Mememe

[mirrorshard]

Courtesy, as so many good things are, of hellison - things I'm good at. Qualifications and self-effacement, as the rules demand, have been ruthlessly excised.

I can:

1. Rig and run a fully functional theatre lighting grid from scratch.
   
2. Serve as lighting designer, stage manager, or fight director for a play, and just as importantly teach others to do likewise.
   
3. Read and interpret anything written in English, with confidence and fearlessness.
   
4. Decide something I read isn't to my taste, or is just plain bad.
   
5. Write my own poetry and have it be admired by nationally acclaimed writers.
   
6. Look good in anything I choose to wear.
   
7. Paint, draw, embroider, and take photographs.
   
8. Understand postmodernism.
   
9. Travel by myself across most of the UK without needing a train timetable.
   
10. Find my way back home from anywhere, even if it involves walking ten miles with a pack and partly in the dark.
    
11. Use a shovel, an axe, or a pickaxe safely and productively.
    
12. Cut a respectable figure at a ceilidh, and keep up a decent rhythm with a drum.
    
13. Read and understand at least undergraduate-level textbooks in any discipline I've looked at.
    
14. Listen to a friend, keep them sane for an evening, and help solve problems.
    
15. Start out with an empty collecting bucket and a crowd, and end up with a damn heavy bucket and a happy crowd.
    
16. Ride a cross-country course, a dressage test, or a showjumping round. Ride a showjumping round, in good time, with a plate of jelly balanced on one hand, and still have all the jelly left at the end.
    
17. Cook, and things people want to eat at that.
    
18. Program in shell script or LPC, and do fairly complicated things at that.
    
19. Write MUD clothing and jewellery people want to wear.
    
20. [Censored to preserve innocent eyes]
    
21. Research nearly anything. Find books people want to read, books they had no idea existed, books they need to read.
    

Comments

[mirrorshard.livejournal.com]

Yep! Haven't done it in ages, but it was a Pony Club exercise to train your balance. Only for special occasions, but still great fun.

[hellison.livejournal.com]

I've heard of it done with glasses of water, never with jelly tho! Given that ziggy's steering/bending ) isn't the greatest she's not known as the Sofa for nothing! it'd be interesting to see how far she'd get ridden one-handed ;)

[mirrorshard.livejournal.com]

I got into the habit of riding with one hand on the reins more or less by default quite early on, since I did most of my learning on hacks rather than in the arena, riding along comfortably. Well, that and dressage training, learning to give directions with almost no movement, just a shift of your weight. So the trick is to keep the reins taut and just angle your wrist a little, shifting your weight - thinking leftwards, is the best way I can describe it. Maybe it's one of these things you learn to do unconsciously.

[hellison.livejournal.com]

I do know what you mean ;) It's just that Ziggy, as a hunter, has basically been trained to run at things in a straight line at full tilt.
Steering her, especially round tight corners, can be very like steering a sofa at times. She doesn't really do subtle :p We're working on it tho, and she's getting better, slowly!

[mirrorshard.livejournal.com]

Hunters are wonderful! Back at the riding schools where we had Pony Club lessons, there were only two types of pony for those who couldn't bring their own, or didn't have one. Small round trekking ponies, and if you couldn't fit on those you got moved straight up to hunters.