A new week dawns...

...literally, if you look out my office window this time of the morning.

Welcome back, Andrew!! Long time no hear, er something like that. ;) I hope that your move-in was pleasant and fairly uneventful (as in injuries, deaths, dismemberments, etc.) Oh, and by the way, happy birthday (a few days late.)

So, I spent the weekend in Heber City at Kristin's grandpa's property. We went there to spend time with him and to ride the horses. I was really excited to ride, but soon after starting, I realized that I was in a bad situation. My horse, Raindance, was a bouncy horse and I had the saddle from hell. It was a very uncomfortable hour or so. My legs felt like they were being twisted right off at the knee and I bounced all over on the way down the hill. Raindance also has this thing about being in the lead. If he's not in the lead, then he freaks out and tries to run to get in the lead. When you're as inexperienced as I am at riding horses, it kind of freaks you out when the horse decides to run. So needless to say, I don't think that Raindance was very happy with me at the end of the ride because I kept pulling on his reigns to slow him down. I think, based on this experience, that I'm better at controling poorly-tuned motorcycles than horses. But, if I have a better saddle, I'm more than willing to give it another try. It's funny getting off the horse when you're not used to it because your legs feel like Jell-O under you. :)

Also, during the weekend, we had to wash the horses. Oh my word, that's a funny sight. Kristin simply grabbed the horses by the halter in one hand and sprayed them with a hose in the other hand. The horses hate being sprayed and so the run around in a circle trying to get away from the hose. Spraying their face is really funny too. The monster horsefly that kept bugging us was not so funny. They make the horses jump around because they hurt when the bite.

On a geeky note, I did get a full Unix system running on my Windows machine last Thursday. No, this is not Linux and it's not virtual machine. It's a project called Cygwin and it's a port of most packages available to Unix over to the Win32 platform. It's so complete that I can run a full X desktop on Windows. One thing to note: because it's not native Unix, Cygwin may not be as stable as, say, SVR6, or BSD/OS.

Da Da Da