The Tao of Equus by Linda Kohanov — it is just awesome in the truest sense of the word. I’ll do a proper review when I’ve finished but I wanted to share how totally awed I am by what I’m reading at the moment.

Based on scientific research as well as Linda’s own experience, and discussing biological, psychological and sociological perspectives, this book goes further than any horse book I have ever seen in explaining the bond between people — especially women — and horses, and how these beautiful, noble creatures can lead us to emotional healing if we open ourselves to what they can tell us. The reverse is true also, in that if we just tune in to our horses they can show us how to assist them to heal from past abuse and issues also. And the trained therapeutical instructor can even assist with physical issues too.

I’m pretty gobsmacked at what I’ve been reading: it’s hitting me hard in the gut with every page I turn. I am just grateful I found this incredible book.

The swelling around Rani’s fetlock increased so the vet came out and took xrays which proved somewhat inconclusive, although they did show some arthritic damage. At least, the vet said they eliminated a lot of things.

As a result, I have 4 x weekly injections to give him but the vet nurse said I am unlikely to notice a difference for a couple of weeks. I am just hoping it will make a difference. My fingers, toes, and all other appendages are crossed.

On further contemplation, I realised that if I returned to study at this point I’d be headed for another case of burnout, so I decided against it.

At the moment, aside from work, I also have my equine massage therapy course to get finished. First things first…

Had a letter from Edith Cowan University today, asking if I wanted to re-enter the course I was doing before I started working for the State Government 3 years ago. It’s something of a dilemma.

I was enrolled in the Bachelor of Communications in Interactive Multimedia and, while I was still a govt employee, thought I’d double-major in Public Relations.

Now, should I return, my professional change of focus away from hands-on and towards the business side of – well – business, means I would probably change my majors… but who knows? Indeed, given my professional change of focus, I probably just don’t have time to take on university studies at the moment – even part-time.

My big problem (with this) is that I love learning and would kinda like to do it just for the intellectual stimulation.

I have until July 8 to re-enrol. But the wheels would need to be put in motion before that. Hmmmm.

You could have knocked me over with a feather, but I have been granted the opportunity to continue with my Equine Aromatherapy Course and also my Equine Massage courses.

The Equine Aromatherapy Course presented by correspondence by Catherine Bird was begun perhaps two years ago, but I only got as far as the first segment before Real Life intruded. This included the two Equinology courses in Feb 2004, except due to (literally) crippling sciatica, it was many months before I was in any state to even think about completing the practical component. Then I was inundated with work and working 18-24 hour days, and that externship never did happen.

But thanks to Catherine’s generous spirit, it’s come about that I have the opportunity to complete both courses. It is a great encouragement to me at a rather dry time of my life. It’s given me something to get excited about – always a Good Thing! Horses some how centre me, and bring me back to what’s most important in life.

Three vet visits in 24 hours and more to come… we’ve gotta love our animals!

On Thursday, one of our cats, Max, was in (yet another) fight with wounds (yet again) to both forelegs, ears and one eye. After finding him lifeless (yet again) and taking him to the vet… well $122 later I was really hoping the hormone injection the vet gave him would stop him from getting into (yet more) fights… he is a darned lucky cat that we love him!

Then hubby gets home from work and says Rani (one of the horses) was lying down. Pretty unusual for him at that time of day – dinner time! (He’s a pig.) So – remembering he hadn’t devoured his breakfast hay as per usual we went out, worried… only to see him get up and trot up for dinner. Rani *never* travels faster than a walk (unless the other horses are chasing him!) so we were relieved…

Nevertheless I checked on him before going to bed that night and wasn’t happy with what I saw. He seemed a bit listless and just wanted to stand and snuggle me. I got hubby to set the alarm and wake me in 2 hours…

…at which point I was pretty certain it was colic and so called the vet. Sedatives, drenching and much shivering later, I finally got inside again at 5:55am – just in time to get up! At least Rani seemed a bit happier….

At 10:30am I went to give him his painkiller injection and noticed some swelling and heat on one of his fetlocks. Goody.

Same vet that visited in the middle of the night came out again and we both got soaked in the freezing rain. Vet wasn’t sure what the problem was but decided to treat it as inflammation and said he’d be back on Tuesday to see how it was going and then maybe take fluid samples and send them off blah blah.

Today, Sunday, Max’s eye (which had seemed better) now looks bad again. Another vet visit is likely to be in store tomorrow.

*sigh*

Isn’t it wonderful I am so rich? *cough*

I did a clean install yesterday. I was bored and just needed something to do.  :-)  Thought I’d write about it here for the benefit of those who might still be sitting on the upgrade fence regarding installing 10.4.

OK well I did have some troubles, mainly related to copying prefs etc from Panther (previous system was cloned for easy restoration if required!) which resulted in crashes, especially in Mail.  System Prefs also crashed, and some usual keyboard shortcuts (like Cmd+Q) failed to work.  So I had to revert to a more-or-less blank Mail and painfully import lots of stuff. To be honest, I knew Mail was very different behind the scenes and it was a risk I took (thus my backup of the default settings prior to copying the Panther ones!) and now it’s working fine and I’m getting used to the new interface which appears to have much more space on my small screen. I did have to change the message list font quickly though, as it looked pale and hard to read. Not sure why. Also the way the Outbox and Drafts folders come and go according to whether or not they contain anything throws me off-balance a bit. But all in all now, I’m finding Mail *much* faster than before, and very pleasant to use.

Apart from that? Spotlight took forever to index but that was partly because I kept moving stuff over from my Panther disk. Then I found it very klutzy to use – it is definitely not a replacement for Quicksilver, however does do a great job as a search engine.

I did a search for Receipts and it gave me a lovely list, and I was particularly interested in the email results. I wiped the input field then called hubby to give him a demonstration. When I did it again, there were *no* email results.  I still can’t get email results for a search on Receipts in Spotlight, though within Mail it works super-fast anyway. But that’s weird, and Not Good about Spotlight.

When I was trying to get it to work as an application launcher, it returned results from other volumes before the Macintosh HD ./Applications folder which I thought was strange – and unusable – thus my preference for Quicksilver when I want to open something in a keystroke or two.

Dashboard and widgets – I just don’t get it.  Why have a Dashboard layer at all? Why not be able to open a widget without going to Dashboard first?  Though, to be fair, maybe I just feel like this because I use Quicksilver and have the benefit of both an uncluttered Dock and files and applications that open in a couple of keystrokes.  For those that use the Finder to open their Applications folder, I guess the Dashboard would work well.

The default widgets are also useless (to me). The weather widget couldn’t be farther off – maybe it’s talking about Perth, Scotland – except it’s obviously reading the information off my puter in order to put Perth in there at all.  But it certainly wasn’t -1 deg C this morning! Or 4 deg C today.  I was in short sleeves today!  Says it’s -3 deg C right now and I admit I have put on a windcheater by now – after all, it is Autumn.  But I’m guessing it’s still in the teens.  

The converter widget looked great until I tried a currency conversion and saw that the details were correct – as of 2 days ago.  One has to wonder why they’d bother? (Though again, to be fair, maybe it only does weekdays.  I’ll keep an eye on it.)  

The calculator widget… redundant, surely?  There’s a perfectly good calculator app that comes with OSX.  

The flight tracker looked great until I saw that Qantas, one of the world’s major airlines, wasn’t listed. Another slap in the face for Aussies by Apple, who historically has treated us like poor relations and smelly ones at that.  

Anyway, I think we’ll see some good widgets become available by third parties (already have a Transmit one installed that looks like being useful) but IMO Apple could have set some more usable examples.  (But I’m prolly just fussy!)

I am not planning on using Safari, either for RSS (I use NetNewsWire) or as a browser (I use OmniWeb) except in which to check web pages.  So I only glanced at it, but the Private Browsing feature looks good – it makes sure , as does the Debug menu which I think had to be added via third party apps before, and IMO it’s about time it was possible to view PDFs directly within the browser without having to resort to a plugin.

Of course, there are lots of other features. For example, I think the Search field in the Preferences, and the way it spotlights the relevant icon, is nifty but not really a major talking point. And I haven’t yet had a chance to get familiar with Automator, which by all accounts is a great tool.

In all, after admittedly just one day, I *like* Tiger and think it an improvement, but don’t think it was worth the A$200 – except insofar as (me being me) I couldn’t bear to run older software knowing something else – possibly much better – was out there, especially as my applications all seem to be getting Tiger upgrades! So it was the only course of action for me, but I wouldn’t encourage anyone else to be in a hurry, nice though the new features are.

Western Australians voted overwhelmingly against extended trading hours in the recent referendum, making it perfectly clear we (generally speaking) wish to clearly differentiate between family/recreation time and shopping/business hours.

As one of the (clearly minority) Western Australians who voted for extended trading hours, I really would have liked to have had more flexibility in the time available to shop. Even though I am not an employee anymore, it is not that long since I was one, and it was really, really difficult for me to get to the shops during the week. I’m sure this was made worse by the fact that I had to drive 60km home each night and the nearest shops from my home are half an hour’s drive away, but hey, I’m a modern woman and as such I appreciate my conveniences!

I think both the For and Against arguments had merits, and it was very much a case of “how does this affect me personally?” For example, it just doesn’t happen that a business-owning voter will say “Even though my business will go broke, I see that it will be in the best interests of Western Australians if we have extended trading hours.”

I just can’t help wishing we had the flexibility offered in other states and countries… I really don’t agree with the outcome of this referendum. (Sorry, small retail outlets!)

The Australian Labor Party in Western Australia, under the leadership of Premier Geoff Gallop, won yesterday’s State election, thus entering a second term of government. I have to admit I was surprised – and pleased.

After deliberately not following the election progress during the day, I have only just (at 1:15am Sunday) dared to look up the election results. I believe it was Colin Barnett’s stupid, uncosted canal scheme that had not even passed a feasibility study that is the primary reason for the win. I don’t think Labor has done a bad job of government but they haven’t been spectacularly successful either, and usually in such situations the other party will gain power.

So I was encouraged to see that Western Australians didn’t vote blindly yesterday, and that they actually paid attention to the stupidity of the Opposition Leader. I sure hope the Liberals replace Barnett by the next election because it is rare indeed for a Government to run three terms and the prospect of such a stupid, disrespectful (to the people of WA, in assuming we’re stupid enough to accept his schemes and himself at face value) politician to lead our parliament.

Holly Bergevin and Big John (John Gallant) from positioniseverything.net have yet again come up trumps, this time with a fantastic CSS flyout menu – by far the best such menu I’ve seen so far.

The demo of the menu shows how it’s all done. Just View Source to see for yourself. Quite nifty is the double-sided flyout on the third level. Although not sure I’d use such a feature myself, I can see its uses in situations where it’s preferable to display the content in the space below the menu while the flyout is open.

Naturally, being all CSS (albeit with a smidgeon of javascript for the benefit of our dear friend Win/IE) it enables semantically correct, accessible navigation that degrades well in the absence of javascript and/or styling.

My mind is spinning, thinking of the possible uses to which I can put this menu! It will be most interesting to see how it matures. (Sounds like wine, but then again it will probably improve with age!)

Postscript: the argument has been put forward that CSS should not control behaviour – that the DOM should do that. In (general) theory, I agree – but it’s a personal opinion we all have to form. In actual fact, the DOM has limitations too. I’m no javascript guru and maybe I’ve only come across badly written DHTML menus, but some will only allow one menu on the page, and so on. Give me CSS over that, any day… but when it comes to the crunch I take the view that the behaviour is actually the clickable link, and the CSS and its hover state merely draw attention to that interactivity – either as a rollover or as a flyout menu, or whatever.