Horse Show Trainer's Diary

This blog is dedicated to the few, the proud...the horse trainers.

Get up at dawn of crack. Fumble in dark, pull on mismatched outfit and head for horse show. Finally appreciate that Starbucks opens at 4am.

Arrive at showgrounds, get exhibitor numbers from office, try to organize riders and schedule for the day.

Have advil and coffee for breakfast.

Where are my riders?

Find riders for warm-up hunter class. School riders. Holler same three instructions fifteen times. Each.

Realize this is day one of five-day show. Enthusiasm wanes.

Get to in gate. 27 people ahead of you. Go to kiddy ring to school riders for crossbar class. Chew off what’s left of your fingernails praying nobody gets killed.

Go back to hunter ring. 29 people ahead of you now. Don’t ask how this happened.

Pop more advil and one of those little white pills that you hoard. Say silent prayer of thanks that they only drug test horses, not trainers.

Pass porta potty for the 18th time. Make mental note to stop next time.

Have 22nd cup of coffee. Look at watch. It’s 9am. Resolve to stop looking at watch.

School equitation riders. Realize your feet are starting to hurt.

While watching rider in equitation ring, hear announcement that hunter ring is holding gate for you and your rider. Run like hell to ring. Make rider jump two fences in warm-up area and send her in for her round.

Rider goes off course.

Bang head against railing. Spook pony next to you. Apologize. Pony rider’s trainer gives you understanding, sympathetic smile.

Great, now your head hurts too. Pop more advil.

Did I pee yet?

Bad news: Wind speed measured at 45 mph. Good news: nature’s facelift.

Run to horse show office to put rider in class she forgot to enter. Pain from aching feet beginning to eclipse headache.

Frantically attempt to be in three places at once. Fail miserably.

Stop at beer tent. Who cares if it’s 10am?

Run back to barn to organize riders for medal class. In a spastic fit of poor judgment, tell 15-year old rider she can braid her own horse. Feet are now killing you.

Make mad dash for pony arena.

Say… that’s a nice bike.

Ride bike to ring to school pony riders. Discover your pony rider has painted her pony’s hooves with purple glitter.

Attempt to find solvent capable of removing purple glitter.

Kid who braided her own horse shows up at in-gate.

Attempt to find braider to re-braid horse.

Finally get to use porta potty. Pop more advil and check to make sure your breath doesn’t smell like alcohol.

Ignore loudspeaker announcement re: missing bicycle

Head back to hunter ring to watch rider in adult amateur class. Try to maintain composure while Run Dobbin, Run! plays out in front of you.

Attempt to explain to pasty-faced amateur who hasn’t two brain cells to rub together why it was NOT a good idea to leave a stride out of the outside line.

Covet thy neighbor’s beer.

Make panicked attempt to locate rider called back for medal class workoff. Find her in photographer’s tent watching video of World Cup Finals.

Run to jumper ring to school rider for jumper class.

She wins!

Thank your mother, your teachers, the Academy, and God. Reaffirm your confidence as a horse trainer.

Run to hunter ring to school kid for children’s hunter class.

Explain for the fifteenth time why purple and pink saddle pads are NOT a good idea for hunter classes.

Watch rider chip all 8 fences.

Make mental list of occupations you could still go to school for.

Get to exhibitor barbeque late. They inform you they are out of barbeque.

Must. Control. Fist. Of. Death.

Go back to beer tent and drink dinner.

Return “borrowed” bicycle.

Go back to barn, make sure horses get legs wrapped and are fed and blanketed for the night.

Look at watch and are horrified at time. Make mistake of mentally calculating how many hours sleep you will get. Make bigger mistake of mentally calculating how much you actually make per hour.

Resolve to check out your options next time Starbucks has a ‘help wanted’ sign in the window.

Spend half an hour looking for car keys in barn office.

Find car keys in coat pocket.

Get home after midnight.

Repeat above scenario for 4 more days.

Realize that this is only the first horse show out of 8 this summer.

Take more pills, drink more beer, yank alarm clock out of wall, threaten husband and children with bodily harm if they wake you, and go to bed.

Resolve to look into witness protection program on Monday.

When you care enough to send...

Like anyone with an entrepreneurial spirit, I’m always looking for the ‘next big thing.’ You know, like pet rocks or mood rings or some equally useless item that, regardless of the fact that it serves no purpose, everybody simply has to have. All it takes to be a gazillionaire is one good original idea. You sell a few hundred million of whatever-it-is then take the money and run. Hello, retirement on a private tropical island! What could be easier?

Okay, there are a few flies in my get-rich-quick-scheme ointment. I’ve had no shortage of good ideas, but I’ve got zero investment capital and little marketing savvy. Executing my grand notions has always proved logistically or financially infeasible. I needed a product that was simple, inexpensive, and – since I’m keen on keeping business in the USA – home grown.

It took much consternation and gnashing of teeth before I realized, one day while I was at the barn, that the answer was right in front of me. It’s uncomplicated. It’s abundant. And it is home-grown. Literally.

It’s the Manure-o-Gram.

There endless ways to Say It With Manure. “My new job stinks.” “Sorry you got dumped.” “Just dropping in to say hi.” “The muck stops here.” “Heard you feel like crap.” “So…it finally hit the fan?” Or the ever-popular, all-purpose “Shit Happens.”

Manure is amazingly versatile. Individual nuggets occur naturally in a variety of sizes, shapes, colors and textures, depending on the size of the horse and the particulars of its diet. Manure sculptures can be crafted for any occasion. Manure makes an ideal football (great for Superbowl parties), a terrific scale replica of Mt. Eyjafjallajökull for science projects (add water for optional lava flow effect!), and, for all those Star Wars theme parties, an eerily realistic likeness of Jabba the Hut.

Want to make a truly unforgettable impression? Consider the Flaming Manure-o-Gram. Manure is in itself an incendiary device and easily combusts into a variety of fragrant, flickering colors. Firm manure also makes a fabulous receptacle for birthday candles, making the Birthday Manure-o-Gram a great alternative to those boring store-bought cakes. Individual nuggets also fit perfectly into standard cupcake wrappers.

Manure completely retains its character when flattened and compressed, so you can even slip it in to birthday cards and standard envelopes. Try it with your favorite-shaped cookie cutters! Never mind those pesky postal regulations that prohibit mailing of organic matter…what the post office doesn’t know won’t hurt it.

The applications are infinite, limited only by one’s imagination and/or tolerance for horse crap. While they may be received with varying degrees of enthusiasm, one thing is certain: no matter what the occasion, a Manure-o-Gram will be one gift that’s never forgotten.


Manure-o-Grams are completely green, organic and natural. And since horses are strictly herbivores, Manure-o-Grams are 100% suitable for your most pretentious vegan friends. Horses roam freely and aren’t fed hormones or other unnatural substances, making Manure-o-Grams perfect gifts for animal rights activists. Environmentalists will love that Manure-o-Grams are completely biodegradable – just toss them in the yard when you’re finished with them. Or, put them in your flowerbed and you’ll have the best looking pansies in town. A Manure-o-Gram is literally a gift that keeps on giving.

Best of all, production of Manure-o-grams requires little overhead and zero cash output. You don’t even have to own your own horse to be a distributor. All you have to do is find the nearest equine and follow it around for five minutes. Voila! You've got your quota for the day. There’s not a horse owner alive that cares if somebody else carts off a wheelbarrow full of manure; we don’t care what you do with it as long as we don’t have to pick it up ourselves. You've essentially got an endless supply of free raw materials.

Next time the doorbell rings on your birthday, anniversary or mother’s day, you may be lucky enough to receive your very own Manure-o-gram.

Give someone crap today. Just call us at 1-800-GET-POOP.

Manure-o-Grams: When you care enough to give a shit.

Skirting the Issue

Women are endowed with innate weaponry. Weapons we can choose to conceal or reveal, but that we don’t need a license to carry. Weapons that must be used responsibly and judiciously, and that must be wielded with care. Because, like guns, women are always loaded. 

Every once in a great while, I bring out this natural arsenal. Like the time I volunteered to build new bridle and saddle racks for the tack room at the barn. I had an impressive collection of tools and an equally impressive ability to use them. But there’s one thing I didn’t have: a vehicle big enough to carry uncut lumber. None of the hardware stores cut lumber for the customers anymore; it didn’t matter how much you begged or pleaded. At the time I didn’t have an available friend with a pickup truck.

But I had something better. 

Cue the ZZ Top song She’s got Legs.

I arrived at Orchard Supply Hardware wearing my little short skirt and spike heels, calling upon years of theatrical training to convey complete helplessness. This was the kind of place where people (mostly men) shopped in jeans, sneakers and overalls. The moment I stepped through the door, I looked like a fish out of water. 

Eggggggggggggsellent. 

I tippy-toed about the store in my stilettos. They clicked on the concrete floor, echoing across the aisles. The ears of every male within a 200-foot radius immediately perked the way my horse’s ears did when he heard the sound of a snapping carrot.

Click click click click. Pause at a tool display and stare at it like it’s an alien life form.                                                                                                     

Click click click click. Pause in front of paint display and look at all the pretty colors.

Click click click click. Pause in front of lumber display and adopt expression that is both vacuous and pensive (try this, it’s not easy, I had to practice in front of the mirror). Reach out and gently stroke lumber. 

Five young men sporting OSH uniforms appear out of nowhere and surround me like they are Pit Bulls and I am a pork chop.

All five say in unison: “May I help you?” while vying for the coveted me, me, pick me! position.

Me: Big sigh followed by big, more vacuous, doe-eyed stare. “Well…..I need four pieces of lumber, but I know you don’t cut lumber here…” (employing my best I just lost my puppy tone) “…and it’ll never fit in my little car.”

They run into and over each other grabbing lumber for me. Boards fall over domino-style. Two of them grab the same piece and I fear a fistfight will break out over who gets to carry it for me. It looks like a Three Stooges movie.

“We’re not supposed to cut it,” one of them winks, “But we can do it.”

“I’ll get the hacksaw,” another one says, lighting up like a Christmas tree. 

“I’ll get it,” the third one says.

“No, I’ll get it,” the fourth one says.

The fifth one was ahead of them all and had already split to claim the sole hack saw they kept hidden in the back room.

Click click click click. I followed the lumber, which was being borne with all the pomp and circumstance of an emperor in a rickshaw, to the workbench area, where I stood and watched in vacuous fascination as they meticulously measured and drew lines and cut. The hacksaw was a tiny, old thing and took a lot of manpower to chew through the two by fours. There were four boards and five employees; one of them didn’t get to cut anything. He seemed wholly disappointed. He did, however, get to carry the lumber to the register and to my car for me.

Click click click click. The other four stood vying for position at the door with goofy smiles on their faces as I left. It didn’t matter that I was old enough to be some of their mothers. Their eyes never ventured any further north than the hem of my skirt. Not a one of ‘em could have told you what color eyes I had.

I drove off, waving at them.

The second I got home I doffed the stilettos and skirt and put on jeans, a tee shirt and my work boots. Then I hauled out my own tools and started building. Before you could say Dude Looks Like A Lady, I’d built and painted three bridle racks and two saddle racks.

The skirt and the stilettos are still in my closet, patiently waiting, like magical talismans, for their next assignment. Someday, I’ll need to build something again. And I know that if I need to build it (and if I wear the skirt and shoes), they will come.

The Asphalt Jungle

It was the first spring after I’d moved into the little garage studio in older, rural West Petaluma. The neighborhood gardens were ablaze with color in the form of wisteria, lilac, daffodils, tulips, roses and innumerable wildflower species. Some of them had been purposefully planted and lovingly nurtured. Others just grew with abandon at nature’s whim. They adorned the yards of the beautiful Victorian houses like living jewelry and infused the air with a symphony of scents.

I had just taken a stroll through the neighborhood, gathering a bouquet of wildflowers (okay, and some not-so-wild flowers, but the neighbors had plenty and wouldn’t miss them). As I walked home down my old asphalt driveway, something caught my eye. In several places along the retaining wall that separated my driveway from the neighboring property the asphalt was starting to crack and buckle upward. Continental drift? Tectonic plate movement? I hardly thought so.

I stepped on a few of the cracks and tamped them back down with my foot. I promptly forgot about it, until a few days later when I noticed the asphalt was once again cracking and buckling…and that something had emerged…no, something was growing…from beneath it.

I looked more closely. I wasn’t hallucinating…a plant was growing up through the asphalt. THROUGH the asphalt. I found a dozen breaches where spiky little spears were pushing their way through the driveway.

WTF? What kind of weird-ass alien plant life form can grow through three inches of asphalt?

It looked just like the plants on the other side of the retaining wall – a stand of bamboo trees the neighbors had planted along the property line.

That’s what it was. Bamboo. Their bamboo was growing through my driveway.

Bamboo doesn’t propagate like most plants. Instead of dropping seeds, it sends out underground shoots. Said shoots eventually burst forth to form new plants. They grow at an amazing rate of speed. Turns out the spiky little bamboo shoots can grow through just about anything. Rocky soil. Clay. Asphalt.

Flesh.

I’m not kidding. The ancient Chinese used bamboo as a form of torture. Victims were suspended over or tied to a bed of bamboo shoots. The rapidly growing spikes tunneled right through their flesh, muscle and internal organs.

I saw an episode of the show “Mythbusters” that addressed this phenomenon. They had a human torso made of ballistics gel (a substance that approximated the density of human tissue) that they placed over a bamboo bed. Sure enough, in a matter of a few days the shoots had grown right through poor old Buster.

You may at first think this gruesome. But if bamboo can grow through flesh and asphalt, imagine the useful applications. Like planting a bed of bamboo underneath the furniture cushions in your living room. That oughta get your couch-potato boyfriend’s lazy ass off the sofa. Similar tactics might also encourage your neighbor to move that eyesore junker Oldsmobile off your side of the street. Use it to encourage the guest that won’t leave to get the hell out of your favorite recliner. Slip the stuff under a mattress and it’s pretty much guaranteed to get even the most un-motivated teenager out of bed before noon.

Bamboo cannot be conquered via normal plant warfare. You can’t just pull the shoots up like weeds, they are far too firmly rooted – hell, they’re still connected to the mothership. And they’re tough. I couldn’t break them with my best Tae Kwon Do side kick (I could hear the voice of my Tae Kwon Do instructor, Grandmaster Kang, in the back of my head, chiding me “You let bamboo beat you? Weakling! Go run fifty laps and then try again!”). Pruning shears? Bamboo will destroy them. And bamboo is unaffected by my very best ‘wither and die’ look, which normally kills all plant life within a 10-foot radius. The only way to rid my driveway of bamboolings was to employ weapons of mass destruction.

I’m sure my neighbors wondered what I was doing in my asbestos chainmail overalls brandishing a machete, flamethrower and spray-tanker of Roundup. It was the only way to knock the things down and keep them down. But I knew my efforts were temporary; only buying me time, only postponing the inevitable return of my spiky nemesis. Even as I was dispatching them to oblivion and tamping the asphalt down around their remains like a concrete casket I could hear them, in their best Austrian accent, as though reciting a line from a plant-version of an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie (The Germinator?) promising me “I’ll be back…”

Yeah? Well, I’ll be back too. I’m ready for you. When you burst through the asphalt next spring, I’ll be waiting.

So go ahead. Make my day.

Ineptitude

As a part-time employee in a tack store, I’m among the first to see the latest, greatest products for horse and rider. Some are practical – good-looking, great fitting riding breeches for under $100? Yay! Some are truly beneficial – i.e. saddle pads with changeable shims that fit a saddle comfortably to your horse’s unique conformation. Others are stupidly extravagant – such as the $600 riding helmet, subject of a previous blog. This week I discovered a product so absolutely ridiculous, in both price and function, that I felt compelled to tout its absurdity.

It’s a newfangled stirrup ‘system’ called “On-Tyte.” The stirrup contains a magnet. Your riding boot houses a reciprocal magnet. The magnetic attraction keeps the stirrup on your foot. It’s revolutionary! It’s a must-have! It’s three hundred dollars!

You have got to be f*cking kidding me.

Keeping your feet in the damned stirrups is Riding Lesson #1. Before you even learn to steer, you learn to keep your heels down and keep the stirrup on your foot. Your leg position is what keeps you anchored. It’s what keeps you balanced. It’s what keeps you on the damned horse. Any kid who’s had three lessons on a fat pony at summer camp can keep the stirrups on their feet. Have riders gotten so lazy that they require technology to do their most fundamental job for them?

This is not the riding industry’s first attempt to revolutionize stirrups to eliminate the annoyance of learning to ride properly. They’ve developed inventive inserts for the stirrup bed to better grip the bottom of your boot. They’ve angled the stirrup bed, and the stirrup itself, to ensure proper foot and leg position (nevermind all those pesky exercises your instructors put you through that are intended to accomplish the same thing). They’ve constructed the stirrup of lighter materials so that if your feet slip out the irons don’t bounce and pummel your horse’s sides – a cue most often interpreted by the horse as meaning “run, Dobbin, run!!” I can only hope you practiced the pulley rein exercise (to stop a runaway horse) more than you practiced keeping your feet in your stirrups. Or are you waiting for the riding industry to invent a way to stop your horse for you? Perhaps giant impact-absorbing sandbag blockades in every corner of the arena would do the trick.

I admit I’m keen on some of the stirrup improvements. My stirrups have joints that flex to absorb impact. When you’ve got enough years of wear and tear on your knee joints that just the thought of riding hurts, these stirrups are a godsend. I’m all for eliminating pain. But eliminating the effort of learning to ride properly? Um,…..no.

Don’t ever show up in one of my riding lessons with On-Tyte stirrups. I’ll make you go change them. If I’m feeling particularly evil, I’ll just take them off your saddle and make you ride without them. That permanently eliminates the problem of losing the stirrup and it doesn’t cost three hundred bucks.

If we’re going to make stirrups that make it unnecessary to ride well enough to keep your feet where they belong, let’s just rid ourselves of the need to do other things correctly. Let’s make Velcro reins and gloves, so your hands never slip out of place. We’ll call it Grip-Tyte. Let’s put magnets in the saddle and in your underwear so your sorry arse can sit the trot. We’ll call it Sit-Tyte. And let’s make feminine hygiene products that don’t shift while you ride. We’ll call them Up-Tyte.

I had ONE student that I would ever consider allowing using magnetic stirrups. She has a genetic condition that has affected the tendons in her lower legs. Even after many surgeries and much hard work, it is difficult for her to make one of her ankles flex to the point where she can reliably keep the stirrup on her foot.

Before she had the surgery that allowed her to maintain a traditional leg position, she rode without stirrups. Didn’t even put them on the saddle. She could walk, trot, canter and jump. All you non-impaired riders out there could learn a big fat lesson in determination and hard work from her.

But if I offered her the option of the On-Tyte stirrups, I know exactly what she’d say. She’d look down her nose at me and scoff “I can do it myself.”  And she can. And if she can, you can.

So instead of spending $300 on magnetic stirrups, you might want to consider investing it in some more riding lessons. In the meantime, I’m going to hope the riding industry realizes they are not helping anyone and unceremoniously dumps this product.

I’m also going to hope my gynecologist doesn’t get ahold of it.

 

 

It's About Time

I say I haven’t traveled much, but that’s not entirely true. Some twenty-odd years ago, I did quite a bit of traveling. But it wasn’t the traditional plane-train-automobile sort of thing. 

I time-traveled.

Of course, nobody knew this, because the beauty of time traveling is that you can be gone as long as you like and still get back before you left. With no scheduling issues to consider, it’s easy to, say, take a quick trip to the 1800s as a little break in the middle of a hectic work week.

My foray into time travel was completely happenstance. I thought I was walking in to a phone booth to make a call. It looked like a phone booth – one of the old “police box” style ones – from the outside, anyway. As soon as I’d walked through the doors into what appeared to be another dimension (and was, in fact), I realized that my phone card was not going to work here. It was too late; I happened to venture in just as the time machine was departing for parts (and times) unknown. My Partner in Time, an ageless fellow whom I knew only as The Doctor, was kind enough to invite me to tag along with him.

I figured, what the hell.

It was unfortunate that this particular time machine had a GPS that was slightly cattywampus. Sometimes you knew where you were going to end up….but you rarely knew when you were going to end up. As a result, even the best-laid plans tended to go dreadfully awry. Oh, the vacation in ancient Italy sounded like a good idea. Until the whole volcano thing. There was nothing in the Pompeii Travel brochure about that. And I’d checked the weather forecast; it said ‘partly cloudy with a chance of precipitation’ not ‘partly cloudy with a chance of being buried by volcanic ash.’

Speaking of travel brochures, there was a reason why hotel rooms were so cheap in Hawaii in December. In 1941.

I could have skipped that whole Roman Empire escapade. That Caligula fellow was just not right any way you looked at it. And if I’d known he had a thing for redheads (“a thing” meaning he thought they made the best sacrifices to the gods of fertility), I would have gone back to blonde. 

I wish I had countermanded the decision to take Genghis Khan for “a little ride around the 1200s.” Likewise the wearing of the Joan of Arc Halloween costume on that trip to the 1430s (saying I looked “hot” in it, by the way, my good Doctor, was not funny). 

We weren’t supposed to influence events, of course, just blend in and observe. That was the biggest challenge. It was difficult not to interfere when someone was about to do some colossally dumbass thing that you knew was going to end up in the history book chapter titled “Biggest Disasters of the Past 1,000 Years.”  

We learned about the not interfering part the hard way, when we decided to take the Wright Brothers on a little jaunt into the future to show them how their aeroplane thing turned out. Thanks to the cattywampus GPS we ended up in the middle of World War II. When Orville and Wilbur saw their flying machines being used as weapons of destruction, they promptly washed their hands of the whole project. We had to do major damage control (including showing them man walking on the moon and scaring the bejesus out of Neil Armstrong) to set them back on course. Talk about almost totally f’ing up history. 

We did end up helping things along sometimes. I dutifully sat for hours in an itchy getup and dark wig while DaVinci painted my portrait. And it was difficult to keep a straight face when my time travel partner was standing behind the artist making faces at me. I really never could completely wipe the smile off my face. 

Don’t engage me in a discussion of historical events, because I know things you don’t. Cleopatra was blonde. Napoleon wore women’s underwear. Edgar Allan Poe was afraid of spiders. Colonel Sanders was a vegetarian. And I know why the Mona Lisa is smiling. That whole conspiracy theory that the trip to the moon was faked? Bullshit. It happened. We spent a LOT of time erasing the hopscotch grid we’d drawn in the moondust. 

The opportunity to travel through time (albeit randomly) was priceless, and I remember my time-travel days fondly. I had to give them up when my (other) doctor told me it was bad for my blood pressure. I told him I didn’t think it was so much the time travel event as it was ending up in Pompeii in 79 AD or on the Titanic on April 14. Whatever the cause, my blood pressure is much lower now. My Accidental Death by Historic Disaster insurance premium is also much lower, and I don’t have to spend nearly as much money constantly updating my wardrobe. I really didn’t have thing to wear for the Crusades. 

You probably don’t believe any of this, and I daresay I can’t prove it. I don’t know where (or when) the Doctor is right now. Internet connectivity is spotty at best between time rifts, and he’s often out of touch. But once in awhile he gets a connection at an intergalactic Starbucks and I get a t-mail from him (kind of a time travel version of e-mail). Perhaps he’ll be able to read this blog and comment. Otherwise, it’s just my word against yours. 

Proof or no proof, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.