redroanchronicles

So, I only just realized I've been incredibly remiss. I moved my journal to Wordpress awhile back -- mostly for technology reasons -- and I'd meant to set up an RSS feed or... something... to carry the posts over to DW and LJ. But I totally didn't. I've just been blithely posting away on the new blog with my head in the clouds.

So I thought the very least I could do was post here and direct you over here to the blog I actually update, in case any of you want to continue following the saga of my life. :D And if you have suggestions on how best to make it easier for those posts to appear in your friends feeds on DW and LJ, please do let me know. I'll be keeping my fannish blogs on DW and LJ but the move to Dreamwidth seems to have stuck for good with this more real-lifey blog. ANYWHO, I hope you're all doing awesome. I haven't had a chance to read my friends feeds in a terribly long time, but I'm also trying to figure out how best to keep up with those.

It snows in the morning, and waking up to winter after a few weeks of spring is like finding yourself in a foreign land with no recollection of how you got there. It's jetlag without the travel, and though the thing has passed by afternoon and most of the snow is already gone, it still leaves you disoriented.

There's a woodstove and a warm meal waiting inside, but there are chores to do first, and the low rumble of thunder is like the voice of an old friend, calling for your company. You can't bear to be inside. You check on the dogs, grab your gloves and your book, shut the door behind you and head out to the horses. The gelding and the big mare are in their usual places, waiting expectantly for supper, but your own mare is standing at the peak of the little hill, staring in the opposite direction, neck held high and ears pricked, not her usual self.

That rigid set of her neck always unnerves you a little. She's led a life in the wild, and she's wiser than you. With any other animal, you might dismiss it; with her, you simply wonder what she knows that you don't.

She comes easily at the shaking of the grain pan though, and eats her fill, and only raises her head a few times to listen to the storm that's closing in. She's wary, but she's not afraid. She's even willing to stay under the shelter with the other horses. She turns her nose easily into your hand, then buries it in sweet-smelling hay, seemingly content.

You leave the horses to their supper, tuck your book inside the front pocket of your hoodie, and scale the ladder back into the hay loft. The barn cat is there, and tries to deposit himself in your lap while you're still climbing the ladder; you push him away gently, one-handed, and miraculously you manage not to trip over him as you step deeper into the loft, brush the loose hay from a few bales and sit. You call to the cat, cluck your tongue and murmur to him, expecting to make an easy job of attracting him close enough to pet, but the sound of rain just starting against the roof unnerves him, and he's hungry for his own supper; he disappears down the ladder and leaves you to yourself.

Through the open hatches in the loft floor, you can hear the rustling of hay as the horses eat, but it's soon drowned out by the beginnings of a rain shower, a dainty and uneven scrambling like birds landing on the metal roof. A low bass-line of thunder leads into a long, cacophonous percussion solo, rain pounding the ground slick and hitting the barn roof so fast and hard that it produces one continuous roar of noise.

There's a feeling in your chest that's excitement and fear and joy and the wet air is like something alive, something reaching out. You sigh it in and feel it wind its way around your insides, laying gentle roots.

The book's pages are crisp and dry beneath your fingertips. The temperature is dropping. Bruce Chatwin writes from two decades ago about human ancestors huddled in caves, hiding from long-toothed predators. He writes about Australian Aboriginals singing their world into being, and you sit in the hay loft and listen as the world sings back.

The rain turns to hail, then back to rain, and slows to a gentler tempo, thunder still muttering to itself but further off now. Soon it's too cold for bare fingers. You slip the book back into your pocket and descend the ladder.

Two of the horses are still eating, front feet and muzzles buried happily in hay. Your mare is out in the weather, standing again on her hill, staring fixedly at some monster only she can see. You pull up your hood and slip through the gate, sloshing through the new mud until you're standing next to her, one hand light on her withers; she turns her head to greet you, then attends again to her sentry. You peer together into the gathering gloom, but your human senses detect nothing.

That doesn't mean there's nothing there.

They've been in the dry lot all day, and you're not particularly keen to open the paddock only to have to round the horses back up again to go in for the night, but a closer look might ease your mare's fears and let her get back to her supper, so you open up the paddock gate and walk through. The mare doesn't follow, not until you're nearly out of sight behind the trees, and then she charges in at a canter, unwilling to let you face her nightmares on your own. She comes to a stop at your shoulder, blowing air, brave and alert and ready to face the enemy.

The trees are glistening with tiny drops of water, as if they've put on their own decorations. The only sounds are the mare's breathing and the soft patter of rain. Nothing moves. You warm one hand against the mare's neck. Everything is beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. She turns her head and breathes against your knuckles, as if checking you're alright.

You venture into the thicket and she follows you for a short distance, then stops as her pasture-mate comes charging in after you both, late to the battle but ready to wade in, if the threat had been found.

The part of you that Chatwin wrote about -- the lizard-brain that remembers being hunted by giant cats -- tells you not to go further into the thicket. Maybe it's just unfounded paranoia, or the fixed set of your mare's ears, or having watched too many horror movies in your lifetime, but you stop, and you back out of the thicket and back to the relative safety of your "herd." Whether the threat is real or imagined, you'll need to get the mares back into their lot for the night, and if there is something lurking here, you'll hardly help the situation by blundering over it in the dark. It's time to retreat to more certain ground.

You wrap a hand around your mare's lower jaw, fingers burying themselves in the thick winter hair there, the whiskers on her chin tickling your knuckles. You turn away from the thicket, leading her by the jaw, and she follows easily, willingly, with nothing but your fingers pressed lightly to her skin. The big mare comes along too, bringing up the rear, glancing occasionally over her shoulder, unconcerned but curious, as if wondering what all the fuss was about.

You let your mare go when you're nearly inside, so you can close the gate, but she refuses to leave you alone in the pasture, and you have to round her up a few times to send her through ahead of you so you can get the gate shut. She goes along with a lightness you're not accustomed to, putting herself into your hands. When you walk back to the scattered piles of hay, she follows, and for a moment she stands with her head pressed against your arm, eyes drooping shut, just breathing beside you. When you ask her to eat, she eats, her worries seemingly forgotten. She's confident that the predators treading their paths through your shared genetic memory will go hungry tonight.

You run your half-numb fingers through the fair blond hair of her forelock, and step out through the gate, leaving the horses to their hay and walking back over hail-spotted ground toward the house. You're ready now for the woodstove and the warm meal. The morning's snow is gone, along with the sense of displacement it brought. You know where you are.

Today's horse.hack is going to blow your mind. Seriously. This is my best invention ever.

Are you ready? You'd better be ready for this. Maybe sit down. Brace yourself.

I just oversold it, didn't I? You're going to be disappointed. I take back when I said before.

It is awesome though. I would go so far as to say that on a scale of one to eleventy, this invention scores a perfect super-rad.

Okay, here it is. Really. For real.



If your mind isn't blown yet, it's because you don't yet understand the full scope and wonder if this amazing amazingness. Let me explain. This is an IKEA FRAKTA shopping bag. IKEA is of course that well-known wonderland of attractive and affordable Scandanavian furniture and other housewares, that kingdom of fantastically unpronouncable products and delicious, delicious meatballs.

( Learn more about this marvelous, versatile and amazingly amazing hay bag beneath the cut! )

An important part of taking good horse photos involves anticipating where the horse is about to be, instead of trying to get the photo in the exact moment it happens. (This is particularly true of some digital cameras, which may have a perceptible delay between you pushing the shutter button and the camera actually taking the photo.) One of the reasons that experienced horse people make better equine photographers than people who aren't as familiar with horses is because horse people can usually accurately anticipate a horse's behavior. As Pat Parelli would put it, they "know what happens before what happens happens."

( Here, allow me to illustrate with illustrations. )

Just catching up on the latest from my daily art project:


Practicing my comic-y stylings with Misha Collins as Castiel from Supernatural. After taking this picture, I decided I needed to "fine-tune" one little thing, and completely ruined it all. If I learn nothing else from doing this project, I hope to learn to stop overworking everything until it's crap. :D


I found a museum archive of these amazing photos of First Nations people from across North America, and they lend themselves really well to this medium of charcoal on brown paper. I'll probably do a ton more of these, I love how this one came out.


Another charcoal and brown paper piece; this is Rufus Sewell as Tom Builder in the awesome miniseries Pillars of the Earth. I couldn't get the expression right, but I like it anyway. :)

Here's day 2... a study in partial failure. :D I decided to try an experiment with the background on this piece, and it didn't work. It spectacularly didn't work. Unfortunately with colored pencil on this sort of paper, it's about as permanent as ink, so to rectify the problem the piece would pretty much have to be redone. Oh well. I like how the charcoal portion of it came out, anyway. :D I also don't have a scanner at home, so this is a crop from a photograph and the quality therefore sucks. A lot. I'm sorry.

I'm a little in love with the drama of my source material (this was drawn with kind permission from a photo by Cheri Prill) and have been contemplating making this a larger piece in acrylic. Since I haven't done much in the way of painting before, I'll probably save the concept for a little later in the year when I've done more experimenting with acrylics and am comfortable having a go at something as big and grand as I envision this being.

Feh. Anyway, here it is. This horse is a Friesian Sport Horse named Renegade O Mage, and belongs to Mark & Leslie Weiler. I hope to do him more justice in the future. :D

The Horse Boy
(Documentary film, 2009)

There's a bit of magic in that instant when you first put a child onto the back of a good horse. It's a moment when a connection can form, and for many horse people, a memory like that one stands at the beginning of a lifetime relationship with all things equine.

When Rupert Isaacson put his son Rowan on the back of a neighbor's horse, it was just as magical, but something even more remarkable happened. Rowan's tantrum ended. He went quiet. He clung warmly to the horse's back, and then he started talking.

For other kids, that might not be unusual behavior, but Rowan is autistic, and the challenges his parents faced were much different than those that other parents dealt with. Rowan couldn't answer when someone asked his name. He couldn't be potty-trained. His tantrums were heartfelt and prolonged. He didn't socialize with other kids and he rarely spoke. He spent hours obsessively lining up toys end to end.

But something happened when the neighbor's mare, Betsy, came into the picture. On her back, Rowan was different. He was calmer, and he spoke more. He was happy. And for his parents, this was a glimmer of hope where every other form of therapy and medication had failed to make in-roads.

It was the beginning of a journey that would eventually take them to Mongolia, where they would participate in shamanic rituals, ride to waters renowned for their healing powers, and ride north to meet the Reindeer People who make their home near the Russian border. And by the time they returned home, their son was transformed.

I haven't read the book that also tells this story, but a friend who has told me that she was disappointed that the story didn't focus more on the horse's role in the story. This is also true of the documentary, but I don't count it as a failing on Isaacson's part in telling his family's story; on the contrary, this story is essentially about Rowan, and about his parents and how they deal with what their life together is. The horses are an agent of change for Rowan, and though the film carries an undercurrent of gratitude and affection toward its equine participants (particularly Betsy), they are not the focus of the story.

The documentary is wonderfully filmed and deftly edited (the music is particularly fantastic), and though at times it's uncomfortable to watch, it is an unflinchingly real look at how Rowan's autism affects his life. I watched him throw tantrums in which he seems almost terrified by his own helplessness to stop himself, and I watched his parents clean him up after yet another "code brown," and I saw his parents struggle to reconcile their love for this boy with their obvious anguish that he isn't able to really connect with them.

When father Rupert -- after trekking the remote Mongolian steppe with his wife and his autistic child, holding his son's flailing arms as a shaman beats a drum next to the boy's head -- wonders aloud whether he's insane and whether he's really doing this for his child's benefit, I wondered too.

When Rowan's parents marveled at some change in their son that seemed almost mundane to me, I wondered whether they aren't just seeing what they want to see, whether they were trying to justify what they'd put themselves and their child through by seeing progress that wasn't there.

And when Rowan ran off to play a game of chase with the Mongolian guide's son, and chattered like a normal boy, and sat atop a reindeer as if it was the best thing that had ever happened to anyone (which clearly it is, because he was sitting on a freaking reindeer), I did begin to see their point.

This film is a profoundly touching and deeply educational look into autism and the ways in which autistic people can form closer ties to their world. There are interview segments with experts, including Temple Grandin, and throughout the film it's clear that the goal with Rowan is to help him lead a richer life, relate better to his family, and take some of the pressure off of his parents. Similarly, the issue of traditional medicine is treated sensitively and respectfully; the Isaacsons may not both entirely buy into the idea of shamanism, but they're willing to try for their son, and they're full participants in the ceremonies of the many Mongolian shamans who come to help them, even when that means biting their tongues and taking their literal lashes. Ultimately, whether it's the shamanism or the horseback riding or just pushing him outside of his usual comfort zone, the trip does change something in Rowan.

Though the film's conclusion in some ways fails to lead up to the build-up -- particularly true of the segment in which a fairly arduous ride to see the reindeer people mostly culminates in Rowan sitting on a reindeer for a moment like a child in a petting zoo -- the whole of the film is both fascinating and inspiring, and definitely worth watching.

Rowan's parents have since founded The Horse Boy Foundation, an organization uniting autistic and neurotypical children in learning horsemanship. They also help to fund and support other autism programs.

A few weeks back I told you about my newfound ambition to become more well-rounded, and to make myself useful as well as decorative, by learning 101 life skills in 1001 days. The first skill I should've put on the list was "learn to finish writing lists," because it took an unholy long time to do this. In any event, I've finally compiled a list to begin with, and I'm sharing it here in the hopes that you will all peer-pressure me into staying on top of it. It also sounds like I've inspired a few people to take on similar projects of their own (including my roommate, who ever time I mention one of the goals I'm taking on says, "I want to learn that too!"), which is freaking awesome. If you're doing something similar, or even just learning a few new things, I hope you'll comment (or blog about it and then comment to point to your blog, or whatever). I'm really stoked about this project and I've gotten started already, which is why I'm setting the official start date for my project as December 4th, when I actually crossed the first task off my (non-existent) list. That makes my deadline Saturday, August 31, 2013.

As I continue to tackle the list, I'll blog about my exploits and tag them all with 101 skills so you can keep on top of it a little easier, if you're interested.

In any event, here's the actual list. I don't have 101 items on here at the moment, as I'm leaving room for things that just come up later on in the project; I expect to have much more to add as I go along.

Learn to...
1. Make eye splices in yacht rope (to make my own lead ropes)
2. Tie a rope halter
3. Snowshoe
4. Cross-country ski
5. Skijor with my dog
6. Build one basic piece of furniture
7. Build one more complicated piece of furniture
8. Do a balanced trim of my horse's feet
9. Drive a manual transmission
10. Throw pottery
11. Safely handle and shoot both a rifle and a handgun
12. Change a tire
13. Pitch a tent
14. Tie ten different knots that are useful for horsemen
15. Put on snow chains
16. Harvest firewood (from standing tree to stacked and finished wood)
17. Dance (in at least a very basic fashion)
18. Darn socks
19. Sew or create some sort of article of clothing
20. Develop knife skills for cooking
21. Carve wood and/or antler
22. Paint on fabrics
23. Build a campfire in an actual wilderness situation
24. Recognize poisonous and edible plants in my area (learn at least 5 of each)
25. Repair a bike (at least how to patch/replace tires and chains)
26. Learn another sort of knitting stitch and how to use it (learn to make something other than scarves!)
27. Change the oil in my truck
28. Change out the lights in the instrument panel of my truck (they are dying! so sad!)
29. Start a plant from seed
30. Hem clothes, and any other basic sewing that seems handy
31. Help build a house with Habitat for Humanity
32. Crochet
33. Use 5 new kinds of tools
34. Refresher on orienteering, map and compass reading, and figuring out where the #@$! I am when in the wilderness
35. Do three new sorts of crafts of any kind (making candles, Christmas ornaments, stuff with old horseshoes... whatever)
36. Do basic wiring for home repair (wire a new plug to a lamp, wire a lighting fixture into an existing box, etc) and how to safely work with wiring/electronics without electrocuting myself
37. Tread water
38. Change spark plugs
39. Catch, clean, and cook a fish
40. Canoe and/or raft
41. Properly use polo, standing, and other leg wraps for horses, and learn when to use which wrap
42. Do three different kinds of braids for horse manes or tails
43. Carve, burn, sew and otherwise work with leather
44. Fold fitted bedsheets so they're flat (seriously, that takes major skill)
45. Juggle (not necessarily a useful skill, but you never know...)

I'm still taking suggestions on things I should learn, so if you've got a great idea, pipe up! I'd also recommend for those who are doing something similar to look for classes in your local area, and talk to the folks around you to see who's got some skills they could teach you. I've crossed off my first two items, learning to cross-country ski (which was awesome!) and learning to skijor with my dog (well, we've learned, but I'm not a good enough skier to have jored yet), thanks to free workshops from my local nordic ski club, and I've already had offers from coworkers to teach me to snowshoe, operate a chainsaw, and build furniture. Hopefully I'll emerge from all of these projects with all of my limbs intact... I think I'm off to a good start, since I only fell down on my skis like four times. :D

Recently I have been forced to come to a depressing conclusion: my strongest areas as a person are the ones that are the most useless to my survival.

Here's a case in point. Recently I was out to dinner with the girls, and we came upon the subject of a coworker's recent collision with a deer, and I mentioned that he was lucky it wasn't a moose, and then... well, that got me going on the moose thing, you see. I had to tell them about how moose like to get drunk on fermented apples, and how they sometimes get brain parasites that cause them to stagger and run around like crazy until they die (sort of like the moose version of a zombie! But with more sadness). And I didn't even get to the parts about how the Soviet Union tried training them as riding and driving animals, and when that failed, they started in on the idea of dairy moose. Dairy moose.

I am so fun to go to dinner with, you guys. Seriously.

Anyway, while my skills of random ungulate facts are sure to make me the life of any dinner party, I've realized lately that the price to be paid for this cornucopia of amazing and useless facts is that my life is lacking in other areas. Like, say, knowledge that is useful in practical ways. My roommate and I have just moved into a great rental house, and I had to be taught how to build a fire. And I'm not talking how to build a fire in the wilderness using only the lenses of my glasses and a pile of kindling painstaking shaved from the back of a wild marmot. I'm talking about building a fire in a fireplace, with a bunch of kindling and logs already prepared. Oh, and a box of matches. And a lighter. Three lighters.

By not knowing these things, by lacking these essential skills, I'm letting myself down. And worse, I'm letting MacGyver down. MacGyver, who has taught me so much, like how to repair a radiator with an egg and how to escape from East Berlin in a coffin/jet ski!

Actually, now that I think about it, it's entirely possible that my reliance on MacGyver as a role model might be why I don't know how to do anything handy that actually works.

I've been working recently on a new 101 things in 1001 days list, because all of the changes my life has undergone lately have rather invalidated my last one, and as part of that I decided to make a list within a list. One of my 101 goals will be to learn 101 useful things and practical skills in the next 1001 days. I'll be counting both big things and small things, and I'll be making the list up as I go along, but a few of my goals include learning to build some furniture, snowshoe, cross-country ski, train my horse for driving, tie a rope halter, splice yacht rope, correctly trim my horse's feet, drive a manual transmission, use a map and compass, dance, throw pottery, jump start a car, chop firewood, safely handle and shoot a few kinds of guns, change a tire and put on snow chains, camp without being eaten by a bear... or maybe I'll end up learning how to wrestle bears in defense of a chocolate bar. It's hard to say.

As I work my way through the list, I'll be sharing my trials, tribulations and triumphs with you... and hopefully it'll be more of the latter. As you can tell from this list, I've got plenty to learn, and in addition to all the butch and outdoorsy stuff I've listed, I'll also be attempting to master new cooking techniques and recipes, create some new crafts and whatnot, and generally embrace any opportunity that comes up to learn something new. I only have a few requirements: the thing I'm learning has to be something at least moderately useful in my every day life (so I guess I can put off "perfecting impression of moose mating call"), and it has to be relatively cheap and not involve acquiring too much equipment. So while I might, say, be interested in learning to weld, it won't do me a lot of good if I can't afford a bunch of welding equipment to put those skills to use.

So, I'm dying to know, what are the skills you think everyone should learn? What do you wish you'd learned before necessity forced you to sink or swim? What simple things do you feel like everybody else has down pat but you're just mystified? Maybe we can all brush up a bit on our knowledge base, so when the inevitable zombie moose apocalypse arrives, we'll be well-prepared.

Seriously, you learn something new every day. Like, apparently Charles Darwin terraformed a barren volcanic island and turned it into a thriving cloud forest ecosystem, which at least one scientist thinks is promising for the future of terraforming on places like Mars.

John Gribbin thinks that perhaps our origins weren't so different: he theorizes that our universe was created, but by something far more like us than like a god. It's an interesting theory. It's also the kind of article that makes my brain want to explode.

William Gibson writes about, of all things, Google and its impact on our world, and he can pretty much do whatever he wants because he's William Freaking Gibson, but it's actually an interesting article, too.

I just learned about the Ig Nobel Prize, the awards ceremony for which sounds like a hilarious good time for geeks. As a bonus, the article will also tell you about interesting things like the sexual proclivities of fruit bats (er, that might make it nsfw actually) and how to collect samples of whale snot. Just in case you needed to do that.

China has launched a moon mission, while NASA just recently laid off 1200 people, and those layoffs are expected to axe 7000-9000 people just this year. I guess declining empires don't need space programs. This sucks.

The journals of British naval surgeons from the 18th century onward are pretty much totally awesome, and I guess are also helping to advance the study of medicine or whatever. The British National Archives have just completed a major recataloging project that has made these records much easier to comb through. Does it make me a total geek to think that it would've been awesome fun to get to read all of these journals for the purposes of cataloguing? Yes? I'm okay with that.

Climate scientists are going on the offensive against climate change deniers, in response to the new Republican-majority Congress apparently deciding that make-believe about climate change is going to be a priority for the next session. ILU, climate scientists. Fight the good fight.

In other news, Canadian scientists have transformed human skin into blood, apparently ants didn't get the memo about emancipation, there may finally be a way for even me to be good at math, the world's largest rainforest is probably drying out, and you might enjoy this case of evolution via religious selection.