Thursday lesson and some hilarity

The photos and videos you saw on my blog of Jana riding Mag were transferred to a USB stick (in the form of C3PO, how cool) that she gave me.

The stick was very small, so I went on a search in the barn/lounge, for an item to attach it to, like the gas stations do with their bathroom keys. I settled on a tiny European coffee cup.

I texted Jana, "I've left C3PO attached to a coffee cup in Maja's grain container. The cup is so she won't get accidentally fed the stick."

She replied, "Please also attach a note to it, "von Jana"." *sigh* OK then. I thought I'd gone to enough trouble. But also, why did she say "von" Jana? Von means "from" or "of" which makes sense, that it belongs to her, but since von also means from....well...

Personally I would have written "FOR Jana" but it wasn't my choice.

I stuffed the note into the coffee cup.

The next morning Jana arrived and I said, "Did you find your stick?"

She said, "It isn't in her food bin!"

Willy happened to be standing next to us at that moment, and he shouted, "There was a coffee cup in this feed bin this morning at 7 AM!"

I said, "See, I put it there, Willy is my witness!"

She said, "It's gone!"

Willy confirmed.

She ran to her tack locker, expecting to find it there. No, nothing.

She said, "It's gone!"

I was happy to have Willy as witness.

Jana texted Christina and told me Christina had taken the stick home with her, because, of course, it said, "FROM Jana" on it. Right. My German isn't great but I know the difference between for and from.

Of course the owner of the horse would see something labeled "from Jana" and assume it was hers for the keeping!

Or is German even less precise than the world thinks. (BTW, they have one word for she, you, and they. But 16 ways to correctly use the word "the", depending on case. How many of those 16 have I mastered?)

***

I approached Christina's trailer to do some training and saw one of its reflectors lying on the dirt. Oops. After our trailer session, where Mag was great and ate his bucket for 10 full minutes not offering to leave once....I found Willy.

Willy, can you help me? I held out the reflector. He pulled the expired double backed tape from it. I asked if he could help. He said, "How ironic, she just took her trailer in for inspection last week!" I wondered if the inspection has anything to do with reflectors but this is Germany, so probably yes.

Then Jana approached and I said, "Hey, will you please let Christina know (the owner of the horse she leases) that a reflector had fallen from her trailer. And Willy has it now."

And she came at me with her cell phone and said, "You tell her yourself." So I spoke into it, "Found on ground,..."

Then I realized she was *recording* me in some sort of voice mail program, and when I was done, she pressed a button, without taking it from my face, and my message started playing back to me. I said, "Stop it, please make it stop! My voice, my German!"

Then she said "I'll take a photo for her!" and asked Willy to hold the thing up.

He fished it from his pocket and put it against his forehead, which cracked us both up, as she took a photo for Christina.

Willy said, "I"m gonna go throw it in the trash now!"

Just to tease us, which for me, really worked, cuz it's not my trailer and I'd been using it 4 months and need to keep it blemish free.

He kept laughing at me, as he walked away.

***

Kati arrived and we had a great lesson with cones and poles. She asked me to do this cloverleaf pattern that Claudia had shown me (Claudia is her top student, according to her facebook page).

I told her what trouble we were having walking tight around cones, and then Mag proved me wrong as he did each one perfectly. I sighed, "OK I'm a liar.'

Then we did more trot/halt/trot transitions.

It was a very nice lesson, and she persists that Mag is having FUN with them. Hm!

I told her I appreciate how she does not nitpick me in my riding style, and she said, "I will only correct your riding if it negatively affects the horse." Ok then..

She said, "I have nothing to correct with you."

I must admit, I wondered after that if she's qualified to teach, because of her refusal to nitpick. Isn't it irresistible, for teachers to correct minutia?

Hm. I don't care about qualifications, after so many qualified have disappointed me. But I hope she can reach out of her ground-work box and offer people who sit on horses something.

***

Willy came at me grinning, "You know what Mag did?"

"They asked me to sign card from Moritz' owner with child. I had Mag in hand and I signed name, he grab the pen with mouth. I got the W and the I and then Mag wrote a large stripe across card, very funny, yes!?"

I said, "He is funny."

I looked at Mag standing with his head hanging between us....he is both funny and I feel he really loves Willy. 

I will miss Willy so much. He thinks of the horses as his colleagues, I can see that, every day. He approaches each and every boarder and tells them a little tidbit from their horses' day. He finds joy in it.

And when fences are kicked down, he smiles and fixes them. He sweeps every corner of the barn for wisps of hay. He shouted "Guten Appetit" to Mag today as he got his bucket. He loves them as if they were all his own.

The barn owner herself has a goldmine in this Polish immigrant.

I hope he's paid well, because I never see him take a day off. I know that if he didn't love it, he wouldn't engage us each and every one, "Do you know, what your horse did today!?" I've heard him say it so many times.

I was thinking of baking a batch of my famous chocolate chip cookies for the barn people who've helped me. I think I should get him something even better. Any ideas?

***

OK something negative. In the 4 months I've been there, 3 times I've found someone else's grain in Mag's trough. What? I have never failed to supply his vitamin/pellet ziplock that is fed twice daily. But even when I ask Willy, he has no idea why I'd find other horse's grain in my horse's bucket. It's usually oats or barley.

I am not angry about this, though I feel I deserve to be. Because how hard can it be to feed each horse the food that is literally attached to the front of its stall every day. How can you mix that up? But 3 times I've had it happen. Willy would not make that mistake. I have no idea.

It reminds me of the 20 years of boarding where I had zero control over what my horse ate every day, and that is kind of what we pay you for!

I wonder who got Mag's ration those days. Not that I'm angry, I'm just bewildered that it can happen, when each horse has its ration directly in front of its stall door.


***

Earlier in the day I worked at J's Opa's apartment, cleaning it and interacting with him. He was a POW in WW2 in Canada, so, he received the best treatment in the world, perhaps, of prisoners of war. Opa and I have a hard time communicating but I try so hard every week.

His in-home-health assistant arrived, and I didn't know her. I was taking apart his Schwebebahn models to dust underneath them, and the Eifell tower, and the Empire State building, and White house, to dust. And I started to wonder if they were to scale, each puzzle building (I'd put together the Empire State 3-D puzzle, but not the rest of them. As I stood there, wondering, the health care lady said "I can google it on my phone." YES!

Anyway, we figured out all the heights of all the buildings,  (and sadly for me, the Space Needle in Seattle is not nearly as high as the Eifell tower).

Then she said she grew up behind the Berlin wall in the 80s.

I just blanked out. What do I say, what do I ask?

Stupid American!

I asked her about those East German cars I'd read about with a 10 year waiting period for purchase, and why that was a problem. She explained it to me. No economy, and the state wanted to control them, public transport is better.

I asked if she's seen the movie "Goodbye Lenin" - where I learned the most about East German life in the 80s. She had. I asked her if it was true. It was.

How does one live behind a wall?

Feeling, I would hope, SAFE?

But, realistically, they couldn't give it that attribute.

I have no idea but I promise you next time I see her I will have better questions.

***

As I left the barn Willy held the reflector up in the air, "I'm gonna just throw it in the trash, are you afraid I will?"

I said, "Willy, I'm not afraid"

Then I drove home.

(And I will not miss this drive, not one little bit..)