Cob Jockey

I actually took this picture to illustrate the fact that my favorite airline has pulled some oooooooooooooooold planes out of storage due to the 737-MAX grounding.  Airworthy but ugly!

Pets that also miss me

With boots that didn't zip and a Dressage saddle pad because I forgot I don't have a Dressage saddle right now and a too-big shirt and black reins with a brown bridle and and and

I like how the hair I left on his heel bulbs looks like a giant moustache

As you can probably tell by my lack of posting lately, I haven't had time to even see my horse recently, let alone ride.

For the first week of March, I was at my company's sales kickoff with 7,999 of my colleagues in Vegas.  Kickoff is the one time a year I get to meet co-workers in real life, and it was critically important to my career to introduce myself to as many people as possible, even if it was at midnight by the blackjack table.

(Who am I kidding, ESPECIALLY if it was at midnight by the blackjack table.  #techindustrylife)

Also #techindustrylife: they hired Imagine Dragons to play a private show, and I got pushed up to the front row by nice taller gentlemen who wanted to make sure I could see.

That led to getting almost no sleep all week, which led to my run-down immune system greeting a stomach bug with open arms starting Thursday night, which led to a hellish flight home on Friday, which led to epic jet lag on Saturday, which combined with daylight savings time making it a 4 hour time change instead of the usual 3 on Sunday made me feel just awful all weekend.


(But I'm not complaining about DST because YAY DAYLIGHT!)

Even though I still wasn't feeling great, I managed to drag myself out to the barn on Sunday, which was the first time I'd seen my horse in a week.  Have I mentioned lately how grateful I am for boarding care so good, I don't even have to check in while I'm traveling and everything is just fine?

So sleepy.  So cuddly.

Lifting the curry to groom him felt like an enormous, slow-motion task, so a productive ride wasn't happening.  But I figured just being on a horse would make me feel more like myself, so I tossed the bareback pad on, played the Cardinals spring training game radio broadcast, and we toodled.

As we toodled, I thought about how long it's taken to get this horse to this point: that even when I feel like crap with slow-mo reaction speed, and it's windy and the doors are banging against the indoor and he's not wearing a saddle, I can trust him to powerwalk on the buckle, neck rein, stop dead when I say 'whoa', and do it all cheerfully with his ears up the whole time.

Ears up!

It has taken a LONG. TIME. to get to this point.  But it means more to me than anything he could ever do in the show ring, because off and on for the rest of my career, I will have weeks like this one, where I haven't ridden consistently in weeks, showing seems like a distant memory, and I barely have the energy to unpack my suitcase.  Having a horse that cheerfully serves as a four legged couch when I need it and doesn't do anything stupid really, really matters to me. 

Thanks buddy, you're the best <3

All's quiet here right now.  After three months of not getting out of my pajamas for work, suddenly I'm traveling 2 or 3 days a week for six weeks in a row.  Kansas City, Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Green Bay.  Two of those are personal trips, but it's still travel.

Me standing in front of my parents' old apartment just outside of Kansas City, MO on a business trip last week

This isn't translating into a whole lot of saddle time, of course.  I am SO grateful to have a good BM/trainer who stays on top of blanket changes and puts quality rides on him while I'm gone.  Couldn't do this job without someone like that in my corner.

"Don't mind me, just over here self-entertaining while you're flying around the country."

Even though Connor is staying in shape, I feel like I have to relearn how to ride every time I go out right now.  Try to remember what we were working on last time I rode (the blog definitely helps with that).  Try to remember WTF I do with all these body parts that I swear I knew how to use a couple weeks ago...!

Back on Track season has begun

I could get stressed about that, but instead I'm zen.  This job is still my dream job and it's always going to be unpredictably cyclical like this.  I'm lucky to travel on two weeks notice, most of the time it's more like a couple days notice.  The people that ask me to travel try their hardest not to make me travel if they can possibly avoid it, which is definitely appreciated.  Sometimes you just gotta get in a room with people though.

This is just that adult amateur life, knowing you'd make a ton of progress if you could ride 6 days a week and instead trading hour long rides for 20 minute trips out to snuggle him, pick his feet out, feed him cookies and go home! (The horse is not complaining, really!)

There's a very small cross-section of people who will be interested in the networking infrastructure powering a larger hunter jumper show, but I am one of those people, and this is my blog!


The Upperville Horse Show in Virginia has some pretty unique networking needs, which are powered by gear from my favorite networking vendor, Ubiquiti.  Here's an excerpt from the blog post about it:

Every year, an empty field in Virginia is transformed into a small city with tents everywhere.  The tents provide stabling for 500 horses, VIP seating and vendors.   Two large office trailers provide the room for servers and desks full of staff taking entries and keeping track of results on laptops.    Two video production trailers provide international live feed of the 5-6 video cameras covering the 4 separate show rings.  Each individual ride video is recorded, edited and packaged so the riders can later purchase them. 

Three giant video screens work as score boards, provide live video, and run sponsorship advertisements. 

Four starting gates (one of each ring) have to be connected to the network so the names of riders can be entered and relayed back to the servers keeping track of everything.   Free Wifi is provided at the VIP tents and the Press Tents. 

All of this is powered by a UniFi.

All of the above generates a ton of traffic - a Terabye of WAN traffic in a week as shown below is ridiculous.


They basically have to create an enterprise-grade network out in the middle of a field, once a year, for a week, which is crazy.  Enterprise grade anything related to computers doesn't just happen overnight like that.



For more behind-the-scenes tech footage of Upperville, click here for the entire blog post.

Thursday was my first chance to get out to the barn, and I had thought I would definitely ride that day - first day seeing my horse in almost two weeks.

BUT.

I'm not usually one to take photos from the air, but this thunderstorm/heavy rainstorm was super cool.

I was more jet lagged than I've ever been in my life.  I've done US to Europe and back a couple times, and I've done short trips to California before, but I've never gotten fully acclimated to Pacific time and then came back East.  Woof.  I actually took a nap over my lunch break because I felt like I couldn't go on #perksofworkingfromhome

This dog was pretty stoked about a midday nap.

So instead of trying to ride in that state, I went out to feed Connor cookies and got a bunch of stuff sorted at the barn that needed doing: cleaned out my tack locker, gave the horse a bath, brought out his SmartPaks, re-filled his fly spray, and performed some surgery on his grazing muzzle halter (more on that later).

Not the most flattering angle, but man he looks good right now.

It's good to be back!

Rocky agrees

Oh and we won this Dover contest.

Blue dot: my house.  Red pin: where Connor is now.  Yellow star at the very top of the photo: where Connor lived for five years.

Changed my whole year

So fat.

My job...is really hard.  That doesn't mean I don't like it, it's my dream job, but I've had to learn to be okay with a baseline level of stress in order to cope with it.  And occasional stress spikes.

A face that says "I might have just lost a million dollars in hardware and an entire virtual infrastructure and I wish I was someone else right now..."

But, that means when my job is awesome, I savor it and tuck it in my brain for later.  When my job is awesome, I take a few deep breaths and think "Damn, the tech industry is awesome," sip a glass of whatever alcoholic beverage is in my hand at the moment (because if there's one thing the tech industry does often and well, it's drink) and remind myself why I stay here.


Especially when 'here' is Churchill Downs during Derby week.  And a glass of Woodford on the rocks is in my hand, because, duh, Kentucky.

Every year my company rents out a big suite at Churchill and holds a massive event, where we invite our customers and our vendors.  The food is free, the booze is free, the swag and giveaways are plentiful, and everyone gets a voucher to get their feet wet with betting.  The entire city of Louisville basically never stops the party during Derby week, whether they care about racing or not, so it's very festive.

We also sponsor a race!

Our event was held yesterday, and it was the first time I've been invited, and oh man, it was awesome.  Beautiful weather, tons of socializing (some of it even productive work socializing that should end in $$), and ponies, so close to me!

Especially for the turf races.

This being Churchill during Derby week, the dress code was strictly enforced, depending on what part of the grandstand you were in.  For us, jeans, tennis shoes and athletic wear would get you turned away.  Dresses, blazers, sport coats, collared shirts, ties or bow ties, and nice shoes were highly recommended (though they noted you are allowed to wear comfy shoes to get to the suite, and then you have to change into nice shoes)  Many, but not all, women wore hats.


At the end of the day, after watching the entire card, we had to walk back to the parking lot because the shuttle wasn't running.  As I came out of the tunnel that goes under the track, My Old Kentucky Home started playing over the loudspeaker.  I immediately got chills and thought of my mom, for whom Churchill is like Mecca.  We've both been there separately now, we need to go together sometime!

Our suite was almost that entire green tent you can see behind Practical Joke in this Kentucky.com photo.

A pretty good day of work, all things considered!

I think this is the longest stretch of time I've ever gone without blogging, which Connor's breeder pointed out to me in a text this week.  She always looks out for me. :)

We're still here and Connor is still cute.

My life right now is ...unsustainable.  Both in terms of things that take up my time (work, horse) and in terms of things that stress me out to the point of not being able to think about anything else (...work).  Even if I had the time to drive the 80 miles round trip to the barn and ride as much as I wanted to right now, at the end of the day I don't have the brain cells to rub together to make a post.


I say this not to complain to you guys, but man, being an adult amateur (at heart) has never been more real than it is right now.  I have my dream job at a great employer, my dream title, enough $$$ to save for retirement and not feel overwhelmingly guilty about my horse expenses (still guilty, just not overwhelmingly guilty...), and yet I'm making it to the barn less than ever and don't have the time to watch clinic videos, think through the holes in our training, or plan my rides in advance.

The good news on the job front is that I'm exploring ways to make that more sustainable.  Can't really talk about that publicly though.  And on the horse front, I have a trainer-sanctioned plan to make that more sustainable too.  More on that soon.

Deep breaths.  It's about to get better.

Another one of those work swings snuck up on me.  I'm basically doing two jobs right now, and a whole lot of travel to Michigan, and neither of those things are good for blogging or riding.

"Where've ya been?"