While searching for a photograph of Dr. Dobson and a horse in an MRI scanner at the vet hospital in Guelph (for the vet book), found this photo of me in my Pony Express uniform in Nevada. This is one of my all time favourite photographs, taken by publicist Jan Mansfield. I was riding up to one of the many schools we visited across the state, mochila slung over the saddle, letters from BC students tucked inside the mailbags ready to be delivered to Nevada students. These children were playing outside when I arrived on Breezy, the half-Arab mare we bought in Nevada to ride along sections of the old Pony Express trail. The children spotted us and dropped everything to race across the playground, yelling, "Hey, cowboy!" I still can't quite believe that we made that crazy trip.... it's only when I stumble across photos like this one that I know we really must have been there. 

 
My basic nature is somewhat disorganized (anyone who has ever seen my office will be laughing right about now and saying, "Somewhat?")... This does make it tricky to keep track of all the image files for the three photographically-enhanced books I'm working on at the moment. I have them stored on three different computers (don't ask) and even though I have done a lot of sorting and transferring and filing, there are hundreds and hundreds of images to keep track of. So, I've been going through the photo files, selecting and sorting, as I get closer to finalizing what's going into the current books and what might be useful for future titles (like the ploughing photo posted yesterday).

Anyway, while going through all these work-related photos, I was reminded just how many non-work images are sitting on my hard drives. So, I thought I'd start posting one a day here in a more or less random, disorganized fashion.

This first one is even kind of seasonal, being a bit creepy and Halloweenish. This is one of the scarecrows entered in the annual scarecrow-making contest down at the Historical Artifacts place... 

   Posting this photo for no particular reason except that the blog is more interesting with less blathering and more visual effects. So, this was taken at the Historical Artifacts Park during the ploughing demonstration held earlier this summer. I really would like to do a book about the heavy horses and those who continue to love them despite the fact they've become more or less obsolete... Hopefully all these heavy horse photos I've been collecting won't all go to waste!

There aren't that many show-stopping hazards for the average storyteller, but laryngitis would certainly be one of them. Today was the BC Teacher-Librarian Association conference and I had two appearances to survive - the first, a panel with four Vancouver Island authors (Karen Rivers, Sheryl McFarlane, Kit Pearson, et moi...) moderated by former features editor of the Times-Colonist, Carolyn Heiman. This wasn't too bad - was able to suck on cough drops, speak softly, let the others talk a lot. Next was a quick lunch (minimal chatting required) followed by an author signing (again, much cough-dropping, water sipping, nodding... and, I might add... not much signing - lots of authors, lots of teacher-librarians, but not a whole lot of book-buying going on! Of course... they must all already have my books! Yes, that's it.)

Anyway, feeling like my head was encased in one of those old-fashioned diving helmets and my voice threatening to disappear again completely, I had to take the stage in the theatre and deliver a performance of the Marriage of Sir Gawain... Much stress. Huge relief that the microphone worked. With an intervention from the Gods of Story I got through it, though having been unable to do my usual neurotic rehearsing, it wasn't as tight a performance as I would have liked... And the venue (blinding lights shining in my eyes so I couldn't see the audience) was not the best for delivering a top notch performance. Storytelling is a very interactive, malleable, flexible kind of thing and when you can't see if the eyelids in the audience are open or drooping, it's hard to connect with the listeners.

The feeling is a bit like being alone in a shower and holding forth about something or other and then realizing there is actually nobody listening and having this horrible moment of self-consciousness that closes the throat and sets me to humming some inconsequential tune in a feeble attempt to reassure myself that I'm not losing my mind. This doesn't usually happen during a storytelling performance because when things are going well and I can see my audience properly, there's a lot of give and take - a conversation of sorts is going on so I really don't feel like I'm talking to myself.

But today, the strange combination of feeling a bit cut-off from everyone else in the room and having consumed far too much Tylenol and Echinacea and not doing my usual vocal warmups (with no voice, it seemed a bit pointless and I was seriously worried that I would use up whatever voice I might have had left) the whole thing was a bit of a psychadelic experience. As a final aside, it is very strange that this audience dissociative disorder doesn't really happen during a stage play - not just becuase usually one doesn't stand up there on the stage doing a very long monologue, but also because there's a script, whereas the story is a very fluid beast that can turn on the teller when the teller is feeling a little under the weather. I am guessing the feeling is more like hanging yourself out to dry as a stand-up comic - something I've always wanted to try but dread so much I've never bothered.

Good grief - what a ramble. After all that, came home and mucked out the paddocks, fed the horses, and then collapsed on the couch to sort of listen to the hockey game. I say sort of because I kept falling asleep. Did rouse myself to vertical position to hear the last 5 minutes of the game, followed by a heart-stopping 4:59 worth of overtime. And I'm glad I did because my beloved Canucks managed to pull out the win with only .7 of a second left to go!!!!!! Thank you, Sami Salo - you rock my world!

All of this was followed by an absolutely delicious dinner prepared by Dad who, entranced by France, cooked some scrumptious beef/onion/garlic/red pepper-laced rich sauce served up with herb-crisped roasted poatoes. Yum!

You won't believe what arrived in my mailbox today! A small package, lumpy and bizarre-feeling, containing - ta-da! - a hoofpick signed by none other than the amazing Gail Greenough. Just in case you are not falling on the floor with astonishment, here's a brief bit stolen from Wikipedia about Ms Greenough...

Gail E. Greenough (born March 7, 1960) is a Canadian equestrian. She was the first woman, the first Canadian, the first North American and the youngest person ever to win the World Show Jumping Championships. Greenough was champion in 1986 at Aachen, riding a horse called Mr T (Hann). In 1990, she was made a Member of the Order of Canada.

Wow. Just wow. And how did this amazing treasure (which, btw, will never go anywhere near the filth inside a horse hoof...) wind up in my mailbox? Turns out my sister, Tonya, is doing a little barn work where the illustrious (can you tell she is one of my heros? heroines?) Gail Greenough herself rides... I can only think that Tonya slipped the appropriate horse an extra-big carrot... or swept the outside of a certain stall extra thoroughly... or squirreled a crisp $50 in the right grooming box... Do I care exactly how this came to be? Not really. So thank you thank you thank you Tonya! And thank you thank you thank you Gail Greenough!

So what could be harder than cutting 30% out of a manuscript? How about getting rid of everything EXCEPT 25%? Yup, that's the situation in which I find myself with the Karen Brain biography. So I'm diligently taking my 180 page manuscript and hacking away at it so I am left with approximately 45 pages. This so we can include plenty of photos throughout without breaking the bank. The length will actually wind up being very similar to the BTS books and will definitely put the finished book firmly in the land of books for 8-12 year-olds.

The good news is that Sono Nis would like me to do a second version of the biography, for adults and teens. The bad news on that front is that the original 180 pages are written for a younger audience and the manuscript isn't really long or detailed enough to satisfy an adult reader. I'll have to go back to my original interviews to pull out more details, conduct more research/interviews, and then have another crack at the longer book. In related (nearly awful) news, I came into the living room the other day only to discover the dogs had gone through my briefcase. For whatever strange reason, they decided that my digital voice recorder and [expensive!] Sony microphone were snack-worthy... Shards of digital debris everywhere! LUCKILY - I think I have everything downloaded from the recorder as I can't get anything to turn on and even if I could get any kind of turning on action, there is no data screen left! Also fortunate, the batteries were wedged in pretty tightly so even though the criminal hounds had removed the battery door, the batteries only show a couple of superficial tooth marks but no battery acid was consumed.

All of this trauma makes me very, very glad that I always take copious notes during an interview, just in case of equipment failure just like this!

So, how much cutting have I done so far? Not quite enough, but impressive nonetheless. Karen is post-op and about to move into Parkwood Rehabilitation Hospital and I'm only on page 48! So, the last section (recovery and getting to the Olympics) will be handled in the next section and that will give me a much reduced new first draft to work with. The next sweep should get me pretty close to where we need to be lengthwise for the draft that will [finally] get to my editor, Laura Petoum, in Toronto. For the short version, anyway. It looks like I'll be agonizing over the longer book for a while yet. Sorry. But if I have to suffer like this, it only seems right that blog-readers share my pain!

Of course, I couldn't send my only child off into the world without a hug... and a project. Visit Where is My Hug? and follow the progress of the hug I sent off around the world... The idea is to keep passing the hug along until it gets all the way around the planet and back to me! This is my small gesture in aid of world peace. I wonder who will bring my hug back home?

Whew! A busy few days getting Dani ready to head off for Dani's Big Adventure in Tokyo! (You can follow her progress at Dani's travel blog...).

Happy Thanksgiving!
Spent the morning at work on the Karen Brain biography (more on THAT when I'm not quite so tired), the afternoon working on Ringo (one of my horses currently in training), and the evening feasting at the Canoe Club. Who says salmon isn't an appropriate Thanksgiving menu item? Here on the mellow west coast, anything goes. Late evening spent adding more books to my LT catalogue - now over 600 titles, but who's counting?

In my last post I mentioned some slashing and hacking happening in the BTSAT Racetrack book. It may sound a bit dramatic to be chopping out a third of the book, but it's actually pretty normal. We cut at least that out of Jo's Journey, a way more difficult task as that was a work of fiction and it's kind of tricky to excise big chunks of a story without things feeling rushed or choppy. In the case of Jo's Journey, we needed the length to fit within the Orca Young Readers format. These are short novels with a large typeface intended to encourage readers who may still be feeling a little intimidated by fat novels. The books also include a few interior illustrations. Interestingly, Orca doesn't restrict content or vocabularly, so these aren't really hi-los, but rather, they're just short. Granted, in a short, short novel there isn't a whole lot of room for sub-plots, but it's amazing what one can fit into a little book like that.

The Behind-the-Scenes book is being cut for slightly different reasons. F&W is publishing the book in full colour with lots of photographs. The design is also supposed to be nice and open, with lots of white space on each page, plenty of sidebars and so on. I can't tell you how delighted I am with these decisions. A non-fiction book for horse-loving kids should have lots of photos of horses and horse stuff... and these days, black and white just doesn't cut it any more. Neither does a cluttered design with great long blocks of dense text. The plan for the book is all fine and dandy aesthetically speaking, but there are very real fiscal restraints at work. The cost of printing a full colour book, even offshore, is high and the costs rise with each signature added. Meanwhile, back at the retail end of things, there is only so much a consumer will pay for a book. If the book is for children, that amount drops. So..., despite the fact my original manuscript (pushing 100 pages) went down very well (remember an earlier post in which I said the editor felt we could proceed directly to the copyedit?) it was just too long.

Rather than slashing whole chapters (that would have been too easy!), I pruned the designated 30% evenly from the entire text. The first 5-10% was easy - most manuscripts easily contain that much fat in the guise of adjectives, repetition, passive verbs, and sentences that can be easily rewritten. The next pass was a little tougher - that's when each sentence is examined to see if it is really necessary, how much it adds to the text, if there is some way to combine one section with another to get the same information across. Another 10-15% was lost with that kind of process. The final cuts were hardest (by this time, I'd already lost 25 pages from the manuscript and it really felt like there wasn't anything else to lose!). Red pen in hand and bandaids close by, back through the manuscript I went again, removing some stuff I really liked but which wasn't, strictly speaking, absolutely necessary. On this draft I did quite a bit of shifting of information out of the body text and into slightly longer captions, getting rid of any duplication that might have existed between the captions and the text. The final section (additional resources) I cut completely, thinking that perhaps we could incorporate that into a teacher guide or on the website (which reminds me, I must get Dani to add a new section to my website. She has been busily re-designing it as the design was really looking pretty old and tired).

So at the end of it all, I have a much leaner manuscript that still has plenty of information for kids curious about life at the racetrack. Now we'll see what the editor thinks!

Ok... I have developed a serious new addiction... Cataloguing my library. I justify this activity by telling myself that I really should root out my duplicates and pass them along to worthy causes, but really, I am just having a blast going through my shelves, discovering old friends, dipping, browsing, stroking, and perusing.

If you, too, feel the need to tackle the stacks and stacks of books with which you are surrounded, set yourself up over at LibraryThing, possibly the best site to distract me in years. I'm trying to figure out a way to link my library to this blog... if you don't see an assortment of covers anywhere around, head over to library thing and search for BiblioFool - that would be me! Say hi. Start entering your library...

In case you are one of my editors, I only engage in data entry AFTER I've done my actual real work for the day... Fear not! Managed to cut the track manuscript by 30%, as requested. Hack. Slash. Gut. All in a day's work!

Ok... after a bit of fiddling and testing, it seems like if you click on any of those covers up there you will be taken to amazon where you may purchase said title (so you can then catalogue said book in your library and we will have a book in common and, as it happens, I will make a teeny weeny commission...). Click on the words 'my library' in green, and you will be taken to, yup, my library over at Library Thing where you can poke around through the books I've catalogued so far (I broke 500 this evening). See you in the stacks!

Visitors to the Mary Winspear Centre in Sidney made pom-poms with Coast Salish knitter, May Sam. The artwork in the background is by Joan Larson and was used in Yetsa's Sweater. 

Sylvia Olsen modelled some fine items of Cowichan knitting during a presentation to students from Deep Cove Elementary School. Her antics were part of the weeklong book launch of Yetsa's Sweater. May Sam, seated nearby, shared her own stories of learning to clean the fleeces, card, spin, and knit the wool during a lifetime spent working with wool. Children learned to make pom-poms in the same style that May made them when she was little. The artwork hanging in the background is by Joan Larson, the illustrator for the book. The machine peeking out from behind Sylvia is a spinner, made from a modified treadle sewing machine.

Chasing the Moon is Penny Chamberlain's new work of historical fiction for young readers. I mention it here while wearing my Freelance Publicist's hat to let everyone know to attend the book launch this weekend.

Details:
Sunday, October 1st
1-4pm
Mary Winspear Centre
Victoria, BC

Penny's book is one of two being featured in a weeklong series of school visits, public displays, signings, and launches organized and hosted by Sono Nis Press (the second book is Sylvia Olsen's new picture book, Yetsa's Sweater - I'll post a cover scan in a minute). Big publishers take note! This kind of all out support and promotion of new titles is rare, rare, rare and is yet another reason why I appreciate the work of Sono Nis. The books are gorgeous and Diane Morriss throws herself behind every title she produces. She really is the heart and soul behind the 'little press that could' even when the publishing industry in Canada suffers its share of troubles.

And here it is, Yetsa's Sweater by Sylvia Olsen and illustrated by Joan Larson (the same artist who will be doing the new StableMates covers, in fact!) Yetsa's Sweater is a lovely book about the tradition of making Cowichan Sweaters. Sylvia's launch will be on Thursday evening (Sept. 28th from 7-9 pm) at the Mary Winsear Centre. May Sam (the model for the grandmother in the illustrations) will be on hand doing some sweater-making demonstrations. Yetsa (Sylvia's grand-daughter) will be there being both cute and famous, and Joan Larson (along with a selection of her artwork) will also be in attendance. Come one, come all! Should be a great time... If I get myself organized, I'll take photos and post them here, so you can see what you're missing! 

Can you identify this bird? A raptor is about as much as I know... The photo was taken above a vineyard near Cobble Hill on Vancouver Island earlier this year (they day we took Dad out for a tasty wine-enhanced lunch for Father's Day). I'm mostly uploading this as a test of my internet connection from my laptop and apparently the most recent photos stored here aren't that recent. I kind of like the photo, though - I got quite dizzy the day I took it as I was sort of stumbling along with the camera pointed straight up, one eye closed, the other peering through the viewfinder, trying to catch the bird as it soared above me... Hmmm... that really doesn't sound good, does it. Seriously, I only had a very small quantity of wine... not really enough to result in stumbling across the vineyard, dizzy and unable to identify the local birds. 

One of the (many, many) strange things about life is its persistent nature. After someone dies, life keeps on going for everyone else even though it seems impossible that this could be true. I know, every armchair philosopher on the planet has mulled over this whole mortality business - but I must say that despite knowing my mother's death was coming (she was ill for a long time), the finality of her passing has left me in a bit of a surreal daze.

This was not helped at all by a peculiar moment today at the Threshing Festival at the Historical Artifacts Park down the road. Dad was volunteering there and I popped in to say hi and check out all the cool steam-driven engines that were hissing and chugging and clanking and whooshing away...

The museum is a pretty cool place to hang out - very casual, lots to see. The model train people also use the property and they had their small trains running (large enough for people to sit on, though the engines barely come up to my knees). At some point, I started wandering around in the hidden corners of the place where the as-yet-unrestored bits and pieces of machinery, old wagons, tools, sawmills, ploughs, and other amazing stuff are stuffed into sheds and barns and shelters and I had this flashback to driving around to old farms in Alberta with Mom.

She spent hours and hours and hours poking around decaying homesteads, photographing rusty ploughs and rotting vehicles and I started seeing things completely differently.

Next thing I knew I was grovelling around underneath some horsedrawn carts, snapping away, having something like an out-of-body/not-my-memory experience as I imagined what Mom would have photographed had she been there.

These wheels are part of the series photographed while I was feeling a little lightheaded...

New author photo?
Well, it's been quite a week... With our family gathered from all corners of the globe, it wasn't long before someone suggested we dig out the boxes of old photos (my mother was quite the photographer, so we have lots and lots and lots of pictures to look at!). This one of me was taken in Surfer's Paradise in Australia in about 1967. I'm looking pretty stylish, don't you think? I'm thinking it might work as an author photograph.... 

WILLIAMS, Helga, (nee Wallraf) (The Word Lady), was born in Halle, Germany October 10, 1939 and passed away on September 6th at the Saanich Peninsula Hospital after a lengthy illness. Helga is survived by her husband, Colin, daughters Nicole and Tonya (Bart), sons Peter and Sascha (Peta), and grandchildren Danielle, Brittney, Cydney, Alysha, and Toby as well as her sister, Hanni (Wolfgang).

A love of travel took Helga around the world and back, always seeking new adventures. She and her family lived in England, Australia, and the United States and, after immigrating to Canada in 1969, Banff, Calgary, Fort McMurray, Vancouver, Salt Spring Island, and Victoria.

A professional photographer and writer (in addition to many articles and columns she was also the author of Wordplay, illustrated by her husband and published by Sono Nis Press), Helga was also a fabulous teacher. Her photography and ESL classes were not just informative, they were also a great deal of fun. A Scrabble champion and founder of the Victoria Scrabble Club, Helga’s knack for knowing just the right word was legendary. Victoria residents enjoyed her CFAX appearances and looked forward to her Wordplay columns in the Times Colonist. Helga’s weekly “International House of Music” broadcasts on CJOK radio in Fort McMurray entertained listeners for several years.

Helga’s sense of humour and love of life will be much missed. A passion for music was a constant in her life and not long after her move to Victoria she became a member of the Gettin’ Higher Choir in Victoria. The choir, the music, and the friendships she developed in this community of song played a central role in her life in recent years.

The family would like to thank all the staff in ECU at the Saanich Peninsula Hospital for their dedication and many kindnesses.

In lieu of flowers, donations, if desired, may be made to the Gettin’ Higher Choir Scholarship Fund – Helga’s Legacy, 1305 Bond Street, Victoria, BC V8S 1C3.

If you knew my mother and would like to visit her online guestbook to leave a comment, here is the link.

Aly and Dani hanging out in the hay mangers of the horse trailer at last weekend's horse show in Sooke (Behind the Scenes at the Horse Show?). This was Aly's first show - she and her pony Emma (peeking out over the ramp) competed in pole bending, trail class, English pleasure, English equitation, tack and turnout, and barrel racing - all in the leadline division. This means that a very hot, huffy-puffy Auntie Nikki did a lot of running around in the sun at the other end of the leadline while Aly chortled and bounced her way through all her classes. Great fun for all and Aly came home with a fistful of ribbons and two trophies! Quite a haul! 

Clydeslades at the Saanich Fair! Team Bickford at work! 

Perhaps one day these fellas will make it into a book on draft horses? I love these heavy horses - there is just something, you know - hefty - about them!

Good news on Friday (before I headed off to the fair with a single Clyde from Bodicea shoe-horned into my two-horse trailer...) - things are going well on the racetrack book. Apparently the cover design is coming along nicely (it's tough to try to capture various types of racing, back-stage type stuff and all that while still looking sharp enough that a kid will pick the book up). Can't wait to see it! I also learned that unlike my earlier impression that the whole book was being designed before the text was finalized, actually just a single double spread was being worked on so everyone gets a good idea of what the book is going to look like. Meanwhile, over on the editing front, it doesn't sound like there will be major changes to the text, so we are heading fast toward the copy-editing stage. It's always exciting when things move ahead and the book starts to become more real. Of course, copy-editing can mean some tedious, nit-picky changes that seem very innocent but that can cause a huge amount of work to resolve. I recall a certain question raised by an editor about the actual eyebrow colour of redheads. My 'copper-coloured' description was deemed 'unlikely' by the editor, so I wound up doing an exhausting investigation involving many hair salons... My favourite response from a stylist (who clearly thought I was a bit soft in the head for asking) was, "That's a really silly question. Everyone knows red-headed people don't have eyebrows." Oh really? I have had many beg to differ since.

Meanwhile on the vet book... all is going smoothly. First draft text is just about done on that and the last of the photo shoots are being set up. So I think I need another book to work on... perhaps it's time my thoughts turned to Africa? More on that project soon...

Of course, there is Double Take to finish up. Karen's biography is missing only the last few interviews with coaches, etc. but then it can go off for editing - and then maybe Hollywood? Karen is competing in an Olympic qualifier over on the mainland this weekend - looking forward to hearing results next week when she gets back.

An on a final horsey note, congratulations to Canada for bringing home the gold in Aachen at the World Equestrian Games in Reining! Woooo hoooo!

Dani at Newcastle Island...

So, I just had some great news! Joan Larson has started to work on the StableMates covers! I've been thinking a lot about what makes a good cover during the past few days as there has been quite a discussion about that topic on a children's literature discussion list I subscribe to. Apparently, the gods (and goddesses) of publishing were also reading the thread! I can't wait to see what Joan comes up with!

Another day at the office! 

I love my job! One of the sidebars in Behind-the-Scenes With a Horse Vet deals with telling the age of a horse by its teeth. To illustrate this point, Dani and I visited the ever-gracious folks at Bodicea Farm to take some photos. What luck that their little (not!!) Clydesdale baby, Thistle, still has his milk teeth.

Being the sweet, tractable creature that he is, Thistle was happy to oblige as we pulled his lips this way and that, trying to get a good camera angle that clearly shows the teeth. What a sweet, sweet baby!

For good measure (and another chapter entirely) we also photographed his hernia. Because this is a G-rated blog, I won't post the photo.

After the baby pictures were done, off we went to find a more geriatric specimen for comparison. Tony, my old Anglo-Arab seemed like a good bet. He's on loan to Bodicea for a little while where he is helping teach new riders the ropes. He was much less cooperative (older and wiser, I think he thought we had a tube of wormer tucked away somewhere) but his chompers were most excellent in a particularly gnarly kind of way.

Tony's teeth.

And here's another fine set owned by an older mare called Smudges. No need to pull her lips apart to get a peek in her mouth! This old girl grins on command!

We were on such a roll we took pictures of cracked hooves, scrapes, bangs, and gashes and a couple of good scars. The medicine chest, feed room, hay pile, and water buckets were also duly documented. Several willing models mucked out, groomed, and trained horses. We even managed to snap the quintessential shot of a heap of healthy manure. What a brilliantly productive day! To see more of our handiwork and how we will squeeze all these photos into a book about vets you'll just have to place an order for the book...

The view from Newcastle Island, looking back toward Nanaimo. Yeah, we live in paradise. I know. Most days I do remember... (The reddish, gnarly trees in the foreground are called madronas or arbutus trees). 

When Dad and I went up-island to pick up Dani after her vaulting clinic, we all spent a couple of nights in Nanaimo, enjoying a mini-vacation. Aren't we doing a good impression of being tourists? In this photo we're on the little boat that shuttles visitors from Nanaimo over to Newcastle Island.

It so happened that we were in town during the Parksville Sandcastle Competition, so of course we had to drive up and have a peek (and, of course, those photos are on the other camera, the one I haven't downloaded yet). The sculptures were amazing - so detailed and intricate. We were there during the final stage of the sculpting (the artists are timed and then all the creations are judged) and it was great to see the sculptors hard at work, shaping their piles of sand into castles, dragons, and complex plumbing.

Other highlights of our time away included Coombs, a tiny town famous because of the goats that live on the roof of the local market. So famous are these goats that the highway information sign just says, "Goats on the Roof."

Dani continues to defy gravity and good sense by flinging herself this way and that while sort of attached to a horse - while wearing slippers! She has that same look in her eyes she used to get when she was in gymnastics and determined to stick a back handspring on the beam (why would anyone want to do such a nutty thing?) or perfect her splits or do some ludicrious release thing on the uneven bars. And, yes, there is a competition looming in her future that is upping the ante and driving her to practice more and more and more... on the living room floor, straddling the back of the couch, hanging from the vaulting horse she brought home from the clinic (not a real horse - more like an oversized saw-horse complete with handles, stirrups, and a soft carpeted back....). . Provincial Vaulting Championships are a coming in September - stay tuned!

Meanwhile, back on the work front... I'm gathering various bits and pieces of information and quotes to add to the Karen Brain biography - none of that is too difficult, but it does take a certain amount of coordination to get emails and phonecalls sorted out and followed up. Meanwhile, the first draft of the Racetrack book is with the editor and designer simultaneously. Now this is an interesting way to do things - usually we finalize the text first and then the designer decides how it will all be arranged on the page. I think because production timelines are tight and there are so many images a rough layout is being worked on that will (I hope) be fairly easy to change when the text is modified. While the Racetrack title is on hold (from my perspective, anyway), and I'm waiting for replies to my Karen questions, it's off to work on the vet book (Behind-the-Scenes With the Equine Vet - same series at the track title). All is going smoothly on that one, though I now have to get serious about arranging some photo shoots. Will post some of the results here, most likely before the end of the week.

Everything would have been just a little further along except last week was hay week and, as the old saying goes, one makes hay while the sun shines. Nearly 400 bales of the stuff, in fact! I was lucky enough to get a fabulous deal on some very nice hay from a farm near Lake Cowichan. The catch was we had to drive up to the farm and pluck the bales out of the fields! We took the truck and horse trailer up several times, loading both until they were literally overflowing with bales. Then, of course, we had to unload the bales and stack them (up into the rafters) in the neighbour's barn (I don't have much storage here at our place!). My shoulders and back are so sore, but my horses (and the goats) are extremely happy. Now, as long as the size of the herd stays more or less the same, we should make it right through until haying starts again next summer. This means I'll be able to avoid paying three (or more!!) times the price for hay when I have to go searching in the dead of winter. I tell you, though, I sure admire anyone who makes a living from the land. The work is brutal and it can all go terribly wrong with a shower on the wrong afternoon or a drought when a little water is needed most.

Dani is developing a serious obsession with BIG horses. Here she is astride a rather hefty specimen owned by the Bickford family. There was a good reason we were taking photos of this beauty - Dad is painting a mural on the side of a tram known as 'The People Mover" at the Saanich Historical Artifacts Society. Subject of said mural is a pair of horses ploughing... and, it turns out, the Bickfords donated the people-mover. So, it only made sense that we were there snapping photos from all angles so Dad would have plenty of good reference material. What doesn't make sense is how one of the photographers suddenly found herself astride! While wearing a short skirt, no less.

Dad and I head up to Nanaimo tomorrow to retrieve the mad vaulter from a week-long clinic she's been attending. We had a frantic call from Dani this evening who said, "Bring the truck!" Apparently she has procured a vaulting barrel, an essential device on which vaulters practice when there's no horse handy. It could have been worse, I suppose. She could have said, "Bring the horse trailer!"