Are up.

I, uh, had forgotten that moving up means not always being in the last division to go at every event.

Dressage: 7:42
Cross-country: 10:04

No time for stadium, though they ran it separately from XC last year and I assume will do the same on this go-round.  Possibly it was catch-as-catch-can with the division starting at a time TBA?  Possibly not.  We've got five from the barn going Novice at Huntington and four of us--all excepting our junior, who's of course in JN--are in the same division: ONA.  One goes in the ring right before Tucker and I do; another goes directly after; the junior rides in her division's ring at the same time I go in mine.  At least I know I'll be sharing the warm-up with people who know how to steer?

No live scoring at this one and I can't for the life of me remember whether or not I'll have cell service up there, so you kids have a good weekend, but not too much fun without me, okay?  Okay.

PS I'm not leaving until Friday morning.  Please to be squeezing into the next 24 hours any fun that can't wait until I get back.

#

I was going to make a short list of some things that I've discovered recently that I love, but one of them I can't get to link properly and another will get its own post at some point, so instead I'll just mention the third one, which is this thing that the yellowdog does when we're out for a walk.  He'll be lagging a little bit behind and I'll tell him to step it up and he'll obligingly trot out in front of me, and then, and then.

And then he peeks back at me, over his shoulder, and gets this look in his eye--same look the old dog (the Best Dog) would get when convincing somebody she was deafer than she was--and then curls his body into a kidney bean shape--that's another thing he does; whacks his own nose while he's wagging a tail--for a step and then uncoils and just takes off--zoom!--to the end of the leash.

Tell me to speed up! he's saying.  As if!

It's not the best joke he knows--that's the one where he steals one of the cat toys and carries it around in the back of his mouth like he has a secret--but still, he thinks he's pretty smart.

I need to apologize to all the good citizens of Rehoboth, MA, for rediscovering my Joy Division CD at 7am on a Sunday morning.  Blame the Killers: I was comparing versions of "Shadowplay" and once I had the disc in the player, of course I had to listen to "She's Lost Control" thirty-seven thousand times.  I would have made a lousy Goth girl, but damn, that song is great.

#

Ended up competing today after all: they had a three-person all-Novice Senior Combined Test division, and then one of the riders added cross-country and so moved into the Senior Horse Trials, which left my partner in crime and I as the entire division.  Not bad!  She beat me by half a point.  We both got a little lost trying to halt at G instead of X and she halted a step closer to the right place than I did.  Half a point's worth of closer?  That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.

Very glad I did the CT today.  I'm happy with the way I rode and beyond thrilled with the way Tucker went, and I think it was a Good Idea to get this under my belt before Huntington and UNH.

Onward.

Probably too little and too late, but do any of you Bostonian types want to go see the fireworks over the Charles (Cambridge side) tomorrow?  All my usual suspects are out of town or uninterested or otherwise already booked.  I may well just trundle on down by myself* and that'll be fine, but unusual suspects are welcome if anybody wants to come (or wants to let me play tagalong)...!

* I may also end up falling asleep an some absurdly early hour the way I did last year, or mistiming my trip down and ending cold and cranky enough to bail before the actual show starts the way I did the year before that.  I'm not sure what happened the year before that--think I was with the Quaker house crew for the rehearsal concert on the 2nd or 3rd, but no idea where I was on the 4th.  But never fear: my chances of dramatically screwing up are significantly lower if I have somebody else to think about!

Dear Boston,

IT IS JULY.

Loff,
Hannah

PS No, seriously.

#

Meanwhile, the Globe provides news you can use: How to build an ark.

You know how you always get extra fortune cookies in your Chinese-takeout bag?  Tonight I decided I didn't like my first fortune--

Repetition is the mother of skill.

--because it's not that it's not applicable, but man, it's not adequate, you know?  I wish to acquire all possible skill right now.  I cracked open another cookie in search of a fortune more to my taste--

It's up to you to clarify.

--at which point I guess I should have seen the writing on the wall.  But hey, I happened to drop a piece of that cookie, and the yellowdog snapped it up!  Maybe that fortune was meant for him and not for me at all.  Cracked open fortune cookie number three--

No need to worry!  You will always have everything that you need.

--and you know, even my thick skull isn't entirely immune to anvils.  Thanks, universe!  I get the picture!  I added the last remaining cookie to our stash and went on my merry way.

Repetition is the mother of skill, huh?  It's not quite Everyone knows that you are the best--I really got that one, one time; I am not making this up--but I guess I can work with that.

Tags: best day ever, i'm glad we had this talk
feels like: feeling slightly judged

Sookie: "Why would Eric have Lafayette in the basement?"

Me: "...would you like that list in order of preference or alphabetized?"

40. Street Magic (Caitlin Kittredge).

Well.  That was weird.

Not the book itself, exactly.  The book itself is a more or less standard-issue modern-style urban fantasy: mouthy girl with untapped magic powers (re)meets shady boy with knowledge of same and her safe normal world goes all to hell.  Variations: this one is set in London (convincingly enough* from where I sit, although I don't know from London, so) and the boy is a heroin addict.  That's the one part of the book that I can specifically point to and say, "There!  I liked that!"  Because so, so often in this genre, you get your magic-associated addicts and it doesn't actually affect their lives in any meaningful way, but Jack?  Is affected.  More or less like whoa.  And it's all deeply unsexy, which is unusual for this genre and I was just kind of fascinated.  I kept waiting for Kittredge to hand-wave it away and she mostly didn't, which kept me watching for the first half of a book that's otherwise lacking in novelty.

Pete (short for Petunia) is a Scotland Yard Detective Inspector, working on a missing-child case.  Jack's a Shadowy Figure From The Past--more on that in a sec--and shows up after a twelve-year absence to give her a tip and then vanishes again.  The tip pans out and another couple of kids get 'napped, and Pete's off to hunt Jack down and make him give up some answers and ends up (as you do?) getting a crash-course in magical London because the kidnapper, of course, is not entirely human.  In parallel: all the usual urban-fantasy-book issues associated with Shadowy Figures From The Past, although actual no smooching.  I never thought I would say this, but here goes: thanks, heroin!

(One Shadowy Figure issue that I did have a hard time getting over: the Past Traumatic Event took place when Pete was sixteen and Jack was twenty-six and a rock star and dating her sister, although apparently also "seeing" Pete, whatever that means; far as I can tell there was no smooching then, either--and it occurs to me that one could probably get a good rant going about this character type, the guy who's non-stop threatening but not actually ever even a little bit of a threat, but I suspect it's been done and anyway, I'm on a roll here and said roll does not include thinking, so for now I'm just going to point and say, "Look at that"--but you know, much as I dug the bit where the book is unrepetentent about Jack being kind of a loser, I had a hard time with the part where the book and I split ways re: when exactly that loserdom kicked in, because it kept waving its arms and shouting, "Look over here!" while I was all, "Go directly to Loserville, do not pass Go, do not collect $200, mmkay?"  Which probably I should get over, seeing as how the present of the series is twelve years later, but in a way that makes it even weirder, I think, because if that's where you want to end up, do we really need to start with an age gap that skeeves even me out?  Especially if Jack isn't actually going to feel thirty-eight in the story-present, anyway?)

Um.  Anyway.  The world is okay enough and the plot is okay enough and Pete is okay enough, but there's not much here, other than the heroin, that you haven't seen elsewhere if you're at all familiar with the field, although if Kittredge wants to write a Jack-and-Mosswood series, I would totally read that.   Their two-page conversation is the best two pages in the book.  But second half in particular--from the Trifold Focus quest on--is not very compelling or interesting.

...so I have no idea why I bothered to finish it (for values of "finish" that include "skimmed large chunks") or why I feel vaguely warm towards it or why I suspect that if book two in the series crosses my path, I'll pick it up and give it a look.

Maybe I'm just hoping Mosswood will reappear.

* Except for one...minor...detail that drove me bonkers.  It's such a stupid thing to gripe about that I'm putting it in a footnote rather than in the bookpost itself.  What happens, you see, is that Pete is describing Jack to someone and says he is "three and a half meters tall."  That's it.  That's all.  Like I said.  So.  Stupid.  But it drove me bonkers for the rest of the book because while I totally understand typos and that some stuff doesn't get caught, I can't even figure out which part of this would have been the typo, because just changing one of the numbers doesn't make sense, and neither does just changing the unit, and I keep trying to convince myself that he's just tall--because he is, though not,  I am fairly certain (because Pete drives a Mini and he rides in it several times), 3.5 meters worth of tall--and Pete was just trying to be funny, except that it would have been a weird moment for attempted humor and anyway, Pete has no discernible sense of same.  So I guess the most logical explanation is that maybe it's not a typo but rather an error--maybe Kittredge (and editor, and copyeditor, and so on) doesn't actually know how long a meter is?  Which would, y'know, not be a crime, and whatever the actual case, it's six words and I should just let it go, and it's not like I'm judging the book's overall quality by this one glitch--though fickle, I am not often actively cruel!  But I tell you: bonkers.

Tags: unchallenge

I have sand in my ears.

Anyone have a good oatmeal cookie recipe?

feels like: won't do _that_ again

While tanaise is out of town, I have to put ear drops in her cat's ears.

The cat's a remarkably good sport, but I can't help suspecting that this exercise was specifically designed to keep him from liking me best.

You guys, you guys, Rachel Alexandra ran today in the Mother Goose Stakes, won by 19+ lengths--of course she did; there were only two other fillies in it and that pace was suicidal, but what do you do?  This was always going to be a walkover.

But look at her go, you guys.  Just push-button.  Just cruising, floppy ears and a loop in the reins all the way down the stretch and that's a stakes record, and also cracks the winning-margin record that belonged to the late great Ruffian.

(Tom Durkin makes me laugh.  "The results...heh heh...are not official.")

Oh, horse.  Don't break my heart, okay?

ETA: And clear on the other side of the country, the marvelous Zenyatta wins the Vanity Handicap in--maybe less flashy, but super-classy fashion, carrying some weight, just really an elegant run.  The plot, she thickens beautifully.  Boys?  What boys?

(That's a helluva race by Briecat, too.)