Line-up

On the first weekend in February, Lisa was to have a vaulting competition. It was a bit of a test — exercising inside a gym, on barrels only, not on live horses, and the competition was not registered with AVA nor commented anywhere. This meant that the results would not count in the roster and the teams would only receive verbal assessment from the judges; they could learn from mistakes and how to get better. Our only problem was the time and the location. Lisa was expected at eight o'clock in the morning in Petaluma. The town's not too far away, but you either drive across San Francisco, or circumnavigate the whole San Francisco Bay — both cases represent completely unpredictable traffic situation, and your trip can take anywhere between two and five hours, even on a Saturday early morning.

Free style - Katniss Everdeen.

Thus we had decided to reserve a hotel room in a nearby Novato, and drive out on Friday noon, before mass departure for the weekend. We were shocked to find our trip only take two hours, and finding ourselves in a strange town with nothing to do. We solved the problem by having an icecream, shopping in a bookstore, and eventually having dinner. Our pick — sushi — had, alas, required reservations on Friday evening, and relatively snobby waiter, looking on us down his nose, informed us that the wait for a table without reservations would take about an hour and half. We departed next door to a Thai place, and thereafter to our dubious hotel. We had picked blindly by price, and it was far from ideal.

Compulsories.

Breakfast at the hotel was also poor; cereals and some plastic-wrapped, long shelf-life muffins, but at least I got coffee and milk. No wonder that this way we were among the first at the gymnasium of the local high school. And the most work-intense phase of the race began, namely styling hair of all the girls. Lisa was permitted to let her hair grow long only after she was capable to taking care of it herself, thus I had remained un-trained in creating sophisticated hairdos. Thus I was bound to get schooled by Ashley, the coach, and still I left the last stage in making a bun to her.

Having endured Lisa's compulsory, Tom and Sid showed tendencies to scramble up the walls, or rather go hide in the car again, and thus we chose to use the break before Lisa's free style and go and have a real breakfast. We found a small coffee shop with beautiful watercolor paintings of cows and goats — and with real live goats, who had stood models for the paintings, on a pasture across the street, which cheered us up a lot. This was a place where civilization was just a veneer carried here over from Silicon Valley, but only a few miles north of San Francisco, goats were grazing in front of a coffee shop...

Alice in Wonderland.

We brought Lisa cocoa from the shop, and tried to talk her to eat something, or at least get dressed, for she flew up and down the unheated gym (there was frost in the morning) dressed only in her gym outfit. Lisa was obviously operating on self-administered drug overdose (adrenalin) and was in high spirits, but her hands were warm (mine were freezing in three layers of clothing).
We stayed for Lisa's free style performance, which she had shrouded in mystery at home, claiming surprise. It was. Lisa chose a Katniss theme from Hunger Games, and her free style show was a real short ballet with a plot and meaning, not just a gymnastic sequence on a metal "horse". It seems that girls participate strongly in choreography, which then reflects their personality and strengths.

There was another two-hour pause before Lisa's team was to perform, and so we set out — for a change — to get a lunch. Lisa could not come along; her coach did not want to let the girls scatter, but we promised to bring her back salmon rolls. Alas, a sushi place next to the morning's coffee shop, one we had spotted before, would never open (despite their posted hours), and we were bound to look for something else in Petaluma. Hooray for the age of smart phones. Our order had to be complicated, for the server mixed it up — but it was just as well, for besides rolls with salmon we brought back unagi (smoked eel). Perhaps Lisa ran out of her adrenalin stores, for she grabbed both boxes and proceeded to inhale their contents in the course of mere minutes.

Alice in Wonderland.

Ashley had to leave the girls in the afternoon, for she had to catch a funeral, yet she deputized Lisa to oversee the team. Lisa is the oldest and tallest and may be the most consistent and responsible, hence she herded them incessantly, making them practice their set again and again. I had to say that when I saw them practicing, I found it pretty hopeless. Girls had problems mounting the horse, kept variously falling off, forgetting their moves and so on. When they found themselves on the spot and judged, they mounted without hesitation and practically flawlessly (at least for my laywoman's eye), and they deserved their second place in teams.

In the meantime I worked on drying off Twilight. According to advice from experienced goat owners, I had switched my goaties to a diet, only grass hay with minimum granules or grain, and kept extending breaks between milking from twenty-four to thirty-six, forty-eight to seventy two hours. I also started looking for someone who would professionally trim their hooves short again. Goats grow their "nails" constantly and when they don't manage to grind them off, they start twisting around their fingers or extend too much forward, so the goat pushes a kind of "ski" in front of her. In both cases it accumulates dirt and manure and may cause inflammation; if the nail is too overgrown, it may deform whole leg posture. I keep trimming my goats hooves periodically, but I can't help being too careful, and afraid to cut it too close. Of the other goats in the stable, I dare only to deal with Brownie, but not the Saanen goat Sheila, and horned (and thus armed) Hazel, who is a general menace. A farrier promised to provide goat pedicure for twenty dollars apiece, did not flinch at my description of Hazel, and so I arranged with Toni (the stable owner) that he would trim her goats as well.

Tom & Twilight.

Michael the farrier then told me that he would send his apprentice, Jared, which made me worry. Jared is a tall youngster full of smiles, and I was afraid that the goats could overwhelm him. Yet after he came he looked like no problem, and I let him do his job. My goats and actually Brownie, too, are all taught to stand on the milking stand, for a bribe in the form of food. Jared got going, praising my goats (even Twilight) how well behaved and nice they were — and when they began losing patience with the procedure, Jared started singing. Imagine the scene, springtime day, green grass all around, and a farrier singing to the goats.
I don't know if he was being intuitive or intentional — I sing to my horse Ned in the woods for several reasons. One: Ned can hear me (horses don't see much of their back), second: I hope it would disturb and chase away mountain lions, and third — when you sing, you must breathe regularly and it calms you down, which calms down your horse. It never occurred to me to sing to my goaties, but it worked on them. Even later, on Sheila and Hazel. Now all the goats have nice pedicure, they walk more comfortably, and I have gained an experience.

Wild animals keep roaming around the stables.

Ned and I had attended a dressage lesson. Ned is used from his mountains to walk forward, in a straight line, often many hours in one stretch. In my context, I get in the saddle for about twenty or forty minutes a day, while I would need to keep my horse in good condition. Some exercises from dressage are suitable for just that — side-steps and backing-up, which forces the horse to keep better balance and enforce belly muscles. Furthermore, I teach Ned to distinguish commands for front body and back body — it's a difference when a horse rotates around hind legs, or around front ones; whether he's turning with his whole body, or walks diagonally. And mostly — both Ned and I, practice fine control. It comes handy for common activities like opening the pen gate from the saddle — Ned has to stop so that I can reach the latch, followed by a few steps sideways so that I can move the gate open, then back-up and enter — and then close the gate behind us. Fine control is useful in the woods when I, with my spatial vision, can better assess a sliding slope, depth of a puddle or mud-spot, and need to maneuver my horse into a narrow passage between a bottomless mud-pit and a fallen tree.

Besides the ability and willingness to be finely manipulated, trust is also required. Neddie has entrusted his life into my hands even the other day, whilst crazy sounds were penetrating the woods. Every few steps he kept making sure that I really meant to continue towards the clearing where screams were being heard, but he walked. A bogeyman was horribly rattling in a bush, and eventually about thirty wild turkeys marched out in front of us. They are large and heavy birds, and I don't know if that day was the mating festival, or they were fighting, but they had been truly noisy. Once Ned discovered that it was only some birds, he started to graze. I don't know if he eats when stressed, or whether he felt the need to show off and prove he was not really afraid, but I started using grazing as a stress relief. It helped in the case of forest workers clearing thick bushes in the slope over our trail. And then there's singing. Now I start to suspect that Ned expect me to start singing to get more relaxed and set out into the woods. Or he needs to be sure that my squeals would discourage all cougars in the vicinity and we would find open roads.