Life – Page 31 – Five Acres with a View

Hap goes home

From what I imagine is Hap’s point of view, I took him home to my trainer’s barn yesterday, after he spent five months with Rags and Smoke. The young woman who had a half lease on him last fall is leasing him again for the summer. In the ten years that I’ve owned him, he has spent less than a year at our place.

After we allowed him to work off some energy in the arena, we turned him out with his buddies in the gelding field. I’ve seen some horses quail under the curious attentions of a herd, but Hap seemed to enjoy the horses pressing up around him. There was remarkably little squealing and striking. It probably helped that Hap was the second most dominant horse when he left, and good friends with the dominant gelding, Havoc.

I always flinch a little when I turn a horse out with others for the first time after a break. I keep telling myself that it is good for their little psyches, but the rough and tumble can be very hard on their bodies.

Madeline

Madeline recognised me instantly from past visits: “She who takes small Australian Shepherds for walks.”

Chicken coop

I am writing this from a converted chicken coop near beautiful downtown Encino. I am briefly in Southern California to help with my mother’s move to Colorado Springs. Yesterday, my sister, her son and daughter, and I packed the items that will be moving. Today I will run some errands, and tomorrow we will do some last minute packing before the movers come on Wednesday.

My sister has converted an old chicken coop behind her house to an office which is where I am sleeping. She graciously granted me the password to her computer and I promised not to change anything on it. She says that techies always want to change her computer. I only have to suppress the urge to download and install Mozilla about once every two or three minutes. I find Internet Explorer so limited. I did find some problems with my weblog design under IE, but will wait until I get back home to try and address them.

Eye of the Galaxy

I’ve been cleaning house, doing a complete install of Fedora Core 2, Release 3, and playing with “gnofract4d.”:http://gnofract4d.sourceforge.net/ Of the three, playing with gnofrract4d, which produced this graphic, was the most fun, though installing Fedora wasn’t too bad either.

Dungeons and Dragons

BBC asks Whatever happened to Dungeons and Dragons? Jack and I started playing together not long after we started dating. July 4th, 1976, we spent the day with friends playing in Jack’s parents’ family room. During our brief fling with the phenomenon, a Washtington Post reporter wrote up a game for which Jack was gamesmaster. Somewhere in the files is the dungeon that I developed. I also found setting up the scenarios to be more fun than playing them. We started losing interest, since it took so much time, about the time high school kids started discovering it.

Chicken Vindaloo and Settlers

Yesterday, we had family over to eat “chicken vindaloo”:http://www.stardel.com/cao/archives/recipe_chicken_vindaloo.htm and play “Settlers of Catan.”:http://www.universityofcatan.com/soc-games/ckofce.html I was dubious when Jack volunteered me to make Chicken Vindaloo. One, it is a lot of work. Two, I wasn’t sure people would like it, since it is highly seasoned. After a little discussion, Jack volunteered to make the paste, which is most of the work. After making it Friday night, he mentioned that the recipe should add two hours to the preparation time of 20 minutes. As a nice bonus, I woke up to a clean kitchen. Generally, when Jack cooks, it looks as though he managed to find and use every pot and pan we possess. (I just recently learned the difference between pans and pots. Pans have one handle. Pots have two.)
Continue reading Chicken Vindaloo and Settlers

Gardening

My farrier was here to trim the horses, and after I paid her, we stopped and checked my garden beds as I walked out with her. I hadn’t looked at them recently, because March is really too soon to expect much at 7200 feet in Colorado. I had wondered if I should start watering though.

We found lots of signs of life: the rose bushes look like they are alive, the columbines have little crowns growing through the earth and look quite healthy, and most of the herbs are starting to grow. I was most surprised to see that the dianthus (pinks) seem to be coming back. I bought them as annuals, and although some of my friends say their dianthus reappears, I had low expectations since our conditions are so harsh here. Of course, it was a mild winter. I am most excited about the columbines: they are the Colorado state flower, and gorgeous in their own right.

Right now, I am watering the beds, and day-dreaming about annuals. The salvia I planted last year did poorly, but the petunias did quite well. I am not too proud to plant petunias again. I could put them in front of the rose bed, and plant something else where I planted the petunias last year. Updated 2003-03-28 Changed peonies to petunias. What was I thinking?

Radioactive Boy Scout

At first, I thought The Radioactive Boy Scout sounded like satire when I heard a discussion on NPR this morning. However, evidently a boy scout set out to build a homemade nuclear reactor in a backyard shed.

Goodbye Encyclopedia

In J-Walk Blog: Goodbye Encyclopedias, John Walkenbach posts about reading the encyclopedia for fun when he was a child. Hey, I though I was the only one who had done that. I won’t swear I read every article in our edition of Compton’s, but I read a high percentage of them.

Full Moons

I’ve always liked the long descriptive names for full moons, such as Hunter’s Moon or Harvest Moon. There are a lot of varying lists on the WWW. The Farmers Almanac – Dates and Times of Full Moons webpage gives one, along with some associated historical information. In a few days, we will have the Worm Moon.