giddy up or hiya, your choice

So I just got back from horseback riding. Today I was on a crazy little pony named Ty. He's only 4 and is shorter than me (I'm just short and light enough that they sometimes have me ride some of the spunkier ponies), but boy can he jump! On the flat he was calm and sensitive and responsive--very sweet--but once we started jumping, he suddenly became feisty and over-excited, galloping up to every jump and leaping about twice as high as he needed to to clear them. Anyway, after coming home and having a shower, I remembered that I've been planning to post a few photos of my various athletic endeavors that my parents took when they came to visit in early December. Sure, having them join me (at my invitation) and videotape me at all my sporting events made me feel like a little kid again, but in a good way.

In any case, please bear with me (or feel free to skip ahead) while I do a little bit of show and tell:

First, my parents came with me to my horseback riding lesson on Wednesday (Nov. 29). Before the holidays I was riding a horse named Flight 101 (Flight, for short) a lot. He’s owned by a girl who went off to college and left her horse at the stable to be leased; my riding instructor tried to convince me to half lease Flight, but not only is the $300/month half lease a bit out of my price range, but I also don’t have the time (as much as I’d like to) to ride three times a week. I haven't ridden Flight since early December, so I imagine someone else agreed to lease him since then.


Flight’s an excellent horse—sometimes he fumbles a bit over fences, but only at first (like he’s nervous or, ha!, flighty). He’s really lovely under saddle. Even though I’m mostly doing hunter-jumper now, I still love riding a horse that has a sensitivity for basic dressage; he transitions seamlessly between a smooth sitting trot and a faster, more elongated posting trot and, even more unusual (for the horses I ride regularly), he has a great collected canter which makes it feel almost like he’s floating in place.


He jumps huge, as you can see from the second picture of his jump over the oxer, where I try in vain to stay with him but end up sitting on his back much more than I should (I should be stretched out with my hands up on his neck, not all hunched over). I prefer jumping Hughie, one of the stable’s horses, although his gaits are not nearly as refined as Flight’s; Hughie’s still challenging—he’s got a lot of power and certainly isn’t an automatic pilot kind of horse—but he’s more predictable over fences. For example, unlike Flight, you can be fairly certain Hughie will jump the fence in front of him and at a decent pace; Flight sometimes slows to a walk right in front of the jump and then jumps it anyway, which is disconcerting. But the day of the parental photo shoot, Flight was behaving himself, although I almost fell off when the horse and I had an argument about which way to turn after a jump and we nearly ran into a wall. All par for the course.

On Thursday, my parents came to my dojo to watch my karate and jiu-jitsu classes. I went to the brown belt class that night because the black belt class I usually go to is in the afternoons and I thought it would be easier on all of us to just go to two classes in a row (since jiu-jitsu's right after the brown belt class). We did some free sparring that night without protective gear (so no real punching or kicking, just light smacks).

After karate, we rolled out the mats for jiu-jitsu, which I've only been doing for about a year and a half (I think). Below I wrestle with one of the few other women in the class (there's 4 of us on a good day, but sometimes it's just one or two...often it's just me and a room full of guys).

In the above picture, I'm about to do an arm bar (one of many possible submissions--with this one you over-extend the shoulder and, well, it hurts) on one of the jiu-jitsu senseis. Don't be too impressed; he's probably defending at about 25% in order to let me practice different moves. One of the things that's great about jiu-jitsu is that technique is ultimately more important than sheer muscle strength, or so I'm told. While karate is my first love, I think jiu-jitsu might be the better sport for bare-bones, end-of-the-line self-defense since it's a lot about instinct and positioning--e.g. some positions are defensive, some offensive, and some safer or more vulnerable than others. When a 180-pound guy is about to choke you, it's good to have an instinctual sense of how to get away or at least how to defend yourself until you can knee him in the face and run away (not an option in class, of course). Since I watch way too much CSI and Law and Order, these are the things I think about.

Better yet, I could knee the attacker in the face and then ride away on my pony!

better than the sunday comics page

As of the past 6 months or so, I've added the indulgence of webcomics to my ever-diversifying armory of procrastination techniques. While it began as a bit of a fancy, many of the comicistas out there on the internet are actually fantastic artists and have created compelling, fascinating and complicated worlds in their work. A word of warning, when you start with a new comic you’ll get this great rush of being able to read hundreds of pages of archived material. But, once you reach the end of what’s been written/drawn so far you will likely feel, as I did/do, very deprived as you wait for the next installment(s). Adis over at Count Your Sheep posts the most regularly (three to fives times a week), although his comic is also in a strip format (like newspaper comics) rather than a graphic novel, so it’s probably easier to produce those faster. Inverloch, Angels 2200, and Flipside are also pretty regular (two to three times a week). Alpha Shade, which is gorgeous and complex, has the longest lag between updates, so much so that the artists only just posted a regular update schedule on their site (although time alone will tell if they stick to it).

Here are a few of my favorites, in a vague sort of order. In order of my dedication, perhaps:

1. Count Your Sheep is a clever, fun, and cute comic by artist Adrian Ramos (known as Adis). It’s about a girl, her mother and their imaginary sheep, Ship, and is reminiscent of Calvin and Hobbes. I love this strip, and it’s actually a marvel to me that, despite frequent attempts, Adis hasn’t yet managed to get his work syndicated or published somewhere. I think Count Your Sheep is far more interesting and more intelligent than many of the comics you find in, say, The Washington Post.

2. I' m not sure how to describe Alpha Shade because I'm not always entirely sure I know what's going on myself, there's so much going on at once. But this isn't a bad thing. It's gorgeously-rendered and the characters are intriguing and enigmatic. At the stage it's in right now, it's hard to glean the scope of the entire narrative; I've only gathered enough to know that one of the central characters--a pretty typical American 20-something--has become trapped(?) in a parrell universe and finds herself commander of an army. Or something. I don't think my description does Alpha Shade any favors, but if you read it you'll understand why I'm at a loss.

3. Inverloch is a fantasy-adventure story set in a world that's vaguely reminiscent of RPGs I played as a pre-teen, except the characters, setting and social architecture are much more realistically conceived. There's racism and sexism and greed and vanity, and the story is really as much a social allegory as it is a fantastical narrative. And besides, Acheron, one of the main characters, is adorably cute and cuddly.

4. Angels 2200 is a futuristic sci-fi comic set in a world where most of the men have been killed by some sort of plague. It's alternatively amusing and heartbreaking and while it's full of feminine stereotypes, the artists are also meticulous about breaking them whenever possible.

5. Flipside is possibly the weirdest comic I've ever read. About a female jester, a female would-be knight and their adventures, it definitely falls under the fantasy category. A word of warning: while funny and kooky, it's also a bit risque (occassionally in an obviously prurient way) and sometimes quite violent, but intriguing all the same.

Also, check out the Buzz Comics rankings to find more great webcomics if you, like me, are looking for entertaining procrastination.

Okay, back to actual work now. No. Really.