About like that...
Carriages have turned into such a novelty that people have wholly forgotten that A) horses are living, breathing, thinking animals and B) they don't have that German-engineered finely tuned precision steering that your BMW does. Also, they're sort of slow. So when you see a carriage in front of you in whatever downtown you happen to be in at the time, please remember to PAY FUCKING ATTENTION TO WHERE THAT CARRIAGE IS GOING. If the carriage is half in a turn lane when you come flying up on the back of it, they're probably going to be turning and is moving into position. This does not mean your correct response should be to try and squeeze in between the carriage and the curb. And especially not at speed.
Even Picard and Riker know that.
No, I'm really serious here. It's like meth. Don't do it, not even once.
But that's exactly what happened last night and I about died of a heart attack. The horse nearly died of a V8 engine. Luckily, thankfully, there was *just* enough room and I was frantically hauling back on the reins as fast as I could to both stop and get the horse stepped over, but please refer to the above part about not being a finely tuned etc. etc. so no equine to fiberglass contact was made, but it was damn close.
And then there's that whole Occupy Everywhere thing going on, right? I don't much get into politics on this blog, BSL being the the rare exception and I'm not going to start now as to where I stand on the whole issue. However, last night I was keeping a very close eye on my Twitter feed about the whole issue, because where the protesters were massed was not all that far from where we park in between rides and was definitely on one of the most popular routes. So when I started seeing tweets mentioning that the riot police had started trashing everything and forcibly shooing people out of the park, things got a little tense. An unknown amount of riled up people were now marching through a semi-confined area on 16th St. Mall and it could turn pretty ugly, pretty quickly. We ended up bailing as soon as we could hear the shouting, mostly to save the horses the trouble of getting spooked.
Downtown Denver is never boring, to say the least.
I know I said driving carriage was going to provide a lot of blog fodder and that's true. However, this is the last post about carriage driving I'm going to be able to write. After the episode with the car, combined with the fact that things are only going to get busier as the holidays approach and the reality that downtown and my ADD just won't work together (I hate driving a car downtown for the same reasons and try to avoid it at all costs), I talked with the owner and quit.
Moar stress? Do Not Want.
Sinister, part of a family photo shoot I did the other week and will talk about in a later post.
Thankfully, I was able to do it in such a way--and I had made a good enough personal impression with her--that we parted on good terms (she's still going to be my Scentsy customer!) and the offer stands for me to come back and try again should I ever feel the urge. I love horses, I think carriage driving is fun, but I can't take the stress and pressure of driving downtown. I have it too ingrained in my head that people have a sense of self-preservation, that people in cars pay attention to details such as a half a horse sticking into their lane. Silly me! I don't know how the Amish do it these days, driving on the side of friggin' highways. Hats off to them!
I finished out the night and did all the usual end-of-night stuff, pushing my carriage back into place, cleaning the harness, all that stuff. Turns out it's a really good thing it was the last night, because in the course of all that, I threw my shoulder out. Again. This whole "getting old, healing slower, getting nagging injuries" really blows hard, y'know? I was looking forward to getting to play Ultimate Frisbee again for about the 5 minutes between quitting and realizing what that "pop" in my shoulder signified. I'm hoping that I'll be able to play Spring league, as Fall league is now shot.
In the meantime, I've got some photo gigs coming in, Scentsy is picking up quite nicely and I just interviewed for a supervisor position at a new pet food store that's opening up about 15 minutes from me. If I'm going to have to work outside the house this winter, at least I won't have to drive far to do so and won't have to actually be, you know, outside. And I'm pretty stoked about the fact that I'll have my weekends back again!
More time for me!
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