{"id":4326,"date":"2010-12-05T00:26:39","date_gmt":"2010-12-05T00:26:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=4326"},"modified":"2011-04-12T13:26:48","modified_gmt":"2011-04-12T12:26:48","slug":"bump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=4326","title":{"rendered":"Bump!"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was talking to someone yesterday.<\/p>\n

I know, how unusual is that? And not in a ‘throat-grabbing, gonna punch you in the mouth’ kind of way. Anyway this person I was talking to, let’s call them David<\/span> William<\/span> Elizabeth, accidentally let slip that she reads this twaddle and finds it, sometimes, amusing. I don’t really ‘know’ Elizabeth. I’ve met her once. Or maybe twice.<\/p>\n

So in an attempt to be gratuitously amusing, here is the gratuitously amusing news.<\/p>\n

The snow has gone. Yay! The thermometer says it is eight degrees warmer than yesterday’s -4c, but it doesn’t seem any warmer. Boo!<\/p>\n

When I drove to the stables yesterday morning, there were two holes in the wall, on a bend on top of a hill. This is a particularly lethal piece of open road when the mercury drops below 0c, it’s very prone to black ice.<\/p>\n

Anyway, there was only one hole in that wall on Tuesday; that was the day I nearly lost it, in the same place, despite travelling at 10mph.<\/p>\n

My car is helpful. It flashes a red warning triangle to indicate that it’s in a skid, and the ABS makes the usual graunching noise when the brakes can’t make the wheels bite. Because driving down a hill sideways, with full lock in the opposite direction to the camber of the road, isn’t enough of an indication that the car is in a skid, obv. Anyway, I managed to pull it together, but two other drivers weren’t so fortunate.<\/p>\n

Bump!<\/p>\n

Tom hasn’t been getting much work lately, I’ve been massively busy and things have been out of control for a while. But hopefully I can start getting back on top of things now. None of the horses have been turned out for a few days; the ice has made the safe passage of bipeds and quadrupeds to the turnout impossible. This heady combination of things (a couple of days of not being turned out and a handful of weeks of not being ridden regularly) has put Tom in a very *cough* playful mood.<\/p>\n

A playful mood made even more playful by the sudden appearance of fucking enormous pampas grass plants in pots, in each of the four corners of the indoor arena.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Tom didn’t like these pony-eating plants one bit.<\/p>\n

He was deeply suspicious of the one by the mounting platform, but I let him sniff it, then hopped on. He didn’t like the one in the next corner either, but I kept him on a shorter rein, not wishing to give him the opportunity to have the heebie-jeebies over a plant. The plants in the third and fourth corners seemed OK, so we pushed on around the perimeter of the arena at a smarter walk.<\/p>\n

On the second lap, Tom ignored the plants in corners 1 and 2, so I switched my concentration to establishing a nice rhythm and getting an even balance. On the second visit to corner 3, though, Tom had a headfit.<\/p>\n

He spooked, spun, did a little rear and bronked. As a result I hit the deck. But I prefer to think of it as ‘an involuntary dismount’.<\/p>\n

Bump!<\/p>\n

I remounted and things settled down, but Sammi stuck her head over the door and said ‘He looks “frisky”.’<\/p>\n

Mmmmm…<\/p>\n

There will be more work for Tom tomorrow, and we might be able to slip back to a daily (or near daily) schedule too, and maybe some jumping when he’s settled down.<\/p>\n

In other news.<\/p>\n

I’ve finished reviewing this series of I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here!<\/a> for Shouting At Cows. It was fun but, being a daily writing gig, I wish I hadn’t been so tired on a couple of occasions. There have been a couple of evenings when I’ve felt far too gone to write good gags, or even a half-decent review.<\/p>\n

But I might be bothering Cows readers again the future.<\/p>\n

I’m not sure that’s a good thing. We’ll have to suck it and see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was talking to someone yesterday. I know, how unusual is that? And not in a ‘throat-grabbing, gonna punch you in the mouth’ kind of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff","two-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4326\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}