I met several friends at the Core New Art Space for the September Artist Trading Card swap today. The two women who persuaded me to go in May (including the writer of Connections and I met a friend whom I had invited since I thought she would enjoy the experience. She did. After an hour or so of swapping cards, we had lunch at a nearby Mexican restaurant. As we ate, we perused each other’s treasures, from this and past swaps.
Lily
I brought Lily home yesterday. This sounds much easier than it was, considering Lily had never been here before, and had never been turned out with any of the horses here. I had been mulling over how to trade her and Hap, since Hap is capable of a full workload, and Lily is still being rehabilitated from her tendon injury. I would rather have the horse I can ride at my trainer’s where there is an arena.
My trainer came up with the plan. Bring Lily home, and take Rags and Hap to my trainer’s place for a while. This would give Lily a change to get used to the place without having to contend with any horses besides Smoke, who is remarkably passive when it comes to meeting other horses. My trainer volunteered to help me with the move on her day off, which is Wednesday.
The move went surprisingly smoothly. We had to do a little barn rebuilding where some of the barn’s siding had loosened so it was only hanging on a by a few nails. I kept Lily in a stall while she and Smoke became acquainted. We had put Rags and Hap into the round pen in the new field. She snarled a bit to impress Smoke that she was top bitch, and he sighed and agreed. I let her out of the stall and she started checking out the areas where she might find hay. She did a little trotting around to check out the field, but didn’t to anything to worry me that she might reinjure hereself.
Hap and Rags jumped eagerly into the trailer for the trip to my trainer’s place. Rags used to live there before we had facilities here at home, so he is familiar with the place. Hap had only been gone for a week, but the horses in the gelding field still all had to check him out and squeal their greetings. Then Hap went down to see if there was enough water in the stock tank to be worth emptying.
OpenOffice.org Macros
OpenOffice.org comes with a macro language called Open Basic. I went looking for some documentation and found a very good tutorial as well as a list of links to other information at a site provided by Andrew Pitonyak called OpenOffice.org Macro Information.
Evening skies
Estes Park, 1997
Yesterday, I completed a massive filing effort. One bonus was finding this show photo of me riding Hap, taken in Estes Park in 1997.
Vandals
Horses have the same reaction to a clean white T-shirt as a vandal does to a freshly painted wall. This is why I have a lot of T-shirts.
Sunrise
I was out before dawn on an errand earlier this week, and was stopped at the bluffs by a passing train as I returned home. Fortunately, I had my camera.
Bubonicon
My trip to Albuquerque with Jack on the occasion of Bubonicon was marred by a head cold. I felt a suspicious scratchiness in my throat Thursday night, and had full bore symptoms by Friday morning. However, I had a relatively pleasant time despite the cold, though I did run out of steam by late afternoon each day.
The function space in the new hotel seemed to allow for a bigger dealer’s room as well as a larger art show. The con suite was up one level from the other rooms, and due to the way the elevators worked, it was hard to go between the con suite and the other functions. Tables, both for serving and sitting, filled the con suite room, and I found it a little too cramped. However, in total, the hotel was much nicer than the one last year. The air conditioning worked a lot better as well, which is important in New Mexico.
I enjoyed my visits to rubber stamp stores “The China Phoenix” and “The Stamper’s Pad.” However, I ran out of oomph before I got to the fabulous paper store on Nob Hill. I know I am feeling puny when I can’t find the energy to visit a good paper store.
In what has become a tradition of sorts, we listed to an audiobook by Ngaio Marsh on the trip: “Spinsters in Jeopardy.” Marsh has the facility of keeping us listening while simultaneously we critique the various reasons why we don’t think much of her plotting. In this book, there were just too many coincidences: I am willing to suspend disbelief, but not to the extent Marsh required. However, the setting was gorgeous, and there were a lot of comic bits. Most importantly, it lasted all the way to Albuquerque, and most of the way back.
Rio Grande Nature Center
Sunday morning I drove to the Rio Grande Nature Center. Even there, it is hard to forget that you are in the middle of a desert.
While I took this photo, some Canada geese flew in and out making a tremendous racket. Later, I saw a roadrunner. One of the watchers, a birder, lent me her field glasses so I could get a better look. I find them entrancing, probably due to an overexposure of Saturday morning cartoons as a child. Back then, I rooted for the bird, though now I have a sneaking sympathy for poor old Wile E. Coyote.
La Placita
Saturday, Jack and I had lunch at La Placita restaurant in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Have you ever wondered at the odd spelling? Evidently, the “r” which should go after “albu” got lost in the 19th century.