Finn went xc schooling with Hilda

He went to rocking horse and was a good boy. Grown up Isabelle gave him a lead over most things and he went through the water, jumped his first ditch (Hilda said he jumped it every time like a Rolex ditch, never quite trusted in no alligators), and several other fences. He is now signed up to do dressage and SJ at the RH schooling show and school XC with me there and then do his first event at Ocala 2. I head down with my car this week. Yeah!

About to re-become the Florida Chronicles

Finn heads down on Friday! I start visiting in January. It has gotten rather cold here, so I am looking forward to it for that reason as well as all the others. I finished my running goal, doing all 10 Rock 'n' Roll events. I just dropped off the resulting 19 medals with Medals4mettle.com in the hopes that someone facing real challenges will enjoy them.

9 down, 1 to go

Ran the Rock 'n' Roll San Antonio over the weekend. Nice city, though I wasn't crazy about the race. Met a very cool woman named Tia Harrison on the plane back. She is from Chicago, working on 50 state marathons and has some very nifty fund raising ideas. She has also won a woman manager of the year award and runs a business with her husband and has 3 kids who all run too! Running, like riding, is a fun way to add to your life community.

Finn continues to do well. He appears to have grown a bit, was pretty butt high for a while, but looks more even now. Had a fun hill work yesterday, though the gnats were out, leading to the "dolphin-canter" up the first hill (one buck, one canter stride - feels like you might imagine riding a dolphin would). Keebler is settled in Michigan with Lynn Cronin. Hard to imagine a better place for him and she seems to be enjoying him, and totally onto dealing with his, as she says, "8 year old boy antics" I look forward to hearing about their progress. Meanwhile, in Florida, Hilda has put Isabelle back into work. We're not sure how thrilled she is about that (Belle, not Hilda), but I'm looking forward to eventing her along with Finn in the winter. Almost time to start looking at schedules. I'll be down there this weekend, so will get to make plans with Hilda and ride the girl. Wish I had unlimited time and money as there are so many really cool horses available right now. It would be fun to buy 4 and just ride for a year (assuming that unlimited time and money thing)

Lottsa

The SMDM meeting was held in Hollywood October 17-22. I am now a member of the board, which is a huge honor and affords opportunities to be even more involved. We also got to visit the family while in Southern California.

I attended my Stanford 25th reunion October 23-25th. It was great seeing the campus and catching up with some classmates and faculty members. If I can figure out how to get photos from my phone to my computer, I will add a couple.

Finn continues to improve. His flatwork is getting very good and moderately consistent. Better in the indoor, where there is less that he wants to lift his head up to look at, but he remains unphased by all kinds of things, including the totally Hitcockian birds that hang by the hundreds in the trees beside the arena and then on some unknown signal, simultaneously fly across the arena into some other tree. We had a lesson Saturday and he ended up jumping through a little grid (2 trot poles, cross-rail, one stride to rail, bounce to plank vertical, two strides to small vertical) perfectly multiple times, putting all of his fee down correctly each time, so that was exciting.

Too much rain, but love the lighter mornings now.

Expecting the Phillies to pull off the miracle, but glad that it is also football season and the Eagles seem to have pulled it together following the totally embarrassing loss to Oakland.

Two more half marathons to finish out the year.

Another PR at San Jose Rock 'n' Roll half. About 20 more improvements of this level and I will only be slow instead of really slow.

Back in Palo Alto

And loving it. Stanford beat UCLA 24-16. A good thing, as the Phillies lost to the Marlins tonight. Hopefully, the Rockies will win again. Yummy pasta at Lucy's place followed by online shoe shopping. Hopefully, the very brisk wind will die down before race time in the morning.

Fall appears to be here

Boy, it was chilly out at the barn this morning. Luckily Finn is as unaffected by cold weather as by everything else, including the recycling truck stopping right by the ring and dumping loud clattering cans and glass in, the dogs running around, the cat running through the trotting poles as we entered them. On the trotting pole front, he has totally figured them out and happily trots through on the first and all subsequent attempts. We are now working on being rounder and swinging from the shoulder as he goes through. Also doing jumps with ground poles in front and he is getting quite clever with his feet, though a bit lazy off the ground. On the other hand, when I pushed harder, he stepped in and then bounced the second pole and the vertical as a single element. Well, oops! But, we came back around and he did it perfectly. Grant deadlines at work, so that is pretty crazy. Also just got asked to review a paper that is a copy-cat of one of our papers. Gotta love this: The relevant paragraph:

In a 2008 study, Bristol et al. investigated the existence, content, and accessibility of seven work-life flexibility policies at the top ten medical schools in the United States: “maternity leave, paternity leave, adoption leave, extension of the probationary period for family responsibilities, part-time faculty appointments, job sharing, and child care.” Following on this work, our study aims to compare these same work-life flexibility policies at all 17 Canadian medical schools. We aim to gain insight into the degree to which Canadian medical schools support compromise between work-life balance and career development.

Bristol, et al refers to: http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/abs/10.1089/jwh.2007.0682