gottawonder

Today I am grateful for:

Beautiful weather.

That I can now focus on JUST helping Roxy's stitches heal, now that we know that the lump was likely an isolated tumor.

It's still hard to feel full relief because there is a part of me that is ready for "the other shoe to drop", but I am trying to just allow myself to feel okay again.

I talked a lot on the phone today.

I talked with my Sister E's husband a long time, since she was busy trying to do some banking. He can be really chatty sometimes. It's funny how most of my adult life I didn't talk to him that much except at our family gatherings, but more and more in the last few years I speak with him on the phone now.

Our family almost has a culture of not speaking that much with the spouses. Not all of the spouses are that interested in talking to family members, and I didn't always feel a connection with them, but I am glad that Sister E's husband and I can talk.

I know that he doesn't really want to move town from their acreage, but I can hear him trying to be positive. They might actually enjoy having less yard work and house maintenance, and with the horse being boarded instead of on their own property, they might even be more free to travel.

I hope there are some silver linings for them.

Then I talked with Trainwreck, and we had the same absolutely baffling conversation about how "she never wanted kids, and everyone should just stop randomly breeding...yadayada"

She was adamant that everyone should just be mandatory sterilized very young, "since it is reversible if you really want kids later". I had to explain to her that it really isn't THAT reversible.

She talked about how she DESPERATELY WANTED her doctor to tie her tubes, though I don't know after which kid, since she had three.

So I said, "well, you DO know there are other things you could have done if you were really THAT motivated to stop having kids, right? I mean, you know about birth control and how babies are made, yes?".

She muttered something about how "it didn't work for me, I lost some pills..mutter mutter" change the subject.

So there you go.

I asked her why this idea has been bothering her so much, because it keeps coming up. Why is she upset that people are having kids? Why is she upset that she had three kids? Why does she think everyone should just stop having them?

She says that kids are just "too hard" and the world is so awful. I said "well, life isn't horrible for everyone, some people have nice lives and can take care of kids, and why not?"

I think she forgets that not everyone is a horrible mess, a terrible parent wrapped up in their own damage, with no money, no hope, etc.

I had to actually say out loud "May I please talk about my dog now?" since she wasn't going to ask how she was doing.

After that, I went to see River.

He did well, but he seems tender on one front foot. Possibly because we are getting soft mud during the day and hard ice again at night, so he might be bruising a bit. I will have to keep a close eye on it.

We practiced our pattern for the upcoming show.

I looked at the results for the last show we entered, the one where I recorded it again with my husband and so on, and we scored really well in it. We were the only ones in that class, so we won by default, but the SCORE was quite good. No comments though, which is puzzling. Usually they give constructive and positive feedback.

I am happy that I worked so hard that day with my husband to submit a better video, because I was not happy with the first one I did with R, and it would have bothered me to win by default but have a poor score.

Two of the ponies at the riding barn were playing like CRAZY out in the pasture as I was leaving, and it was so much fun watching them.

I came home and mostly napped.

I learned that they were able to make concrete on the International Space Station by mixing it in pouches and allowing it to cure in those same pouches.

The findings were that the space concrete was more uniform density that concrete made on Earth, because without gravity the heavier particles do not sink. This makes it maybe stronger.

The space concrete had more air bubbles though, because in space the air does not rise to the top. This makes it weaker, so offsetting the gains from uniform density.

They need to figure out how strong the concrete will be if they want to build structures on other planets or on some place like the moon with very little gravity or atmosphere.

https://astronomy.com/news/2019/09/first-cement-mixed-in-space-paves-the-way-for-otherworldly-buildings