[drivingpairs] Re: A pair with a cart // chariot again!!!
- From: Merrie Mills <mynorvegicus@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: drivingpairs@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 4 May 2005 10:15:52 -0700 (PDT)
Greetings all,
I'm still out here, busy as always. With all this
talk of pair carts...
I have talked with my wheelwright some more about
making me a chariot. (I live close to Colonial
Williamsburg and my wheelwright is Karl Gayer, who
retired from there.) I've got my research done and
collected some very good books (remember, the TLC and
BBC said that "no research has ever been done on
chariots"), but most of the schematic and specific
details are on Egyptian chariots, thanks to the fact
that King Tut's tomb contained six chariots (remember,
TLC and BBC said "no actual chariot has EVER BEEN
FOUND"). However, I want a dorsal yoke and not a neck
yoke, so the Roman style is what we will need to go
with (and NOT the "Ben-Hur/Gladiator" movie props!!!)
Hardy, do you suppose the ADS would allow an authentic
chariot in a CDE some day? I had hoped that we could
have it done in time for Oak Hill in Virginia this
October (yeah, right!!).... but maybe next year, for
the driving show/musical demonstration...
A little off topic now:
I've been busy with two foals out of my well-known
pair of Welsh ponies. Unfortunately, as many of you
may already know, I lost the dam of one of the foals,
and her long-time partner is raising the foal. Merrie
Mill's Fantastic was my roan offside pony. She had
Cushing's Syndrome, and when she started lactating,
she developed severe acute laminitis that lasted for
four weeks (we put her down exactly one month after
the birth of the filly). It was a terrible decision
to have to make, but there was no other way. We were
pumping drugs into her and they were barely touching
the pain. We took the foal off her at age two weeks
and got the other mare to accept it (!!!!). The only
hope was to dry up the mare and see if her condition
became manageable, which it did not. Without an
overdose of Banamine, she could not even stand up.
Overdosing would have eventually killed her in a very
gruesome way, so that was not a permanent option.
I can separate the "pet" from the "specimen" -- but
this time was hardest -- and I had some friends come
so we could dissect her feet to see just how bad the
damage was. I have lots of photos. Email me if you'd
like to see some. By the way, those nice sagittal
pics you see of foundered specimens are not as easy to
cut as you might think.
Surprisingly, her rotation was not as bad as it might
have been; my vet said that the difference lay in her
individual pain threshold. Some animals can be
rotated worse and hardly complain. This mare was
actually in tetany for three weeks straight -- every
muscle was hard as a rock, tensed in pain. So I
haven't been driving any assortment of pairs recently.
I know that when I adjust her harness for a different
pony, I will cry (again). She was my favorite.
On a more interesting note, we have recovered the
skull and a number of vertebrae from one of my two
pony skeleton projects... fascinating... been working
on it for five years now. My museum-quality mounts
will be awesome when I'm done! Some 500 bones or so
in all... and I'll have to intimately know each one.
I do know most of them and can identify them, but the
ribs can be a real puzzle.
Until later--
"My furs are not in storage or draped across the bed,
They're hanging from the cage door, waiting to be fed."
"So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about
prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid
objects and scraps of useless information." -- George Orwell, 1947
Remember: STUPIDITY IS A SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASE!
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