Week in review

I take the week off over the 3 day weekends during the summer. Usually I have stellar vacations.

It was off to a promising start!

Ride now?
The weekend was very nice and I caught a couple of lazy rides. A little too lazy. So on Monday we stepped it up.

I like to go English when it's hot out. I don't know that it makes much difference really but I feel better about the lighter load. My stock saddle weighs a ton!

Sweat!
We really did some serious work. We do that every once in a long while.

Tuesday it rained so I went off on a Big Mac Road Trip.

I *love* Big Macs!
And then...it rained. And rained. And rained. Freezing cold too. Did I mention the rain? It poured buckets! Well at least I had electricity.

Look at the pollen! In September?!
I've never seen pollen in the river this time of year. This is a common sight in May but not in September.

---

Seasonal Ingredients

The Farmer's Market is *the* place for seasonal ingredients and of course I love seasonal ingredients.

Franklin MA, 9 September 2011
I think ratatouille is to Summer what beef stew is to Winter. And this is my favorite ratatouille recipe!

Ratatouille on the stove
Made with field fresh produce this is just Summer on a plate. No that's not summer squash. It's one of those golden zucchinis. I like ratatouille as a main dish with some chianti or better yet, anything at all from the Languedoc region. I had this a few weeks ago with a Minervois and it was sensational.

And I made a discovery!

SoCo Creamery vanilla
These people here at SoCo Creamery make the most awesome ice cream I swear.

Oh ya

I know they have them for every holiday now.

But I'm awfully fond the original.

The best of 2010

It's along about this time of year I go through last year's pictures looking for what I think is the best. I can take 10k pictures in a year. Digital cameras have made it so easy! Just go ahead and click away it's not like you're spending anything on film.

It's a minor obsession and people are now so accustomed to me taking pictures of everything they don't even notice anymore.

My favorite picture from 2010 is:

Summer Table
For technical merit I love the light. I shot 6 frames of this table setting at different exposures and angles and I used a flash for a couple of frames. In fact here's the same picture in this post with a different crop and a flash filling in the shadows. I think the natural light however makes it feel more like summer and I like the long shadows. That was in August and I think it looks like it.

I like the composition. The salami platter leads your eye into the frame from the lower left corner where it then wants to run the length of the basket, curl around the caprese salad and run up along the bottle where it then exits the frame from the top right. I think it flows in a pleasant way.

And the subject of course is a favorite thing, at a favorite time of the year.

It's very hard to pick a single favorite from a year. I have a lot to choose from! But as I went back and forth I just kept coming back to that picture. The year had many highlights and lowlights and that picture makes me feel good.

I've talked about seasonal favorites here and here. One goes through dry spells now and then so sometimes I just don't have a seasonal favorite.

Oh and this, by the way, is my Spring 2010 favorite! But that's just me.

Spring 2010
You see, I remember that day like it was yesterday. You know that very first day in the Spring when it looks like Spring, it feels like Spring, and it smells like Spring? Where *everything* just says "Spring"? This was that day last year. L and I had the most enjoyable ride. I can't think of a better way to welcome the Spring and with the way I hate Winter that's a huge thing for me. I can get almost manic when I feel the Spring coming.

I find maybe 1k of those 10k pictures are worth keeping and some of those I think are quite good.

Some several lifetimes ago I made my living as a photographer. So let me share 3 secrets to taking good pictures:

• Learn some technique. You need to know how your camera works. Experiment and learn how the settings impact the image. And you don't need all kinds of equipment. I have a "nice" camera and I take *tons* of pictures with a little compact pocket camera. And you know what? I've taken the same pictures with the "nice" camera and the pocket camera and compared them and find the images generally compare favorably.
  
• Learn composition. There are some hard and fast rules but the one of the best ways to learn about composition is to study things you like. When you see a picture you like in a magazine stop and look at it. Study it. Try to figure out what it is you like about it. Do the same thing when you watch TV. Or see a movie.
  And, as part of learning composition, be mindful of backgrounds! The single biggest mistake most people make is looking at what they're taking a picture of. Rather than looking at the whole picture.
  
• Take lots of pictures! Odds are when you take a lot of pictures some of them are bound to be pretty good.
  

I...am an Artiste!

I love this picture:

It speaks volumes to me. On the one hand it is truly mundane. I was just walking by this house one afternoon. But it's bold. I think it's inviting and stark at the same time. I think it has some shape and interest. I think one can plainly see it's a well kept little house and it engages the mind a little.

Walking L is one of my most favorite things in all the world. And ...oh, I think it was last May sometime I got to thinking gee, I can walk without a horse. Funny how that thought just never occurred to me before! So one day, after work, I went home and took a walk. I've lived here for over 20 years and I never walked further than the mailbox!

I live in a village. No really, it's a village. The building I live in is in the National Register and anchors an Historic District on a designated Scenic Road. What I mean here is I live in a charming little neighborhood.

Something I noticed that I enjoyed during my walk - it was late Spring and as I walked I noticed things I just hadn't paid much attention to before. Oh it looked like Spring but more than that, it "felt" like Spring. In every way. It sounded like Spring and it smelled like Spring.

Sometime later as the 4th of July approached I walk by this house here:

Like I said, charming little neighborhood. Of course I'd noticed this house before, but walking by I was really struck by the way it spoke. I think it has Americana written all over it.

There are all kinds of cute little well kept houses around here.

And I can almost hear the crickets in the grass looking at this picture:


I think between digital imagery and the internets and things like blogs this has to be one of the most well documented periods in the history of humankind. For all I know my silly pictures of daily life will be my sole legacy and most significant achievement in the grander scheme.

Walkies

This is simply one of my most favorite things in the whole world:

L came home halter broke and that's it. How long do you think it took us to reliably just have a pleasant walk together?

Oh, she'd lead just fine and she could be handled safely in a day or two. Of course we did showmanship early on and typically after our ground work we'd go out and hand graze. No, her manners on our way out to hand graze weren't always perfect. Sometimes they were pretty awful. So I decided when we'd hand graze we'd quietly and pleasantly walk a quarter mile or so to just work on her manners. L is a most dominant animal. Well. I had no idea. No clue at all. A quarter mile walk with L was like going a round with a prize fighter. She'd fight with me every step of the way and fighting with L is not fun. She's bigger than I am, she's stronger than I am, and she can last longer than I can. And frankly, sometimes I think she likes it. Fighting. Walking with L was awful. It was exhausting.

I was determined to fix it.

She'd crowd me and I'd push her off. She'd try to get out in front of me and I'd snap her lead. She'd lean and pull and I'd have us halt. She'd crowd me and lean and pull and get out in front of me and I'd halt her and back her up. That would really piss her off. And she'd shake her head and stomp her feet. It's actually very funny and persists to this day - when there's an issue she acts like you're the one that doesn't get it. She'll spin and rear and stomp her feet (when she stomps both feet at the same time she's really pitching a fit) and she looks at you like she's thinking "*what* is your problem?!" and it's hard not to laugh out loud. You can't do that of course. Horses know laughter is a good thing. But this was every 2 or 3 strides for a quarter mile and it was tiresome.

This went on a couple of days a week for 2 or 3 months and we got *nowhere*. It was very frustrating. I used a flat halter. I used a chain. I used a rope halter. I used a dressage whip. I used a crop. I used a lunge line. She's a tough nut to crack. She really is.

Obviously I had to do something different. So. Contrary to my trainer's advice (*you* choose the speed, *always*), I decided I'd go ahead and move at her pace. I like my horse's ear right around my shoulder with their nostril just behind my wrist on a loose lead. L has a very forward attitude and for years her stride was best described as "stomp stomp stomp..." and it was hard to keep up with her. But I did that for a few weeks. I was hoping she'd get the message "this is where you're supposed to be all the time. At the end of 3 weeks or so I started to change the pace a little, just a few strides here and there. And I'd bark at her and give her lead a little snap when she didn't notice I'd changed the pace. If I could just get 2 strides from her at my pace without a fight I'd pat her and make happy voices and then we'd move on.

Slowly over time I'd change the pace for longer and longer stretches. Three strides. Four strides. I'd make her pay attention every step and when she got it without a fight I'd pat her and do happy voice. After a couple of months we started walking a half mile on our way out to graze and all together after 5 months or so we could go out and reliably have a perfectly pleasant walk together. L would maintain her perfect manners for whatever distance I chose for us.

I'm not a professional horse trainer. Hell I'm not an amateur horse trainer either. I'm just a guy with a nice horse. We trained really hard, 2 or 3 days a week, for 5 months, to just go out and take a nice walk. We got to know each other much better and of course that made a big impact on our training moving forward. It's all training really.

I further refined this as our "comfort zone". It's great exercise for me and "takin' a walk" is our quiet place. When things look like they might get out of hand we can (almost..) always "assume the position" and walk. She knows *exactly* what I expect and it's *not* too much to ask for.

It's become one of my most favorite things and I try to walk with L for at least a mile, sometimes 2 or 3, a couple of days a week. I still change up the pace just to keep her on her toes and if she doesn't notice? An exaggerated little gasp will get her attention. If she really isn't paying any attention at all I'll abruptly change direction, about face, and she'll come right around without taking up any slack in the lead. That's nice. We can go right down to a crawl without any drama but we can't really do a slow motion walk together. Smart as she is she doesn't quite get the "move feet slowly" part of a slow mo walk.

I miss our walking something awful in the wintertime and there are a couple of weeks during the summer when the bugs are *so* bad it just isn't pleasant for either of us.

Here, I'll want to remember this the middle of next winter. This was around 7:00 am today. Looks like it will be a real nice day.