Going to the library

A few days ago I went to the library to pick up a book I'd requested. When I'd looked it up online, I found it wasn't in my local library's collection, so I searched in the Merrimack Valley Library Consortium's catalog, but it wasn't there either. Not to worry -- the Commonwealth Catalogue links to every library in the entire state of Massachusetts! Sure enough, I found not one but two copies of the book (a collection of stories by Roger Zelazny), requested it, and in a couple days' time got the email notice it was in at my local library waiting for me.

So that day, as I say, I went to the library to get it. Smiled at a little girl in mom's arms leaving as I headed to the front door; chatted a bit with the librarian as I checked out; walked out with a big smile on my face....

And realized, by golly, every time I go to the library it makes me happy. It's my happy place.

Tribute to a Schoolie

Schoolies are the drudges of the horse world. They're the horses folks learn to ride on, treading endless circles around dusty arenas, carrying every level of skill from clueless beginners to intermediates working toward their own private horse. They learn to tune out the leg flopping, rein yanking, unsteady balancing of their passengers; they tolerate bad riding that would goad a higher-strung equine into rebellion; they figure out evasions that test the patience of students while helping to teach them the skills to cope with such tricks; they sort through beginners' conflicting signals yet respond to proper aids; and the best of them can pony-ride-pack a tiny kid patiently yet come alive to the sensitive aids of a rider who knows how to communicate with them. Horses hardly ever start life as a schoolie; usually it's a step down (or many steps down) from whatever career they were bred and raised to pursue.

Drudges, yes -- also the unsung heroes of the horse world. As the modern world moves farther and farther from the past of horses being an integral part of life, they're the first step for ever more folks who want to learn to ride, perhaps eventually to have a horse of their own. They bring delight to the students who ride them -- and yes, at times frustration, but that's part of the education they offer. They become the cherished friends of children (and adults too) who dream of horses and live for trips to the barn, for grooming and treating and hugging and loving their giant equine buddy. They teach more than riding; they teach hard work -- in learning to ride well, in the labor of their care -- and sometimes they teach hard lessons in life's realities.

Finny was a school horse at the barn where my horse Ben boards: a short, round, sturdy red and white pinto with an abundant forelock and mane, an amiable disposition, a trot way bigger than he was, and a calm willingness to tote any rider safely around the ring, from tiny beginners to more or less competent adults. He knew his job and did it well, always with an eye out for treats (of course!), and was adored by all, especially his own pet girl (and every horse, but even more a schoolie, deserves his own pet girl to worship and pamper him).

Finny had to be put down Thursday, when the cancer infesting his sinuses reached the point where it was time to let him go. He passed over the bridge calmly, peacefully, amidst those who loved him.

He will be missed.

Alas, Poor Squash

Poor little Squash. Today was a very not fun morning for him.

Shortly after breakfast I snatched him from his comfortable perch in his cage complex, stuffed him in a carrier, and hauled him off to….

THE VET!!!!!

…for a checkup and claw-clipping. Not only was he mauled and oppressed by the Evil Vet and Evil Vet Tech (with bonus evil visiting vet student!) but then abandoned by his cruel owner! Left with the Evils for a couple of hours to calm down enough to get a usable blood pressure reading.

When I collected him at last he was still clinging to life. Evil Vet informed me that his BP was normal. His weight’s down a pound or so from his last visit but he’s still in good flesh, including a pleasingly plumpish round belly. The urine had a bit of red cells in it but the needle extraction could have nicked a capillary, so he may or may not have a low-grade infection; test results will show what’s up. He had blood drawn and I should be getting those results back tomorrow. His teeth need cleaning but at 16 and with failing kidneys I’m hesitant to have him undergo general anesthesia for it. Bottom line, he’s reasonably healthy for his age and medical status.

So I got the poor guy home, extracted him from the carrier, and inserted him back into his refuge, where he scuttled slowly around for a bit, then settled down and waited for lunch. He seems to have recovered from his harrowing ordeal.

My failing memory

I’ve just been reminded of an apparently heroic deed I did years ago, and I can’t remember it. Given the drama involved, that’s a bit surprising.

It was maybe fifteen years ago, at the barn where I was boarding my horse. A woman there had a youngish (five or six years old) Thoroughbred gelding, a well-trained, well-mannered, good-minded horse when she bought him. Within a couple of months, through mishandling, crappy riding, and late-night drunken beatings in his stall, she’d turned him into a murderous lunatic.

People tried to help her, tried to save the horse with advice, instruction, admonishments. She refused to listen. She continued to ride him, longe him, and abuse him.

What follows is what I was told happened one day; as I say, even after being reminded of the incident I can barely scrape up a few wisps of memory, and they’re mostly of her pigheaded stubbornness and cruelty.

One day she was longeing Dash in the ring, whipping him as usual, when suddenly he charged her, hellbent on murder, and knocked her down. I’m told I raced into the ring, grabbed the longe line near his halter despite his flailing forelegs, and forced him back away from her long enough for her to scramble out of the ring.

How I then got away from him and escaped injury, I don’t recall, nor how I felt afterwards, though no doubt it was the normal adrenalin crash into sick shakiness. Looking back with the cold calmness of distance, I almost regret doing it, since if ever a person deserved what was going to happen it was her. And yet, as the person who reminded me of this said, you don’t think; you just do what has to be done in the moment.

This woman eventually left the barn and took poor Dash with her to her home nearby. (I omit some other awfulness related to her as not germane to this story.) We learned sometime later that she’d ridden him out into the woods and been thrown and badly injured. All I could feel then was satisfaction at her finally paying some price for her cruelty, and pity for the poor horse who would of course be blamed for the consequences of her folly. Knowing how far beyond salvaging he was at that point I could only hope that he was given a merciful release from his suffering and put down.

So, as noted, I remember some of the details surrounding the episode, but the heroic deed itself is basically a blank in my mind still. Lord knows I can recall with annoying clarity so many dumb or embarrassing moments from my past, so why can’t I remember this?

When it rains, it pours....

My primary laptop, a Dell over ten years old, had begun showing signs of instability, climaxing in a crash. I was able to turn it back on and it worked as usual, but I decided to take it in to my local computer shop, and have them swap out the hard drive -- an almost new solid state drive I'd replaced the original with less than a year ago. Plus swapping it got me a newer machine but with my preferred Windows 7 OS and all my settings preserved.

Fortunately I have a backup laptop, a Gateway. Given I run my business via email and do a lot of proofreading checking of names and terms via Google, plus need to run printers and scanners, redundancy is a no-brainer. So I fired up the backup, and did some websurfing before settling down to work.

Everything was going fine, when suddenly as I was moving the cursor to click on a favorite link.... BAM! I'm hijacked to a "Windows support" page, with a dire warning, on screen and being monotonously repeated by a woman's voice, that I'd been redirected to a pornographic website and had five minutes to call the number on the screen so that a technician could walk me through how to free myself.

I could move the cursor but nothing else worked -- couldn't even get to the shut off button. So I took out the battery. When I put it back in and turned the laptop back on, the same damned screen and voice came up. I debatteried again, put it back in, and tried starting in safe mode. It came up in limited form, but when I tried clicking on the Firefox icon, it opened on a page with a clearly porn URL. Shut it off and hauled out a notebook with Windows 10 on it (which I hate; my working computers are Win7) and used it for whatever work checking I needed to do.

Sigh. Off I went to the computer shop the next morning, where I was able to collect my rehoused primary laptop, and left the prisoner of porn site to be reamed out and restored. That laptop happens to be one I hadn't installed Adblock on since I rarely use it for web browsing, but since I suspect I got the infection from my cursor dragging over an infected ad (I certainly wasn't clicking on any unknown links!) I'll for sure install that when I get the machine back sometime next week.

You don't want to know what this is costing me. And out of an abundance of caution last night I logged onto my desktop (yes, I have three Internet-connected computers, plus two ancient XP machines offline but still functioning) and changed a bunch of passwords, just to be safe -- so now I've had to change them on the returned laptop, and will have to go through all that when I get the Gateway back.

Ah, computers, how much easier they've made our lives....

After the Storm

So the bomb cyclone that hit my north of Boston town is drawing away at last, leaving havoc and devastation all along the coast of New England (not to mention states farther south). Good riddance, I say!

I lost power midmorning on Friday, got it back a couple of hours later, then lost it for good a little after 7:00 p.m. -- an outage, I learned later, that hammered pretty much the entire eastern half of Essex County. Fortunately it was a rain event rather than snow, so we didn't get buried under a foot of the white stuff; but the wind, oh, the wind! Howling and roaring, gusting massively, trees thrashing wildly, hour after hour after hour....

Luckily for me, I had discovered just a few days ago that my old storm lantern, in which I'd foolishly left the batteries, was ruined and unsalvageable, so I'd bought a new LED lantern just in time for this storm. Also fortunate, I have a gas stove and a box of wooden matches so I could cook and heat water for tea and dishwashing. I put perishable food in a plastic box out on the deck, which provided a great opportunity to do that thorough cleanout and cleaning of the fridge I'd been meaning to get around to -- hey, a silver lining to the storm clouds!

I was able to read reasonably well by daylight and lantern light; I went to bed much earlier than usual last night and slept well; my well-insulated condo, with its newish windows and new front door, sandwiched between flanking townhouses, never dropped below about 57 degrees; and I managed not to fall and kill myself tripping over Peanut. It was annoying and a pain in the butt but nowhere near as awful as a lot of other people suffered.

The power came back on late this afternoon as dusk was gathering, hurrah! I could see to feed the cats; I could see to plate the prepared food that I'd put back in the fridge and nuke it in the microwave; I caught up on email; and oh, the marvelous feeling, I had my first shower since Thursday evening!

Gotta go out tomorrow and shop for a second (hopefully brighter) lantern and a headlamp that isn't so old it's too faint to be worth a damn. After all, there's another storm forecast to come barrelling in midweek....