I'm Visiting the Candy Cave, Be Back Soon
Posted by Jen - 13/06/08 at 11:06:33 pmIf you got the reference from the title, you might be as big of a dork as I am. If not, time to get a little Charlie in your life; I think we can all relate to his attitude sometimes.
Anyway, I hear that you’re supposed to apologize when you don’t blog for awhile. Then I guess I apologize for not apologizing, because I don’t feel that bad about it. Is that wrong? I guess I just figure that I’ll be back next week with a vengeance, so…
In brief, here are some of the things I’ve been doing this week instead of blogging:
- Reading The St. Martin’s Background Readings in Teaching Developmental Writing”, which I’m sure most people would find supremely boring but I found very exciting and affirming
- Buying $60 worth of stuff at Walgreens for $15 Thank you, Grocery Game
- Visiting my mom and dad for King Kamehameha Day last weekend (more on this later)
- Experiencing sticker shock over my new saddle (let’s just say that I need to sell my Black Country Quantum pronto so that I can stop freaking about the price of the new one). I once told my mother that if I was going to spend $2500+ on a saddle, it needed to make my riding into a transcendental experience. This saddle does.
- Helping out my editorial clients since I’m about to become more unavailable to them when I resume teaching
- Going to a CSP meeting at which the administrators were apparently panicking about the size of the CSP Summer Bridge class (something like 220 students). As I see it, the more the merrier. It’s amazing how you start to see class size differently once you’re a teacher–my number one wish for next week is to end up with a class size that’s evenly divisible by the numbers 3 or 4. Preferably 4.
- Apparently I may be driving to Chicago tomorrow to help a friend pick up her new hauling truck.
- The Most Famous Feet in Derby History, April 2008
- Big Brown’s Big Switch: New Shoes, New Heels for Tomorrow’s Preakness
- Big Brown Arrives at Belmont with “Run Down” Problems from the Preakness
- May 25, Big Brown Really Does Have a Quarter Crack This Time
- May 26, Triple Crown “Crack” Down: Update from Ian McKinlay About Big Brown’s Latest Hoof Malady
Reduce the Size of Your Rack
Posted by Jen - 06/06/08 at 09:06:30 pmEarlier this week, I finally managed to get off my kiester and spend two minutes removing the cross-bars from my Subaru’s roof rack. I never actually use my Subaru’s roof rack, and therefore I almost never look at it, so the thought that I even had cross-bars to remove at all didn’t occur to me until I was listening to an NPR story a few weeks ago about improving gas mileage (I think it’s this story from NPR’s Talk of the Nation, but I’m honestly not sure).
It was embarrassingly easy to remove the cross-bars; all I needed was a single star-shaped screwdriver bit–sorry, I’m not a tool gal, but the tip looked like a star and was waiting patiently for me in my toolbox’s caddy of interchangeable screwdriver heads, where clearly it has sat for many years unused. The cross-bars were off with just four screws undone. This was reassuring for me as it means that they’ll easily slide back into place if I ever have occasion to use them.
It’s only been a week since the operation, but if my gas gauge is telling the truth, I sucked out an extra 1.0-1.5 mpg just by removing the cross-bars on the roof rack. Which, in turn, has made me start looking at other people’s roof racks–on parked cars, on cars in traffic, et cetera. And I’m surprised to say that even in eco-friendly Ann Arbor, a shocking number of mini-vans, crossovers, and SUV’s are driving around with roof racks that have clearly never been used. I’d say better than half of the cars I’ve seen with roof racks still have their cross-bars on.
Total number of roof racks seen with an actual item on them? Two: one with a very large kayak on it, and the other with a bike rack on it. Thus there must be thousands upon thousands of cars on the road around this country with cross-bars slicing the air meaninglessly, pointlessly whittling away their driver’s wallet. I actually calculated how much money I’d have wasted in the coming year if I’d left my cross-bars on and gas prices stayed constant at $4.09. It was over $100. If this is you, take the hint and take your cross-bars off this weekend!
Sorry so short, but I’m running out of the house to visit my mom for Kamehameha Day (don’t worry, there will probably be a blog post about that too–give it a few days!).
Thoughts on the Tanking Economy: Complaints, Responsibility, and a Lack of Moderation?
Posted by Jen - 03/06/08 at 01:06:31 pmHere’s a question I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: Given the bad economy and the fact that we’re all feeling the burn and making sacrifices, who is and isn’t allowed to complain about those sacrifices, and how much?
Two message board discussions inspired this question, both of them from horse-related message boards that I frequent. In the first case, someone was griping about driving her daughter to vet tech school and then having to wait for the daughter to finish her vet tech classes before returning home because she couldn’t afford to double her gas bill. She also griped about having to apply for food stamps to feed her family (keep in mind, this woman has two horses that she keeps fed, yet she’s going on the dole to feed herself and her family.)
We could pause here and debate the ethics of going on food stamps when you’re apparently able to keep your two horses fed just fine (for those not in the know, it costs at least $50-$100 monthly to feed a horse). However, what happened in response to this person’s griping fascinates me far more. In response to this first gripe, other people started complaining about whatever sacrifices THEY were making because of the bad economy, like not being able to eat out three times a week or not being able to show their horses. Some of them griped about buying a house during the housing bubble or having poor job security/bad salary/no chance to move up in the career field that they’ve chosen. Some blamed the government for the whole thing, making statements like, “The choices I made didn’t influence illegal aliens to come in and take my job.”
I feel badly for everyone in this economy, but what bothers me far more than the griping is that no one’s taking personal responsibility. If you bought a house or an SUV or you chose to enter a career with bad job security/bad salary/etc., who’s fault is that? If I’d wanted job security, I’d have trained to be a CPA or a nurse or something else that would have made me hate getting up in the morning, but I didn’t, and I sure as heck am not blaming anyone else (especially not the government) for my choice. Nobody held a gun to the American public’s head and said, “Spend beyond your means, buy houses even though there’s ample warning that a housing correction is 60+ years overdue, and get an SUV to tote around your two kids when a gas-friendly station wagon or sedan probably could have gotten the job done just fine.”
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Furthermore, I believe that each of our small daily actions DO influence government and social forces of all kinds. I have my small part to play in how my government is responding to the Iraq War, to the economic crisis, even to the above-mentioned example of illegal immigration. Whether you are for or against illegal immigration, I’m guessing that you don’t consciously go out of your way to avoid buying vegetables picked by illegal migrant workers, you don’t write to your Congressperson every month telling them what you think, and you probably don’t do a thing to get your voice heard other than vote once every four years (hint: not the only effective way to get your political voice heard) and complain about it to your friends. I don’t put my feet in action regarding illegal immigration either, unless you want to count spending my days helping very intelligent people learn to understand all sides of an argument and make a compelling case for their own, which may help them make a difference on that issue someday. But just because illegal immigration is not my Pet Political Cause doesn’t mean I shirk my influence on the matter. I buy the produce. I didn’t write to my Congressman. I am complicit in our current illegal immigration policy.
But speaking of complaining, there ARE people in this economy who are legitimately reaching the end of their rope. We’re not hearing them much on the Internet yet–after all, if you still have access to the Internet and the time to use it, you’re probably above the poverty line–but I’m pretty damn sure that the working poor, the people who were already working 80+ hours a week to barely afford beans and rice in 1999 are losing their basic means of sustenance in 2008. So the question then becomes for the rest of us who are still living high enough on the hog to read and write blogs, “At what point are you allowed to complain in public about your sacrifices?” When you have to cut back from eating out three nights a week to one? When you have to cancel the cable TV? When you have to move to a smaller house? When you go on welfare? When you’re homeless? It seems we all struggle to know when to say who can complain, when, and how much. What are the rules? Can I go on the Chronicle of the Horse Forums and write a two-line pout about how I can’t afford to show my horse this season, which is obviously a luxury practice, then get right back to my usual attitude of “let’s count our blessings” and go home to eat my simple dinner of whatever was on sale at the grocery store? I chose to participate in that second thread because it seemed more light-hearted, but someone called us out on it anyway, just as I’d called out the folks on The Outside Course for their whining. So where’s the line? Is there a line?
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I don’t know where the line is, but I do know this: in a time when we’re all feeling the psychological and financial burn to some degree, we could rip each other apart by complaining about things without taking responsibility for our part in them, just like we could rip each other apart by constantly pulling the “starving children in Africa” card all the time. I’d love to see more Americans doing a more positive, productive combination of the two–counting their blessings AND taking responsibility for their own complicity in the current economic situation. For example, I can be grateful that I’m getting out and seeing my town in a different way now that I’m riding my bike more often to save on gas. But at the same time, I can take responsibility for not buying that bike until a few weeks ago, and failing to take really aggressive steps to improve my fuel efficiency. I can pat myself on the back for having all-compact-fluorescent light bulbs in my house for the last three years, but give myself a kick in the pants for not really encouraging my friends to do so (maybe by giving them more often as Christmas presents rather than the other crap I’ve been buying them). But let’s try to do both, please. If America sucks at one thing, it’s being moderate. We love to be extreme. Learning (or failing to learn) how to embrace moderation in all things might be the one thing that will pull us through. I just hope we get the memo in time.
No, I am NOT rooting for Big Brown
Posted by Jen - 01/06/08 at 12:06:07 pmI’m known by most of my non-horsey friends, especially at the office, as the “go to person” for horsey information. And I can’t tell you how many times in the past eight weeks I’ve
been asked these two questions:
“What happened to Eight Belles?”
“Are you excited about Big Brown maybe becoming a Triple Crown winner?”
In many cases, these friends see these questions as unrelated–they perceive that the first question is a bummer and the second question is fun. I hate breaking it to them that in reality, the questions are closely related and both depressing.
The first question, thankfully, has been thoroughly and thoughtfully answered by many others. I particularly like this appraisal of what happened to Eight Belles on the Fugly Horse of the Day Blog. So since that question’s been well addressed elsewhere, I won’t address it here.
Big Brown, however, is another matter. I am fully aware that there’s been a long hiatus since we had a Triple Crown winner and that the racing industry desperately needs an equine hero to pull it out of the financial toilet. I don’t think horseracing is evil–indeed, I owe most of my riding career to off-track Thoroughbreds–and I happily cheered on Smarty Jones, Barbaro, and Cigar in past years. I think Big Brown is a good-lookin’ fella who can run like hell, and I had a good time watching him in the Kentucky Derby.
Then I saw the pictures of his feet. I don’t break out the curse words on this blog very often, but if you’re supposed to use curse words to indicate the ultimate shock and surprise, that’s about how I felt about Big Brown’s feet. HOLY SHIT those are some awful feet.
Fran Jurga’s “Hoofblog” is doing a great job of covering the neverending saga of Big Brown’s hoof problems. Even if you know absolutely nothing about shoeing horses, just go look at the pictures in these posts. The pictures make the point just fine.
Now granted, just about any performance horse is going to have hoof problems. My own horse just had a stone bruise in one hoof and an abscess in the other, and that doesn’t mean that I don’t take great care of him or don’t love him or that his farrier isn’t great. And let’s admit up front that some of Big Brown’s hoof problems are just bad luck, a case of a problem begetting a problem. That was my horse’s problem too–the stone bruise probably begat the abscess.
But a lot of Big Brown’s endless hoof problems are either being caused or exacerbated by the fact that he’s in full race training and running at top speed. And that is wrong, people, even in a Triple Crown year, even if he’s making gobs of cash for his owners. It takes six to twelve months for a horse to grow out a hoof, and apparently nobody cares to wait for Big Brown to do it when he could be making jillions of dollars.
I’ll admit that I’m not a racehorse expert, nor am I a farrier (horseshoer). Ian McKinlay knows a hell of a lot more than I do whether Big Brown should be running or not. But even if Big Brown can run without pain, nor with long-term damage to his hooves, what kind of message are we sending to the horse industry and the population at large by celebrating and running a horse with terrible hoof problems? We’re saying, “Speed matters to us more than anything else. We don’t give a rat’s ass about the long-term stability of this breed. We don’t really care that the best racehorse we’ve bred in a long time has feet as soft as clay. We probably care about this particular horse’s health because he’s a cash cow, but we’d rather invest in high-dollar, risky, cutting-edge farrier work than go the much safer and easier route of turning him out to pasture.”
And guess where that attitude got us with horses like Eight Belles.
Even if we can get over the whole issue of Big Brown racing and training, there’s the question of what will happen to him after this year. The owners, to their credit, have said that they will retire Big Brown after this year. Big Brown will undoubtedly retire to stud, where he might pass those crappy feet onto his progeny. Granted, having a sire with crappy feet does not necessarily produce foals with crappy feet, just like having a dad with green eyes didn’t mean that I ended up with green eyes. But considering the way that we’re breeding horses these days, which is “speed speed speed and to hell with the rest of it”, I worry that that’s what will happen.
Is keeping Big Brown in the hunt for the Triple Crown an inhumane act? I honestly don’t know. My instinctive answer is “probably not”. But the Triple Crown is supposed to be about celebrating a horse that stands for everything that’s good in the racehorse industry, a horse that shows what our modern racehorse industry can achieve. The message that Secretariat sent when he won the Triple Crown was that great breeding, incredible stamina, and exquisite conditioning can produce a horse who naturally excels to the top of his game. What will Big Brown’s legacy be–that with the advent of modern technology, we can keep Humpty Dumpty up on the wall long enough for the King’s Horses and King’s Men to drink their champagne and make a few cool million?
I don’t have an answer about what should be done. My only answer to the problem is a small personal one. I didn’t watch the Preakness on TV. I don’t plan to watch the Belmont. I will go out and ride my own horse during the race and hope that when I come back, there isn’t some horror story waiting for me on the evening news like the one about Eight Belles.
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