Depression and the defiant

There’s nothing very orderly about this post.  It’s just some thoughts about what’s going on right now with my horses.

As if they’d been waiting for hockey season to end, all the horses scheduled to get sick this Spring got sick together.  The new chronic colic case, November, the old familiar laminitis case Kassy, and the latest laminitis case Cookie.  All together now, ail!

Cookie added to the mix with a mysterious leg swelling which the vet suspected was a subcutaneous infection known as… I forget.  Anyway, she needed a week of antibiotics and anti-inflamatories.  Kassy only needed the anti-inflamatories, so they were separated for that week.  November did wait until Cookie was done with her antibiotics to go off his feed and colic.  That was nice, I only have so many pens to isolate horses in.  So, Cookie moved in with Kassy for drugs and diet, and November took Cookie’s place.

Did you get a dream?

It started in my car, but my car had an extra back seat, a third row, like my car doesn’t have.   I was waiting for Ted Knight and Ted Nielsen, who I went to school with as a child.  Same first name, different last names.  We were all going to a hockey game together.  It was a hot afternoon, the rink was surrounded by foliage, palm trees and shrubbery with big flat leaves and bright, wide-faced flowers.

After a while I looked up in my rearview mirror and saw a man with a moustache sitting in the far row of seats that don’t exist in my car.  I said “hi! Who are you?”  He said “I’m Ted Knight.”  I knew that wasn’t true, he was the wrong race.  He handed me a business card, it said Ted Knight, and it had an email address on it that I recognized.  I remembered sending an email about the game, thinking I was emailing my old friend.  I realized I may have made the offer to the wrong guy.  I was embarrassed.

When the other Ted arrived, he said hi, as to introduce himself to the guy in the back.  He pointed out that this was not the correct Ted Knight.  I felt badly, but the wrong TK smiled and went away.  Eventually the correct TK showed up.

The unprepared horse owner’s guide to body-clipping

Before: this coat has a problem. This is what it looked like after being washed.

Your horse may be old, he may suffer from Cushing’s disease (ask your vet if your horse needs to be tested), you may just have a hairy horse.  But when it’s May 1 and all the other horses around are sleek and shiny looking and yours still looks like something from the set of 10,000 BC, you should probably body-clip him.  I’m saying “him” because the horse I clipped today is a gelding.  You don’t need to do it because other people and horses will judge you or your horse.  You need to do it because your horse is sweltering day after day. You don’t care how he looks, you just don’t want him to suffer.

Maybe you are working your horse in the winter, in which case you may be preparing to show or do something else where other people do see your horse and judge you by his appearance.  If this is the case, you should just pay a professional groom to do it.  It takes a lot of time, equipment and skill to do it so your horse to looks good.  It is probably worth paying someone else to do that if you don’t know how, which you don’t if you are unprepared.  Don’t make the mistake of thinking it will grow out by show season.  A bad clip job will last all year.

Stressing intelligence

This morning I heard Robert Sapolski on NPR talking about stress in primates.  He had been studying a group of baboons in the wild and he mentioned the following observations/conclusions:

• Baboon females inherit their mother’s status and do not change groups
• Baboon males establish their own place in the hierarchy and change groups as a matter of course during young adulthood.
• Low-ranking primates suffer from stress-related health problems because they are smarter than less intelligent or imaginative animals, which means 1) the dominant primates can relieve their stress by abusing the weaker ones, and 2) all primates can stress themselves out by thinking.
• Zebras don’t suffer from stress in the same way because they only experience stress when physically threatened, not chronically due to social or non-immediate stresses.

He had me until he blurted out that zebras don’t get ulcers.  He had been talking about how primates, if they have enough time on their hands, will torment individuals of lower status, which he called “giving ulcers” to the weaker animal.  So I don’t think he really meant zebras don’t get ulcers, which is untrue but not where the hole in his argument is.

Morning with flowers

III

When I went to Russia I was excited to see these whitish weed-like plants planted everywhere.  I recognized them as the plant I’d used to make a floral decoration for my sister-in law’s bridal shower the spring before.  I needed something white to mix in with the bright colors, and their lacy texture was perfect.  To see them in Russia seemed miraculous, that we could have the same flowers in such different parts of the planet.

Those plants ended up in a row in front of my house, but without their brightly colored companions.  My father put them there after my mother told him to dismantle the flower arrangement.  They kept the colorful ones.  As much as I liked the whitish lacy plants, they were never as pretty without the colors to set them off.  I figured they would die and I could replace them.  They didn’t, for years and years, they grew bigger and bigger and showed no sign of dying off to make room for anything else.

The thank you note

II

I got a very late thank you note from my brother and his wife, thanking me for going to their wedding.  It said they hoped I’d enjoyed the wedding.  I got unreasonably upset about that note.  How could I possibly have enjoyed the wedding?  I hate weddings and also it was in New York.  And it was when I learned about CW being dead.

After a while I thought that maybe I never did mention that part to them.  Or maybe the wedding was so long ago that they simply forgot.  No, I know I told them.  I told them that was why I had to go to Russia.  Maybe that doesn’t make any sense to them, or anyone else.  But usually when you mention someone died and you leave the country, people remember it.  I guess not, not if they just got married.  Or something.

Whitney’s dead

I

Some days life seems so fucking cruel.  Hearing of Whitney Houston’s death, I thought immediately of CW.  I hear Houston’s name and I think of The Bodyguard and I think of CW bursting into “Ayyyyyeeeaaaayyyy will aaaaaalwaaaays looove yoooooooUooo….” in the square in Semily.  In the snow, surrounded by the stone and plaster buildings, as we walk somewhere.  The bar or the massage parlor or the train station or wherever,  I remember walks with him in so many towns and cities.  My God, in Pompeii and Naples and Athens and Istanbul…

Going to see “Regarding Henry” of all things in Istanbul.  Drinking apple tea and plum brandy and who knows what else.  The man who found us by the mosque and said he had carpets for sale, the way CW said “I don’t have a house, why do I want a carpet?” and the man said “I will sell you a house then.”