Major activities of the past week

I finished filling out my election ballot yesterday and it will be going out into the mail tomorrow.

The programming on Monday was horrible! The president of the Ford company was supposed to come and speak, but since his company is currently disastrous, he sent this crazy lady to talk about "networking" to us. I put the quotes around networking, because she did not help at all with educating us on how to network, but rather we were tortured for a couple hours by meaningless stuff.

On Wednesday, instead of normal class, we met in the morning at the American University campus and were given a talk by a man who spent 14 years on death row, was 15 hours from being electrocuted, and was found to be innocent of his crimes. He walked us through how he spent his days locked up without human contact and how he kept sane through it all. I was very impressed by the talk and was glad I got to go to it.

Friday night I met up with some horse people I know in the area to see the Washington International Horse Show. We got to see terrier racing, a Combined Driving exhibition (which was VERY cool), and the puissance event (high jump competition). In the puissance event there were only five riders entered, but all of them were very impressive. The winner jumped 7'1" and then made an attempt to break the current record at 7'8" unsuccessfully, his horse fell down after he hit the jump hard and dislodged the rider. I still very much enjoyed it.

I went back to WIHS on Saturday night to watch the Equitation finals and the Grand Prix. I purchased a pair of Polartec riding gloves for $12, and was very excited by getting cheap but high quality winter riding gloves to keep my fingers warm. Surprisingly, I was only impressed by a few of the top ten riders in the Equitation finals instead of the majority of them. The Grand Prix was stuffed in a very small arena with lots of tight turns. It wasn't anything I would have ever done on Blitz since I think I would be dragged around the course, missing turns and hitting rails. Mark, on the other hand, may have a future as a WIHS GP horse (which is a qualifier for the World Cup Jumping Competition) if he has a powerful and high jump and is fast to react. The horse that won, McLain Ward's Sapphire (on the Gold Medal USA Olympic Showjumping team this year), was the beefiest horse out of the bunch, built quite a bit like I expect Mark to end up.

Poor Blitz has an abscess on his coronary band that's made him ouchie walking around for the past couple days. It's a very treatable thing, but can be especially painful when it pops at the coronary band. Luckily, I've been told he's doing much better, but I still miss him.