Introduction

August 2000
September 2000
October 2000
November 2000
December 2000
January 2001
February 2001
March 2001
April 2001
May 2001
June 2001
July 2001
August 2001

December 2000

2 December 2000

3 December 2000

10 December 2000

17 December 2000

2 December 2000
Saturday

Oh dear, here I am again. I'm listening to TMBG [1] and tickling the computer keys. Hey, who cares about homework...

Yesterday I woke up at 5:00 and decided that I might as well get up, because I needed to do laundry anyway. So against my better judgment, I got up and did a load of laundry and fixed myself a huge omelet for breakfast and bought groceries for the weekend and cleaned my room, all before 9:00! Then I went to class, and afterwards I went downtown and shopped for boots, and bought two pairs, both of which are completely awesome.

That in itself isn't all that astounding... but all together the events of the day are scary, because they signal that I'm turning into a German! I cleaned my whole room - swept the floor, organized everything, did laundry, even folded my laundry! What's happening to me?! I'm becoming a Hausfrau and neat-freak! The shoes, too - they're very German, and of course now I have to buy clothes to go with my boots that I bought to go with my tights. It's a vicious cycle! At the beginning of September I really didn't like the style of shoes and clothes here, but it has grown on me scarily.

The other thing that's scary is that I'm growing up. I'm fixing myself regular nutritious meals, and doing my laundry once a week, and cleaning my room... Where's my college-student irresponsibility?!

I'm going to go be a proper college student and watch a movie instead of studying.

3 December 2000
Sunday

One thing I wanted to say yesterday but didn't have the time for was that Kelly and I went with Christine, the woman who has been helping us to find a riding solution, out to her stable and met her horses. She has a blood bay mare [2] named Moca (5-6 years old) and a dark brown three-year-old named Leo. Moca is a elegant lady, choosy about her friends, while Leo is sweet and cute as anything. Kelly and I watched Christine ride, and then she let me ride Moca (only at the walk) outside a little way into the fields and back; Kelly didn't want to ride. I felt like a little kid on a pony ride, because Christine was there and holding onto the reins at first; however, I didn't resent it because I knew full well that I was on a horse who was much too good for me. She responded to things I didn't even realize I was telling her, to the slightest leg or rein pressure. Even just sitting on her at the walk was a dream. It's my goal in life to be able, one day, to deserve to ride such a horse.

Kelly and I also had the idea that we could perhaps lease a horse and thereby bypass the problems we've been having with finding a good school stable. The one we went to first is just not very good or fun, which is the whole point of this of all activities. Christine has said that she is licenced as a riding instructor, and she would teach us herself if she could, but she just doesn't have the horses. (She has two horses, but neither is a school horse suitable for teaching someone to ride.) If we had horses we could ride, then she can teach us, which would be much better than a school stable. Christine is going to investigate and see if we can find two people who will let someone else ride their horses in return for money and help with upkeep. The problem is that they need to be in the same stable; otherwise Christine can't teach Kelly and me together. It's improbable that we'll find anything, but it's a possibility at least, and I think that if it works out, it would be a very good situation. A personal trainer, nearly our own horses... How could it be better?

Of course there are advantages to riding different horses all the time, like we have to in riding classes at MHC, but I also very much enjoyed riding Stormy for nearly two months this summer. It was quite new for me to develop a relationship with one horse, and to gauge my progress by how much more I can do with this specific horse. For example, in June Stormy was nearly always on the verge of bucking. (I didn't realize that at the time, which was probably a very good thing.) However, by the end of July she trusted me, and I could keep her under control even if she was feeling a little frisky. Stormy is not the easiest horse to ride, but we got used to each other. I would love to be able to develop that sort of partnership again.

The very best thing about the day, which I nearly forgot to say, was that there was a cat at the barn! He's extremely small, and I'd call him a kitten except that he has the dimensions of a full-grown cat; kittens have a long-legged look, like they haven't quite grown into their feet yet, and his legs are if anything too short. He ran away from me at first, but after I caught him (he let me pet him once he was under the stairs, and then he didn't protest my picking him up) he was very friendly and purred up a storm. Kelly and I, both cat-people suffering from severe deprivation, traded him back and forth, but while we were perched on stools watching Christine ride, the cat curled up in the warm hollow created by my tucked-up legs and the flaps, went to sleep, and purred some more. It was a very soul-healing experience.

Sorry for boring you with riding, but I suppose I should warn you that I have a bit of an obsession with the sport; when I get in my head, I can't talk about anything else.

10 December 2000
Sunday

I'm writing because I haven't for a week, and I know that you all are dying to hear about me, right? Of course I can't let my public down! Unfortunately I don't have anything particularly exciting to say; my life is more or less boring these days. It's all work, reading German, going to class, blah blah blah. Even exotic places get boring after a while.

On the riding front - Monday Christine, Kelly, and I drove out past Blankenese to check out a couple of barns. Unfortunately it was dark already, so visibility was limited, but it reminded me a lot of Merriwood. We asked about lessons and found out that group lessons are DM25, with about 8 people in the group, but private lessons are DM60 and can be split between two people, so that's what Kelly and I are going to do, or at least try out for a little while. Jan, who does the private lessons, wasn't there right then, so we tried to get in touch with him by telephone; he called me on Wednesday, and we took the S-Bahn out to the stable on Thursday morning. Unfortunately I had thought he said something about showing us the horses and talking about what we wanted, so we didn't take our riding gear out there... My supposition turned out to be completely wrong, and I felt like a complete idiot. But Jan seems extremely nice; I was very flustered (trying to get myself together and form a coherent sentence), and he said "it's okay" or something reassuring like that. Anyway, we asked him a couple of questions, received answers, and made an appointment to ride next week at the same time. Hopefully then I'll be able to prove that I'm not a complete idiot; I rather doubt it.

On the plus side, at least I'm giving my sense of humility some much-needed practice. :-)

Also on Monday, we visited another couple of barns; one was also considered as a possibility for lessons, but unfortunately there are no school horses, only ponies. I have nothing against ponies, but they're simply too small for me. They also teach on horses, but you have to own your own horse. There are people with horses at that stable who are looking for someone for a Reitbeteiligung [3], but unfortunately probably none of them would do it for a mere eight months, which is all the time Kelly and I have left here. Unfortunate, but oh well. It was only an idea.

As a last fun thing, we went to the barn of an old friend of Christine's, Joachim, and looked at the whole barn and then saw him ride. His horse is a beautiful dappled gray Andalusian, a lovely horse but actually slightly too small for Joachim, who is very tall. There were a lot of other people there, practicing dressage, and it was interesting to watch them.

The rest of the week was very boring. Work, Sleep, class, eat... I was doing pretty well, feeling good about my productivity, until Friday evening fatigue and hunger caught up with me, and I felt horrible. Yesterday morning I slept in, spent the afternoon on my bed writing letters, and then came to the Smith Center and spent the whole night there, merely because I didn't feel like going home. That's going to be fun for my body clock. :-( Eh well, in a few minutes I'm going home and to bed, and tomorrow morning I'll get up and do errands, and perhaps that will help me back to normal.

17 December 2000
Sunday

Once again, it has been a week since I updated this journal. And once again, my week has not been that exciting. Work, sleep, class, eat during the week, the same on the weekend. Maybe a little more housework than schoolwork. For example, yesterday and today I did laundry and cleaned my room and cooked. This morning I made fried eggs for the first time in my life and seasoned them with salt and pepper, which is unusual because I never use pepper, because we just never use pepper in my family, and I'm not in the habit of it. But I'm glad I bought and used it, because with it the eggs were quite good. I think I'll give them another shot tomorrow; I've got six more eggs that I need to use up before I leave town for Christmas.

Yesterday I made a Bean-Chili-Penne recipe that I found in a cookbook; it was suprisingly good. It's very red and green (tomatoes and rucola) and tastes very good as a cold salad-ish thing. By the time I finished making it, I was too tired (and sick of cooking) to be hungry, but it's satisfying to cook and to make things that taste good. Unfortunately this week I don't have much time or opportunity to cook any more, because I need to reduce the amount of fresh food I have around rather than increasing it.

On Thursday Kelly and I rode at one of the barns we visited a couple of weeks ago, and it seems like a good possibility. Jan, the instructor, is not what I'm used to; he seems to want us to decide what we want to do, not him. When he asked us what we wanted, I was really quite shocked, because after the benevolent dictatorship of Mary Beth, who instructed me most of the summer, I didn't know how to deal with free choice! However, the horse I rode was good (if weird - I've never seen a horse change so much when I picked up a crop, from slow "nope I'm not going, you can kick me as much as you want" to "yippee let's race!" without even touching him with it), and Jan seems very nice and open to questions etc. I think I will enjoy riding there.

Must go now; late on a school night, etc., and many many errands tomorrow morning. Errands planned for the morning, however, have a tendency not to happen; I usually prefer to sleep in. Let's hope I have a bit more willpower tomorrow!

January 2001

[1] Specifically, "Dead" - very funny song. "I came back a bag of groceries / accidentally taken off the shelf / before the date stamped on myself." I love They Might Be Giants! Who can ever get enough of "Birdhouse in Your Soul"?
[2] A stunning color. Kelly and I thought she was a chestnut at first, because her color is so light. She has white stockings (that means, almost to the knees) on all four legs, and her knees are barely black, and there's only the slightest hint of black at the tips of her ears. If she didn't have the stockings, I'd have noticed their blackness straight off, but it wasn't until it sunk in that Moca's main and tail are black that I realized the truth. I've never seen that extreme a shade of blood bay before; she's really red (or as red as horses can get, anyway).
Another note on the color - in German, the horse colors which are denoted in English as "brown" and "bay" are in German both braun. I think that's too bad, because they're really not the same color at all; browns are the same color all over (though some, like Leo, have lighter muzzles), and bays have brown body and black points (legs, ears, mane, and tail). There should be a way to differentiate them. On the other hand, there's a word for chestnut (but only a noun), der Fuchs; chestnut is different from brown in that the color, which is the same all over, is reddish rather than pure brown.
[3] I'm pretty sure this is called a lease in English (but I've never done it so I don't know). It means that a horse's owner allows someone else to ride the horse a certain number of times per week in exchange for money and help with care of the horse.

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