Happy Trails

We hit the trails, on horseback, one auspicious afternoon when it was not too hot, for an hour's ride in the Brown County State Park.  I vaguely remembered, or perhaps falsely remembered, having mounted once before, but it was probably before moving to the U.S.  I got myself fitted up for the occasion, donning my cowgirl hat and my "fire-engine-red" cowgirl boots, so described by our guide somewhat jealously.  We were told two basic maneuvers - right or left turn by pulling slightly on the rein accordingly, and then, off we trotted in an orderly procession, one horse's nose behind another's butt, so to speak.  I was assigned a horse named Sam; later on I learned that he tended to misbehave by snacking on the greenery along the way.  Sure enough, he would snap some branches off the scrubs once in a while and munch at his leisure.  The trails through the park were not all on smooth turf or gravel, there were some rough patches of mud, steep inclines, and down slopes.  A couple of times, Sam sidetracked us from the trails to get at some juicy bits of leaves in rather precarious conditions.  The guide hollered at me from the front to pull him back, saying with some encouragement, "You can do it, Cowgirl!"  Kirk said that Sam had "got my number" -- and could do anything he wanted with me.  When we got back, no sooner did I dismount, Sam let off a heavy jet of pee -- I barely got away in time.  

Happy Trails

Felix Holt, The Radical

The book, Felix Holt, The Radical, by George Eliot just came out as an audiobook available for free download in the Internet Archive website here or LibriVox's catalog here.  (Both sites have their eponymous free apps for convenient listening.)  George Eliot has such an extraordinary range of observation, power of description, and understanding of human aspirations and foibles that in reading her books one gets a vivid impression of the life, mostly in small towns, in 19th Century England.  I had not read Felix Holt before so it was a real pleasure to get to listen to the book for the first time.  I recorded four chapters for the book, not all in consecutive order.  If you listen to the whole book from the beginning, you can easily pick out my parts; they stick out like sore thumbs.  I hope they don't ruin your listening experience.  These are my first forays into reading for audiobooks; I hope I get better at it with practice.

p.s.: If you can, please consider giving to LibriVox.  Thank you.