26 April 03
Riding Again After Twenty Years
I’ve been riding again after a long absence. Horses are large, unpredictable creatures that seem to have a soul that resonates with mine. I know that spending even a short time around them makes me forget everything else. The smell is something we used to dream of distilling as adolescents. Basically, you either love it or hate it.
Like riding a bicycle, riding a horse is a skill remembered mostly in muscles that don’t necessarily work as well as they used to. But the old instincts are still there: I can still tell when a horse, frisky in the north wind, is about to bolt. Not that this will necessarily save me!
The UC Davis Equestrian Center is adjacent to Highway 113. There are about 60 lesson horses and many others that are owned privately. It’s time for it to move on. There’s a ranch out on Russell Boulevard which has been earmarked for the new Equestrian Center and which is being celebrated this coming week. I hope there will be an indoor arena: riding in the mud in winter and searing heat in summer is no fun. If Davis is successful in its bid to get the new Biosafety Level 4 Lab from NIH, it will sit on the current site of the Equestrian Center.
16 April 03
Interruptions
Feathers of Hope is back online after all sorts of hardware woes on the server. It’s been moved to a new server at the ISP which will hopefully have better luck. Such interruptions definitely break the writing rhythm.
Back at home, the Davis Enterprise had a feature article on blogging yesterday, but once again they fail to put it online. If the local rag has a full-page article, I guess it means blogging really has gone mainstream.
1 April 03
We’re Live!
Feathers of Hope goes live, as I finally got my archiving scheme up and working. There are all sorts of template and stylesheet tweaking to do, but that will come in time.
Oh, the title of the blog refers to the Emily Dickinson poem.
31 March 03
The Earliest Blogger
Samuel Pepys has a weblog. Today’s entry is for 31 March 1660.
31 March 03
Primroses
I have always loved primroses, coming as they do after the daffodils—the first really bright colors of spring. The snails like them, though, and I have to keep a good eye out. The weeds grow here faster than I can keep up with them.
27 March 03
First MT Post!
This is my first weblog post ever!