Thoughts by Kat

Today I am grateful for:

Sleep. Lots of it, for once.

Not needing to rush out the door.

I did some small tasks, like cleaned the litter, put dishes away.

I spoke with Trainwreck about her once partner, and things don't look great. On top of the cancer, he had a stroke (they thought) which turns out was actually an aneurysm. He's stable enough for now, but where do you go from there?

I talked with D from pottery for a while, we are having a communications committee meeting tomorrow at her place. We talked a bit about pottery stuff, about how we hope to foster more interactions between the different groups (people who work on Tuesday for example, rarely interact with people who work on Monday, and the "new potters" don't mingle much with the seasoned potters), and how this S person who is a controlling, manipulative tyrant could be encouraged in the direction of actually sharing information with everyone instead of hoarding it.

I went to the barn, and River was not breathing well, as it is VERY dry and dusty right now. The weather was really strange, kind of overcast but warm, not like it was going to rain, and it's SO dry and dusty. I went very easy on him, lots of ground work and yields, but he was oddly forward when I rode him.

I was trying to get him to trot through pylons while I was riding, something he has done LOTS of, and is generally pretty good at turning back and forth, but today he wanted to just ignore the turning and just trot big and fast and not the kind of control needed for weaving.

Weird.

My Sweetie got back from the MS bike ride, and showed up at the barn. That was nice.

R was around, and we talked with her. I tore an old sheet into strips for her to use in braiding manes, as the fabric and the braids protect the manes to help them stay nice. She found that the little rubber bands she got this time weren't staying in, meaning that she had to fix the braids pretty much every day.

R's parents got a bumper crop of beautiful carrots, and had a big pail for the horses, but we ended up taking a bunch for us to eat because they were clean and picked just today, and there's nothing wrong with them. With R's permission.

They would be soft and going bad in a day or two anyhow, stored in a pail in the barn. R probably wouldn't be able to use them all; you can only feed a few carrots to a horse each day.

We came home and ate, and just chatted for a while before my Sweetie went to bed.

Today I am grateful for:

The hay we got in the barn yesterday. We already had some new square bales, these are round bales.

I did talk with Sister S yesterday, but since her husband was there, she didn't seem to talk about her issues walking or anything, but seemed to steer the conversation to easier topics.

I did go biking with my Sweetie yesterday, and that was all going mostly well, but a miscommunication led to me falling over into a mud pit at one point.

It's hard for my husband to understand that I don't have the speed or the confidence that he has, and it makes things harder for me.

I try to explain to him that for me, that "super easy to the point of being boring" 10 km ride is actually challenging for me, that the easy little hills are tough.

I WANT to enjoy biking with my husband, and I know that the path to being able to do that is for me to ride a lot more often, and I WANT TO, but it also feels constantly a bit humiliating.

I also know that I will NEVER be as good as he is. He weighs about 30 pounds less than I do, and is that sort of perfectly lean, wiry build that is meant for cycling. So, I would have to train like a dog just so that he could ride with me and not constantly be coaching me and "encouraging" me, which ends up feeling worse even though it is meant well.

It's sort of like if he were trying to keep up with Lance Armstrong or something. You can't be angry at someone for being good, but it's not easy to feel good about yourself either.

Even his trip to go on his monumental MS ride makes me happy for him, but somewhat resentful at the same time because I would LIKE to be able to ride 35 km a day for two days over rough terrain, but it isn't going to happen, and I feel left out when he goes on these rides and sees all the other people that he knows who CAN do those kinds of rides.

So, I enjoy biking, but my hardest efforts are barely even entertaining for him. I end up not really enjoying these rides when the whole time I'm just wheezing my last breath to get up a hill.


Today he left for the bike ride, so good for him, I guess. The first day is tomorrow.

I did normal chores and then went to see River.

He did well. His breathing was easier today with there being less smoke and it was cooler.

I stayed to work with Felix, the lovely hackney pony (who also just had a tooth pulled) during the young woman with health challenges's lesson.

I adore Felix, and he has the cutest trot, and I did a bit of Liberty with him and he's very responsive. What a cutie.

R and I chatted about her dog grooming experiences (it is NOT some kind of fun salon with pretty dogs, it gets gross) and about how they are thinking of getting a pair of kittens from a farmer down the road, but how expensive getting them neutered will be.

At least going to the barn made me feel better about myself.

Today I am grateful for:

Just getting through the day, really.

I know that this day might not SEEM like it was a lot, but it was for me. It was just a lot of moving parts, if that makes sense.

I stayed up for when my husband got up for work, because we needed to pre-register for pottery.

We got the email that pre-registration was open for returning potters (ones who have been there for years, like us), BUT the registration was only open for two and a half days, a VERY short window of time, and this morning was the second day already.

If we forgot, or the day got away on us, we'd be registering with the "general registration" that is now likely well over one hundred people, and though a cap has never been set yet, who knows if we'd get in.

Pre-registration was never a formal thing before, this is the first year they've done it. Before, it was just assumed that if you'd been in pottery already for years, like us, that we'd just be coming back unless we otherwise said we were not.

The time window was very short...what if we didn't see the email in time? Again, before we could just...register in the fall and know we would have a spot, and you had WEEKS to register.

So I wonder what's up with there only being 2.5 days?

I went to the dentist's today, and they took a bunch of x-rays and looked at my teeth a bit, but nothing else today.

The dentist wants to just pull the tooth that lost the filling, because it is a wisdom tooth, as well at the other one on the bottom. I had the upper wisdom teeth pulled...ten years ago? He says the two I still have are both not serving any purpose, and have some decay.

I guess THEN they'll do a teeth cleaning and look at some other stuff going on in there.

So I get one pulled next Thursday, and then the other one later.

So my appointment was over pretty quickly. My plan was to go from my dental appointment to the barn unless I had something drastic happen, but since they didn't do much of anything, I had a couple of hours to kill.

I did go to Winner's, sigh.

I got a nice burrito.

I looked in the mail box, but no mail today.

I stuck my head into a thrift store next to the post office and I didn't get anything, but the woman who runs it (it's her own private non-profit thrift store, I think) gave me a little bag of potatoes. She says she tries to always have things like that to just give to people for free. I think that's amazing.

Then I went to see River.

It was hot and a bit smokey today, so he was lethargic, but he did put in some good effort. I made sure he had breaks when he needed them.

We worked on neutral Liberty circles, and then moved on to practicing patterns for the upcoming fun barn show.

River did well, and put in a good effort considering the heat and smoke in the air.

I went home and talked to Sister E. She's in her 70's, and this summer has been a series of small injuries like hurting her ankle in her yard, her shoulder hurts, earlier in the year she had plantar fasciitis pain, and so on.

She and I talk a lot about how other sisters have now got a lot of mobility issues, and how some of that might have been prevented...

So I told her the same thing we both think our other sisters could have tried. BE CONSISTENT WITH EXERCISE.

Sister E is active, but in an inconsistent way that might actually be worse for her. She might go play pickle ball on a whim, but because she's not going to do it for an hour twice a week, she's just risking injury.

I asked her if there's any mobility exercise classes, and she said there is one that she went to "a couple of times", so I said she could start going to it REGULARLY.

I also suggested that she start lifting weights with a personal trainer (so that she doesn't hurt herself, and so that she learns what a complete rep looks like, and to have correct form, as well as to set goals for progressing).

She mentioned that the mobility class person does some weights classes, and those might be a good place to start, but really, is working with one or two pound weights going to do much to build supportive muscle?

My sister E is quite healthy overall, no heart or organ issues, not much arthritis, nothing to stop her from doing moderate weight training (of course through gradually working up to it). The kicker is that she needs to be CONSISTENT with it.

She's very ADHD, and flits from one thing to another all day long, and is easily distracted, easily derailed from her plans.

I suggested that she do the working out first thing in the morning, and that way the REST of the day can be the usual fly by the seat of her pants shit show that it usually is.

She is at that age where one year of not doing enough exercise can mean a lot of muscle loss, potentially meaning loss of balance or not feeling safe to walk outside or lift things. It affects bone density too.

So, I was likely incredibly blunt with her, but honestly that's the only way to talk with her. She doesn't register anything less than a full cannon ball.

My Sweetie had come home from work and took a load of crap from the pottery studio interior demolition to the dump, and had come home as I was talking to sister E.

He made supper and we chatted. It sounds like he had a fairly poopy day at work. Many of his days at work are pretty stressful, mainly because people are generally terrible communicators.