Wednesday, September 18

[gottawonder]

Today I am grateful for:

Sunshine.

I woke up to hearing the one guy's dog barking outside, got up to see if it was loose in the yard, and was pleasantly surprised to see her on a leash. Maybe my friendly talk about fearing for my goats found some resonance with him.

A decent riding lesson on River. He is trying well, but his fitness level is really low right now. I have to ride more, so we can progress. He can't do more difficult work if he isn't fit.

Really nice to chat with another person at the barn today. I was actually able to work with a conversation that went in an unexpected direction (basically the other person went down the path of saying that First Nations people were a bunch of addict loser pansies who should suck it up and fly straight, and get jobs and stop taking handouts and the colonization of Canada just saved them from being savages who killed each other. I'm not kidding, this is what she said almost word for word), and take it to a better direction (we got to a point where she felt that what she REALLY meant is that she is just tired of PC culture, and she views all people to be valued, she's just tired of special interest groups being treated differently). I don't know if she's really that racist, but at least it didn't turn into a horrible fight. I restrained myself from just blasting her, and tried to see if we could mellow that privilege a bit.

Coming home to see good progress on the basement. The styrofoam forms are almost finished, the window spaces are in place, and the sealing membrane is on part of the outside of the forms. It's really shaping up.

Finding some backbone. Today when I was riding River in the lesson, the owner of the barn (we'll call her B) was kind of exasperated at his lack of fitness. She knows what's going on my life, and she understands that I'm lucky to still be riding twice a week, but she also started getting pushy with me. She more or less pushes me into asking one of the younger girls to ride River for me, for free. This felt wrong to me, partly because I felt like there's something else going on here. Like B was going to get this girl to start pushing River harder than I do, to sort of show me how it's done. The other possibility is this is to "groom" me towards letting B use River as a lesson horse because she has this arrangement with some boarders where B uses their horse in lessons for a pittance. It saves B from actually having to own a lot of horses for lessons. Right now, B has one lesson horse out of commission, and a boarder's horse who is also a lesson horse is having on and off soundness issues. Anyhow, I felt bullied into agreeing to let this girl ride him, and I didn't like how B was "fed up" at River not being fit, like I was wasting her time. After I had a few hours to think about how I was being treated, I texted B and told her that I could ride my own horse, that I should be able to ride more again soon, and if our lessons were less than stellar for a while I can accept that. B was actually kind of pissy in her reply text, along the lines of "well FINE then, be that way!". You know, all mature-like. The whole thing was just more pushing my boundaries, made me feel like I was viewed as incompetant and could be manipulated into doing what B wanted. I'm glad I spoke up and said that I changed my mind. The whole thing would have felt different if B were being open and honest about her intentions, but I kept having this gut feeling that there was a bunch of other stuff going on, and that I was being manipulated, and I have to start trusting that gut feeling.

For having a nice evening with my sweetie. We watched John Wick 3, which was cool enough, but starting to reach a certain level of mythical ridiculousness.

For my sweet animals, who are so honest and open.