Daylight Saving Sunday
So, it’s _already_ 10:00 am, and I feel like I missed a nights sleep. I love the whole “fall back” thing. When the New Mexico mafia was gaming all the time we used to cheer on the night we went off daylight saving. A whole extra hour to play!
I want to thank folks for their kind words about my Isis. I’ve lost a lot of animals recently. Isis was bad but the worst — the aboslute worst was losing my Grand Prix horse Widestep (Steppi or The Stepmeister). He was a black/bay Hanovarian with a Hungarian Arabian grandfather, and he could do _everything_. He was even trained to do the levade.
For those of you who aren’t Dressage nuts the levade is where the horse freezes, and then rears to a 45% angle. It was designed to protect the rider against a pikeman on the ground. The spear would go into the horse’s chest and not through the rider.) I would get Steppi into it by putting him in a really tight piaff, and the tap him on the shoulder with my whip. It was an amazing feeling.
But Steppi had a bad colic back in July. I brought him from Germany when he was 11, and there’s an odd thing about horse care in Germany — they don’t worm their horses very often, and internal parasites are what kill most horses. I did a massive panicure treatment when I got him to the states, but the autopsy revealed scarring all through his gut. So anyway, Steppi colicked and he ended up with a twisted gut. I tried surgery to save him, but he could never regain his feet, and I had to put him down. It’s still killing me when I think about it. I’ve got a lump in my throat right now. I’m not sentimental about animals, but the loss of this horse touched me so deeply. I couldn’t figure out why and then I realized that Steppi wasn’t a pet — he was my partner. We had to work together to achieve anything. Also, Dressage is as close as you can get to telepathy with another living creature.
One other little aside. When I was looking at a model of the horse’s stomach at the vets it struck me that intelligent design is a total crock. There is nothing intelligent about a huge stomach that only attaches to the body cavity in two places and can _flip over_. Sorry, back now from the rant.
March 11th, 2007 at 10:37 am
To go in one paragraph from writing eloquently about the loss of Steppi, straight to a paragraph denigrating intelligent design… shows a woman after my own mind.