Draft Horse Classic

I got the printed invitations today. There aren't a lot so expect email invitations...

Woo wee I have a lot of work to do before then!

Remember, you can click on the images to see the full-size version so that you can read it! :-)

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Well, the horse situation is certainly not without some drama. Last night I put Shylah in with Dusty, hoping they'd buddy up. He walked straight up to her hind end (she doesn't tend to appreciate other horses doing that!) so she kicked him in the chest. Nice. By morning he was giving her a very wide berth and she took every opportunity to put her ears back and throw dirty looks at him. What is wrong with my horses? Unfortunately, I think Shylah learned her social skills from Auntie Gwen. *sigh* Shylah does mellow out over time though, and I think will potentially be nicer.

Gwen, although she's not out for blood QUITE as much as she was with Patrick, has definitely gone into her weird defensive mode again. Ugh!!! I really had thought she might not do that. Dusty does not act the slightest bit "studdish" whereas Patrick did. So, though not to quite the same extent, she keeps herself between them and repeatedly chases him off, ears pinned back, teeth bared, fangs dripping blood... ok maybe not that last part.

So the bad horse in this situation is my own. Great. I want this to work out with Dusty, I want to be able to work with him and return a fully-rideable well-mannered horse to J.J. But that's going to be tough, it's a bit like being in a war zone out there. There are certainly alternatives. There are three pastures and three corrals, so there are numerous ways to separate three horses, but the point is I don't want to have to do that. For one thing it's a pain, I'll end up using more hay that way, somebody will miss the social aspect of life, etc. It's tempting to try it for a while though. But I still think when I let loose whatever horse is penned up, it's just going to go back to how it is now. Darn that Gwen! Why must she be so weird about this. I really don't understand why she's so cranky now and she really wasn't like that with Sampson. Hopefully everyone will chill out a bit by next week, because I really want to make this work..

Dusty's first lessons will definitely be getting him OUT of my personal space. I've had very little interaction with him so far, just letting the horses do their thing for now. But he's definitely a bit lacking in boundaries. No offense J... I'm sure you knew this already! :-)

I'm seriously tempted to cut his mane off. It's anywhere from about 1-12 inches long, in about 47 different segments that point different directions (either rubbed off or chewed off, most of it's really short). I get very distracted by how a horse's mane looks!

Anyway...

I never said anything more about the Blue Silkies. They turned out fine, but I wouldn't do the watercolor thing again, it wasn't worth the hassle. So now I'm drawing... MORE Blue Silkies (Bearded, the first pair was Non Bearded). That's cruel and unusual punishment.

I think when I can move on to non-Standard artwork, I'll start posting pics of work in progress on here... might be neat for people to see how it looks along the way (I'm not as bothered by that as I used to be).

I guess it's time to start advertising again, gotta get some stuff going for after December. Ugh, advertising sucks. I'll see what I can conjure up that won't cost me an arm and a leg!

I miss my camera.

Three again...

And just when you thought I was permanently back to two horses. Ha!

This morning J.J.'s horse "Dusty" moved in. He's a 9 or 10 year old Champagne Tennessee Walking Horse gelding (geez, time flies, I was thinking he was only about 7!). He was trained as a 3 year old but hasn't had anything done since then, so he's here for a little refresher course.

This still strikes me as odd, I don't consider myself a horse trainer. But I did okay with Shylah. Of course she's still a work in progress! :-)

Anyway, he's on a trial period of a week or so now, to make sure the three of them will get along and not kill each other. If that works out, he'll be here for... I don't know how long. That's up to J! :-) A couple months, I would imagine.

He's very pretty, I wish I could take a photo. Gwen and Shylah both do the squeal-strike-kick thing when they meet a new horse (they are across a fence from him for a little while) but his response is to rear up. Wow, wasn't expecting that! He caught Gwen on the cheek with a front hoof. She's fine, but it obviously surprised her.

So he'll get a couple days to get used to the routine around here, and then I'll put the boy to work. He's going to get a lot of groundwork before I start riding.

about the chickens

I said I would write about the chickens, so here it is. I sorted through ALL the remaining youngsters yesterday and made some interesting discoveries.

I have fewer good birds than I thought I did. I was thinking "gosh I have a LOT of Blacks" but actually a large percentage of those were black birds from the Cuckoo cross... and I won't be keeping those. Well, maybe one, just for kicks, we'll see.

I thought I had a pretty good number of nice colored BBRed pullets. I do, but I discovered that 4 of them are 1/4 Dominique, from the Crele breeding pens. Hmm. Nicely colored birds! I'll see how they turn out, they may end up too big or with small ear lobes. If they are typey though I would put them with a BBRed male and see what happens, but I certainly would not sell them as a BBRed Rosecomb.

The best colored Cuckoo male IS in fact the single comb bird, but he's probably not going to have good type. The best type male is fairly washed out, with a lot of solid black in his tail coverts. The best colored rose comb male has red ear lobes. It's not fair! The females are all dark, but I'll see how they feather out as adults.

The Creles are going bye bye. Didn't end up with any males worth keeping. There is one half way decent female but she's enormous. It's not worth the time and effort, it wasn't the right way to start that color. This is not failure, this is knowing when to stop! :-)

I will have VERY few show birds for sale.

Camera update

Well, there won't be any photo blogging for a while... :-( Waaahhhh!!! I'm going to guess it'll be about two weeks. I mailed it off to Nikon this morning. The good news is the fix will be free, if the problem is what Nikon thinks it is (a failed electronic component known to affect a small percentage of these cameras). But, that'll take up to 5 business days, plus shipping time.

I miss it already! Prepare yourself for boring blogging...

um, that's not good

The day started okay. I got up late, spent a couple hours sorting chickens (I'll talk about that later), worked on the Blue Silkies (flattening now), pretty much a normal sort of day.

I didn't have time to ride after dinner but wanted to work the horses so I figured I'd just do some groundwork, and I wanted to work both of them. I haltered Gwen first, and after doing various yielding and backing in the roundpen I figured I'd lunge the old gal. She used to be a real turd about this and try to get away from me, but she hadn't done anything like that for quite some time now. Til today. It's human nature I guess to try to hold onto the rope. In reality it's not a big deal if a horse gets away..she's in a roundpen, she can't go more than 30 feet away from me, the idea is you don't want the horse to GET AWAY WITH SOMETHING. And I guess that's what my hand was thinking as she tucked her head around by her shoulder on the other side of her body and bolted away from me. It was just a split second for the brain said LET GO but it was long enough for searing pain and the worst rope burn I've ever had.

I'm pretty sure I let loose a string of foul words and called that horse every name the book as I chased her fat butt around the round pen. If she wants to run away from me she'd better RUN as fast as she can or she's gonna get it. A minute or so of my tirade and she was breathing hard, trailing my once-white cotton lunge line out behind her. I left her standing on the far side of the round pen and walked back to the barn to grab some gloves. That mare was in for it...

With gloves on, I calmly took hold of the lunge line again and asked her to move out at a nice jog. And what did she do? Tried to tuck her head around the other side and make a beeline away from me! That b@#$%! I dug my heels in and jerked the line back as hard as I could, and she swung around to a stop. I dared to her to do it again, but she minded my cues from then on out, and she got a harder workout than I had originally intended. Grrrrrr. I love Gwen but sometimes she really pisses me off. I did end things on a good note though, did some more backing up and simple stuff, she was nice and calm.

And then I had to work Shylah too, though my hand hurt so bad I could barely close it around the rope. Thankfully she was quite the little darling tonight and gave me no trouble at all. So she got to go out for a little walk, since she's a nice horsey. She got to graze in the orchard, and eat some windfall peaches (I pitted them, of course!)

*sigh* Horses...

So then, I was going to take a photograph of my hand, because it looks really gross (oh, and this is my right hand by the way, and I'm right handed, and I'm supposed to be drawing!!! Hmm, maybe by morning I can do that...) So I picked up my camera and turned it on, and all I see on the viewfinder is lines and blurry shapes and strange colors. Hmmm. Turned it off, put in the other battery, reloaded the memory card, turned it on, same thing. That's right, my camera isn't working. HOLY CRAP MY CAMERA ISN'T WORKING. That's like telling you my arms fell off. That's not good. I am lost without my camera. I am queasy, nauseous, I'm not going to handle this well if my camera is dead or needs an expensive operation. I love my camera. This is what it looks like to take a photograph right now (this is the lamp in the other room, yeah, you knew that, didn't you?)


I emailed tech support, they said I'll have an answer within 24 hours. Please please please let this be something simple.

I'll blog about chickens later. Maybe tomorrow. Bleh. My hand is still hugely painful. And my head hurts.

a wee little horsie

Did for this an "animal art challenge" on the pet portrait forum.


untitled foal
2.5 x 3.5 inches
colored pencil and graphite on gray Stonehenge paper

(yay, something else to take to Draft Horse Classic!)

I went to see the Escher exhibit today at the Crocker in downtown Sacramento. WOW. I've been a big Escher fan pretty much forever, and that multiplied greatly when I took printmaking in college and understood how the images were created. It was pretty amazing to see the originals. The show runs through Sept 3 I think, so not much time left if you want to see it!

Thinking out loud

Wrote this late last night but couldn't upload it.

The Blue Silkie drawing experiment might be working. I did do a watercolor base coat. Unfortunately that warped the bejeebers out of the paper. I went ahead and did all the colored pencil work (just doing one bird at a time right now, better than potentially ruining both). And then I did one of those "don't try this at home" things, and spritzed the whole paper with water until it was completely limp (spraying water on my art is not something I like to do, it scares me) and it's now in the "flattening rack" (blotter paper with a stack of books on top). I'll know in the morning if it's going to be okay. If not, redo... and skip the watercolor (it helped keep the paper color from showing through the fluff). I think it'll be okay.

Is anyone else having email problems lately? I don't know if something's up with my server, or if something's up with the net in general, but things I send are sometimes not getting through, and things people send me are sometimes not getting through. There's no failure notice, the addresses are valid, the spam filter isn't catching them, they simply don't show up. Anybody know what's up with this? It's not happening a lot, but enough to make me wonder what's going on.

Now that the days are getting shorter (waaahhh!) I'm not able to ride in the evenings unless I manage to eat dinner really early, so I'll have to switch riding to mornings. So I've been spending more time out with the birds, in search of future champions, or looking at them and thinking "geez, these are awful." Equal parts of both, I guess! I hatched waaayyy too many birds, and they are showing the signs of having been overcrowded. Arg! Bad me! So many of what I hatched were odd-colors and not-showable. I've culled out a lot but still have a way to go, and I need to sort through last year's breeding stock and get rid of those that don't meet my standards or did not produce good offspring (or were low fertility, etc.) I urgently need to move cockerels into the conditioning coop, but it's still full with the older males. Must get rid of birds!

In fact that's sort of my general thought lately, I need to cut back. I should not have started work on a bunch of new colors, I think that was a mistake. I don't have room to work with that many birds and be able to keep them in any sort of decent condition. I will have some good birds for sale coming up, but it's going to be very few, and I don't know if I want to mess with shipping (I'm not even sure I CAN ship birds anymore, it's been about 6 years since I've tried).

I'm pleased with the BBRed females this year, there are a few out there with significantly improved stippling, and they are definitely keepers. The Brassies and Blue Brassies need work. For a few years they were my best of the "colored" birds and I just kinda let them do their thing and didn't put much thought into it. It shows. Far too many had green legs, the females are getting way too dark-chested, etc. I got rid of the Blue Brassy cock, as he was definitely a producer of green legs (since all the splash offspring were green-legged, and the black Brassy male cannot produce a splash offspring). If I'm pretty strict with color I'm going to cull out almost every single bird I hatched, but that's what it takes. I have a really typey "sport" Brassy male (purebred Black) who I may use in the breeding pen. He's extremely dark, but I like his type and I like how dark-legged he is, I think that might help the green leg issue.

The Cuckoos... well, we'll see. I kept one F1 female. There are five F2 75% Rosecomb males and four F2 50% Rosecomb males to choose from. None are great, to put it mildly (in other words, they all suck). The F2 pullets are very dark, but one might be useable. I'll pick one or two cockerels (the best colored one may in fact be a 50% RC single comb male, hmm).

The youngest Silver cockerel looks like he may end up pretty decent (for an F1 bird!) so I'll be breeding him to the two Blue Silver pullets and their Birchen sister. Then again, should I just breed the F1s to Black Rosecombs next season? Hmm, I did not expect anything but black or birchen in F1, so I dunno... Might get too dark if I go back to Black RC in F2.

The Creles...oh the Creles. I know certain of you want me to persist with them, but I gotta say it's really not looking likely. The one remaining cockerel has virtually no white in his ear lobes. The birds are monstrously huge. None of them have any barring in the wings or tail. I think trying to work with body size/type AND really poor color is just going to end up being a disaster. I think the smart way to do this would be to wait until the Cuckoos are decent, and then breed BBRed to Cuckoo. (Or perhaps to breed BBRed RCs to really tiny Cuckoo OE). I'll give them a little more time but I don't think I'm going to stick with this color. I'm not saying it can't be done, but I think this was not the right way to start it and it puts me on a very long road to getting it right. They are pretty, I will admit that. Just really really huge!

Anyway, the main focus, as always, is on the BBReds and Blacks. I keep the Brassies and Blue Brassies because I adore them. I have at many times thought about selling that whole flock but the truth is I'm not sure I would trust anybody with them. They are not Standard, and I'm not ambitious enough to Standardize them. It's hard to find people who are willing to raise them and really work with them, stick with it, and raise enough of them over the years to make it happen. So, they are my pretty birdies, a genetic line I won't make the mistake of getting rid of. The Silvers and Cuckoos now are "let's see what'll happen" projects, and will be small-scale for a while....probably looking at several more years before they are even showable, if ever.

And that's pretty much my thoughts for the evening.

Cuteness

Oh to be a kitty!


(and now the whole world knows I didn't make my bed, oh well!)

Game Fowl #5

I was a little ahead of schedule today, so....

"Game Fowl #5"
2.5 by 3.5 inches
colored pencil and graphite on gray Stonehenge paper
for sale

Why am I making these instead of working on other commissions? Because I can't get into anything that takes more than a few hours, since the time windows I'm dealing with are pretty short. It's too complicated to try to work on another large project. These are quickies, and the only person who gets to have input on them is me (what a relief!). :-)

I am still trying, somewhat unsuccessfully, to get these things onto an auction site... error with registration, long story, very frustrating, hopefully will be resolved at some point. Bleh.

I am starting work on Blue Silkies tomorrow. Aaaaack, I am still trying to figure out exactly how to create that fuzzy look. Might need to bust out the watercolors in order to put down a "base coat" of slate gray so I don't get the tan paper showing through. I need to do more experimenting....