work for his aunt and uncle, horsemen in Vermont, and has shaped my thinking about/approach to riding to a ridiculous degree.  I am not a big rereader, but I visit this once or twice a year; it always offers exactly what I didn’t know I needed to hear.

Wofford’s Training the Three-Day Event Horse and Rider, because it’s a good solid book which garnered one of the best-ever reviews on Amazon and especially because of that paragraph in the selecting-a-horse section where he talks about not buying a horse if you don’t like him the moment you see him, because otherwise you will never enjoy riding him as much as you would enjoy a horse that you did like right off and you will never make excuses for him.  I don’t believe this is gospel and in some ways I think it’s dangerous advice if not applied thoughtfully – but I think it nails something important about partnership that I’ve never encountered anywhere else.

And I am going to cheat a little and pick Connie Willis’s journeyman novel Lincoln’s Dreams, which is one of my favorite books in the world.  It’s not about riding; it’s not a horse book at all, really.  But it concerns itself with the horses of the Civil War and especially with Traveller in what turns out to be a deep and unexpected way.

3.    Have you ever used the Clinton Anderson or Buck Branaman methods to teach a horse groundwork?
Nope, except in the sense that all basically sound approaches to groundwork (or anything) are going to have some overlap.  I’m happy with my unbranded methods.  I am not big into groundwork.  I expect good horsey manners, so I do enough to ensure and maintain that, but all else being equal I would rather be riding.

4.    Do you know any gay riders (besides me, if you know me)? (Duh, I'm obviously going to ask this.)
Absolutely yes.

5.    What's your favorite discipline to watch that you don't compete/train in?
…none?  I am theoretically game to watch anything, but in practice, if I’m at a horse thing it’s because I’m participating in some way: riding, volunteering, supporting friends.  At one point I would have answered this with “Thoroughbred racing” but I just cannot.

6.    Totilas or Blue Horse Matiné? (There is a correct answer! Ha!)
Ravel!

7.    Who is your favorite thoroughbred racehorse of the last ten years?
Ha, I thought I was going to be in trouble with this one – I used to follow racing very seriously but the breakdowns did me in and I just can’t anymore – so other than to say Zenyatta because who doesn’t love Zenyatta? I didn’t think I had a favorite racehorse within the last ten years.  But then I remembered that Milwaukee Brew’s career extended into 2003!  So my favorite racehorse of the last ten years?  Milwaukee Brew.

But Tiznow is my all-time favorite.  Cannot remember when I fell for him (Milwaukee Brew, it was the post parade before the Haskell; I was at Monmouth that weekend) but I loved him madly and still get all snuffly and emotional when I watch his Classic runs.  My definition of a great horse: one that does things that he shouldn’t be able to do.  I still watch those Classics and think he was beaten, but he was simply not having it.  “The daunting presence of a Horse of the Year,” indeed.  I took an ill-advised road trip with a then-friend to Kentucky in 2004.  The trip was an utter disaster, but when we got to Windstar for our tour it turned out that it was just us, Tiznow’s groom, and the big horse himself.  So I got to snuggle up to Tiznow and feed him peppermints – for the record, he was a total gentleman – and so I would do the whole thing all over again.

8.    Biggest pet peeve on horse blogs?
Carelessness, especially with kids and/or green horses.  We all got problems and limitations; we all make mistakes; those things don’t bother me!  But carelessness makes me nuts.  (Readers, worry not!  I don’t have anyone specific in mind here; once it becomes clear that a given whatever is going to press all my buttons, I tend to avoid it.  Life is too short!)

9.    The Black Stallion or Black Beauty?
Black Stallion all the way.  Best book moments: the bit where Steve writes Alec all, “My horse is the fastest horse in the world!” and Alec thinks, “Every kid should think his horse is the fastest horse in the world,” and the race through the fire in Black Stallion and Satan (this is my favorite of the books) and conversation after in which Alec makes the deliberate decision to let Henry think that Satan won the race because Henry loves Satan and because he (Alec) knows that the Black won and that’s enough.

10.    Would you rather ride in the heat or the cold?
My pit bull is the only creature I know that hates hot weather more than I do.  But I absolutely love a bundled-up night-time bareback trail ride through a foot of fresh snow.

11.    Your area of the tack room or your bedroom: Which is cleaner?
…I think I shall spend some time this weekend organizing ALL the spaces!

11 QUESTIONS FOR YOU:

1) Why did you choose your current horse sport or discipline?
2) What is your horse-related Big Goal, if any?
3) Pick a horse-related thing about which you have changed your mind.  Why?
4) Favorite apocalypse?
5) Horses and riding as social outlet: pro, con, or it's complicated?
6) What's the oldest piece of tack you own?
7) Is the glass half-empty or half-full, with what?
8) Time to colonize some other planet!  It's a one-way trip.  Do you go?
9) What's the best horse-related time- and/or labor-saving trick you know?
10) Recommend me a poem.
11) What's on your keychain?

11 BLOGS TAGGED:

I think I've grabbed only people who haven't already been tagged and I aimed for not hugely followed blogs but didn't research in great depth.  Dog people, if you want to do these, just pretend I asked about dog stuff instead of horse stuff, okay?  Okay!

1) A Wild Ride
2) An Eventful Life
3) Dogbird Daily
4) Love Me In Focus
5) Naturally Gifted Farms
6) Team Awesome
7) Topaz Dreams
8) All Things Collie
9) Bulligerent
10) Horse of My Heart
11) In Omnia Paratus