Friday, July 26
Jul. 27th, 2024 01:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gottawonderToday I am grateful for:
Continued fretful overcast sky with cooler temperatures and no rain.
Lovely for sleeping, this cooler weather.
So many kitty snuggles.
I decided to call Sister S, since I haven't talked to her in ages, though she doesn't call me pretty much ever, and often she seems...not happy to hear from me? Something like that, often she just treats me like I don't understand "real life" or thinks that I "have it easy". Well, what's wrong with "having it easy", if one can get it?
We talked about her adult son and family moving to a town about an hour from where she lives, which is far enough away to make visiting inconvenient and ruling out spontaneous drop ins. Yet, her son's job evaporated, and a good one opened up in this other town.
She is also now retired, and is focusing on house things that have long been ignored. Changes she wanted to make, repairs, simplifications in the yard to make it easier to maintain, selling stuff they don't use.
So it sounds like she's got things to do.
I went to see River, and didn't work on trailer loading because the truck wasn't hooked up to the trailer. We did work on the ground halt on the little bridge in the yard, as that is sort of a similar exercise.
I worked with him on backing onto a platform, I'm not sure yet what the application is, it's not an assignment or for a pattern, but when I was talking to R about "do people ever back horses into trailers" (heck no), I wondered if anyone ever backed horses onto obstacles. It would seem to me like something that one day you might need them to be able to do, is back up onto something where they have to lift up their hind feet and think about lifting them and backing up.
He seemed okay to back up over some big logs (they likely do that out in their pasture sometimes), but didn't want to step back onto a low wooden platform. He's fine with walking on it, stepping part way off going forward, and backing up again, so how is that different? After quite a lot of coaxing, he did back up and stand with his hind feet on the platform, so that was good.
Then it was time to work with Quidley-now_Maverick and the young woman with health challenges. She had her face painted at some event today, and it looked cool.
Like I said before, the work I'm doing with Maverick now is kind of superfluous, and kind of just to keep R and this girl company in what can be kind of a tiresome lesson. I think this person, H, likes that I am there as her friend.
My Sweetie showed up on his way home from work as we were finishing up, and we chatted more with R, and I looked at some things another person at the barn was selling, and there are some buckets we could use.
We watched an episode of "Justified", and mostly you just keep questioning Raylon's personal life decisions.
Over 70% of the land of Botswana is made up of the Kalahari Desert, and most of it's roughly 2.4 million people are of Tswana descent.
"The Tswana ethnic group were descended mainly from Bantu-speaking tribes who migrated southward of Africa to modern Botswana around AD 600. In 1885, the British colonised the area and declared a protectorate named Bechuanaland. As decolonisation occurred, Bechuanaland became an independent Commonwealth republic under its current name on 30 September 1966. Since then, it has been a parliamentary republic with a consistent record of uninterrupted democratic elections, though as of 2024 the Botswana Democratic Party has been the ruling party since independence. As of 2024, Botswana is the third least corrupt country in Africa, according to the Corruption Perceptions Index published by Transparency International."
The economy is made up mostly of mining (one of the larges producers of diamonds) and tourism, the general standard of living for the average person is good, there is a good human development index (things like schools, libraries, infrastructure), though somehow poverty is also an issue for many.
Since there are no Tsetse flies in Botswana, cattle can be raised here and were important traditionally as well as today.
This is the home of the "bushmen" (San and Khoi people) who communicate in clicks. Many of these people were relocated onto reservations "Many of the indigenous San people have been forcibly relocated from their land to reservations. To make them relocate, they were denied access to water on their land and faced arrest if they hunted, which was their primary source of food.[107] Their lands lie in the middle of the world's richest diamond field. Officially, the government denies that there is any link to mining and claims the relocation is to preserve the wildlife and ecosystem, even though the San people have lived sustainably on the land for millennia.[107] On the reservations, they struggle to find employment, and alcoholism is rampant.[107]"
It is also the home of the "Limpopo" river (there was a song about it?). https://youtu.be/KbLCo3o6Ym8?si=nVqrDvUBm4N_zRG7
Aside from the desert, there are areas of deltas and grasslands that support great numbers of animals.
Homosexual acts were decriminalized in 2019, and Botswana still has the death penalty for some crimes.
AIDS/HIV is still very much an issue here, and the government is trying to cope by making antiviral drugs available at low or no cost, as well implementing education programs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botswana
https://youtu.be/RJkIdd5D8HA?si=dxttWHuOA0UEjKwF
Continued fretful overcast sky with cooler temperatures and no rain.
Lovely for sleeping, this cooler weather.
So many kitty snuggles.
I decided to call Sister S, since I haven't talked to her in ages, though she doesn't call me pretty much ever, and often she seems...not happy to hear from me? Something like that, often she just treats me like I don't understand "real life" or thinks that I "have it easy". Well, what's wrong with "having it easy", if one can get it?
We talked about her adult son and family moving to a town about an hour from where she lives, which is far enough away to make visiting inconvenient and ruling out spontaneous drop ins. Yet, her son's job evaporated, and a good one opened up in this other town.
She is also now retired, and is focusing on house things that have long been ignored. Changes she wanted to make, repairs, simplifications in the yard to make it easier to maintain, selling stuff they don't use.
So it sounds like she's got things to do.
I went to see River, and didn't work on trailer loading because the truck wasn't hooked up to the trailer. We did work on the ground halt on the little bridge in the yard, as that is sort of a similar exercise.
I worked with him on backing onto a platform, I'm not sure yet what the application is, it's not an assignment or for a pattern, but when I was talking to R about "do people ever back horses into trailers" (heck no), I wondered if anyone ever backed horses onto obstacles. It would seem to me like something that one day you might need them to be able to do, is back up onto something where they have to lift up their hind feet and think about lifting them and backing up.
He seemed okay to back up over some big logs (they likely do that out in their pasture sometimes), but didn't want to step back onto a low wooden platform. He's fine with walking on it, stepping part way off going forward, and backing up again, so how is that different? After quite a lot of coaxing, he did back up and stand with his hind feet on the platform, so that was good.
Then it was time to work with Quidley-now_Maverick and the young woman with health challenges. She had her face painted at some event today, and it looked cool.
Like I said before, the work I'm doing with Maverick now is kind of superfluous, and kind of just to keep R and this girl company in what can be kind of a tiresome lesson. I think this person, H, likes that I am there as her friend.
My Sweetie showed up on his way home from work as we were finishing up, and we chatted more with R, and I looked at some things another person at the barn was selling, and there are some buckets we could use.
We watched an episode of "Justified", and mostly you just keep questioning Raylon's personal life decisions.
Over 70% of the land of Botswana is made up of the Kalahari Desert, and most of it's roughly 2.4 million people are of Tswana descent.
"The Tswana ethnic group were descended mainly from Bantu-speaking tribes who migrated southward of Africa to modern Botswana around AD 600. In 1885, the British colonised the area and declared a protectorate named Bechuanaland. As decolonisation occurred, Bechuanaland became an independent Commonwealth republic under its current name on 30 September 1966. Since then, it has been a parliamentary republic with a consistent record of uninterrupted democratic elections, though as of 2024 the Botswana Democratic Party has been the ruling party since independence. As of 2024, Botswana is the third least corrupt country in Africa, according to the Corruption Perceptions Index published by Transparency International."
The economy is made up mostly of mining (one of the larges producers of diamonds) and tourism, the general standard of living for the average person is good, there is a good human development index (things like schools, libraries, infrastructure), though somehow poverty is also an issue for many.
Since there are no Tsetse flies in Botswana, cattle can be raised here and were important traditionally as well as today.
This is the home of the "bushmen" (San and Khoi people) who communicate in clicks. Many of these people were relocated onto reservations "Many of the indigenous San people have been forcibly relocated from their land to reservations. To make them relocate, they were denied access to water on their land and faced arrest if they hunted, which was their primary source of food.[107] Their lands lie in the middle of the world's richest diamond field. Officially, the government denies that there is any link to mining and claims the relocation is to preserve the wildlife and ecosystem, even though the San people have lived sustainably on the land for millennia.[107] On the reservations, they struggle to find employment, and alcoholism is rampant.[107]"
It is also the home of the "Limpopo" river (there was a song about it?). https://youtu.be/KbLCo3o6Ym8?si=nVqrDvUBm4N_zRG7
Aside from the desert, there are areas of deltas and grasslands that support great numbers of animals.
Homosexual acts were decriminalized in 2019, and Botswana still has the death penalty for some crimes.
AIDS/HIV is still very much an issue here, and the government is trying to cope by making antiviral drugs available at low or no cost, as well implementing education programs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botswana
https://youtu.be/RJkIdd5D8HA?si=dxttWHuOA0UEjKwF
