Tudor Robins's Blog, page 5

It’s Been a Pleasure Doing Business With You …

Kingston at sunset, as seen from the Wolfe Island Ferry.

Gord Downie has died – as we knew, but maybe didn’t-quite-believe he would.

I’m sad.

But happy.

Because, oh, the gifts he’s given us. Surprising, insightful, funny, flippant, lyrics. Music that you feel inside your body. And that voice …

Those were the big gifts – the gifts that everyone in Canada got from him.

But each of us got personal gifts, as well.

Gord Downie has been a part of my life since I went to university in Kingston. It’s fair to say The Hip and Gord Downie are an integral part of my relationship with Kingston, in the way the Ottawa River is part of my relationship with Ottawa. Always there, flashing through my head, when I think of the place.

I’ve loved his and their music always, at every point. Like many people I was always amazed that the new album was just as good as the last album, but different … except the same. I imagine there are many other Canadians, like me, who could never, ever pick a favourite Hip song.

The main gift Gord Downie gave me in the last couple of years was an extra tie with my family – especially my older son.

My kids were 12 and 14 when The Hip embarked on their farewell summer tour. Just a perfect age to understand, and enjoy, and marvel at the spectacle – but still a friendly, low-key spectacle – of that final tour.

The night of the last concert, in Kingston, was magic for us. We were heading back to Ottawa from Wolfe Island. We rode the ferry on a perfect late summer night with sky and Kingston harbour all around us, and pulled off the ferry to face the K-Rock Centre dead-ahead, surrounded by fans.

We drove along Hwy. 15 with the sun setting all around us, listening to the concert live on CBC as we passed through the Eastern Ontario landscape. It was special, memorable, amazing, perfect.

This morning, three minutes after my older son left for school, I heard the news and I immediately thought, “Oh no. I need to run after him. I need to tell him.” He was the first person I thought of.

I wondered – should I send him an email at school? What would be best?

I came up to my office and logged into my email, and there was an email from my son – subject line “Gord Downie” asking “Have you heard?”

I guess I was the first person he thought of when he heard the news, too.

This, perhaps, is the greatest gift Gord Downie has given me – this link my 15-year-old and I share with the moving music of a great man and a great band.

So, I’m sorry he had to go, but it was a pleasure …

(oh, and check out this amazing article – http://www.cbc.ca/news2/interactives/...)

Thankful, Grateful, Lucky …

 

I took the above picture a couple of days ago when we were on the Island for Thanksgiving.

It’s a mason jar filled with horse chestnuts (or conkers, as my British husband would call them).

I give you this is not the world’s best photo, but this one simple photo starts me off on a long list of things I’m thankful for.

Here it is:

1) The Island. Of course. I mean, look at that water in the bay. Does this photo look peaceful? It is.

2) Thanksgiving. My favourite holiday, which comes at my favourite time of year. It’s a chance to pause and enjoy the fall. It’s a break everyone needs after being back at school for just over a month. And it’s completely non-commercialized (if you ignore the grocery store promotions, but – hey – it is about food, so I guess I can’t blame them for pushing food).

3) The actual jar. I love mason jars. They’re both pleasing to look at, and extremely useful. This particular one is quite cool – I have no idea where I got it, but it says “Golden Harvest” across the front, which makes it quite appropriate for Thanksgiving.

4) The horse chestnuts. Have you ever seen / peeled / held one? They are so beautiful. I truly always think what a miracle nature is when I look at them because they come off the tree perfectly formed and shiny and gorgeous.

5) My kids. The fact that they love picking up the horse chestnuts as much as I do. The fact that they’re such nice people, and so much fun to spend time with.

6) My husband’s conker stories. He’ll be surprised that I’m saying this but, yes, I do like hearing his stories of collecting conkers from parks in Cardiff as a kid, and then taking them to school to have conker competitions with the other kids. My kids will probably tell these stories to their kids when they grow up.

7) My parents – particularly for finding this piece of land on the Island, and buying it all those years ago when, really, it just looked like a very windy cow field. I’m not sure if the land’s gotten prettier, or if we’ve grown to see the beauty in it. Maybe it’s a bit of both, because I think it gets better every time we’re there.

8) Thanksgiving food – I’m not really personally grateful for it, because I’m not a fan of large turkey dinners, but it does make me happy to see other people in my family enjoying the big dinner, and I do love apples – and there are always lots of apples to be picked at Thanksgiving.

That’s it, that’s all. Thanksgiving’s over for another year, but it was a lovely weekend.

A Letter to my American Friends (or why I can’t visit right now)

 

Dear American Friends,

I’m so sorry for everything you’re going through. When I hear about terrible things happening close to you, it makes me want to be able to see you, and spend time with you.

I’ve had conversations with some of you about visiting, but I’ve done something typically Canadian – I’ve been too polite. I’ve said my inability to visit is about money and scheduling. It’s not – not really – it’s actually about guns and government, but I haven’t wanted to get into that.

There are many good reasons to visit the United States, and seeing those of you who live there is the best reason of all, but I won’t be coming for the foreseeable future, and this is why:

1) It’s too dangerous. I just can’t get used to the idea of All. The. Guns. I find it very difficult to relax on a Florida vacation when I know people around me may have guns in their glove compartments – they might have guns in their purses or pockets. Far from giving me a sense of security, guns make me deeply and distinctly uneasy. I hate that so many innocent people are shot and killed in the United States each year. I really don’t want a member of my family to be one of them.

2) It’s too expensive. Another thing that takes the relaxation out of a vacation, is the underlying fear of having to use your healthcare system. It could be something big and terrible, like the many Canadians currently in hospital in Las Vegas hospitals suffering with gunshot wounds, or it could be something more mundane – a broken leg from a ski accident in Vermont, my son injured in a basketball tournament across the border in New York. To travel to the States, I need to purchase additional medical insurance for my family – which is already a cost – and, even having done that, I have no confidence of all my costs being covered.

3) I need to take my own, small, stand. I see things happening in your country that your government has no intention of addressing. I see them putting you in danger. Think of it this way – a truck drives down a boulevard in Nice and from that day forward open-air streets and boulevards are blocked off with cement barricades or dump trucks, or whatever – action is taken. Then think of a person firing at will into a crowd of people, using weapons no normal law-abiding citizen could ever have a legitimate use for and, the very next day, anybody who wants to is able to go out and buy more of those same weapons. It’s absurd. It’s also clear as day – there is currently no desire or intention of your government to protect you – or to protect the tourists who come to your country. It’s one thing for me to say I don’t like your (lack of) gun laws, or the health care system, but if I turn around and spend my tourist dollars across the border, my words are pretty hollow. It would be like me telling my son he missed curfew when he took the car out, then promptly handing him the car keys again.

I wish things were different right now. I know I’m lucky that I get to sit on my side of the border and simply have opinions about what’s happening – I don’t need to live it every day.

Canadians care about the United States, mostly because most of us know, and love, people who live in the United States. We don’t have a vote and, let’s be realistic, nobody in the US government is really listening to us. But we do have tourist dollars, and we do spend a lot of them – especially in certain states – and, for me it seems like the clearest way to make a statement is with our spending power. If money is one of the things that most of the people currently in power care the most about, then we need to withhold our money to show we really want change.

Anyway, those are the real reasons I can’t visit right now. I’d like to, though. I have places I want to see, and things I want to do.

I’m penciling it in for sometime after 2020 …

Technology Issues

 

This is my kids’ phone. Yes, kids‘. The two boys share it. It sits in a box by the front door, and when somebody’s going on the type of outing where having a phone might be helpful, they take it with them. This happens a few times a month.

I pre-paid $100 onto it, which is good for 365 days, and that’s how we roll around here.

They didn’t want the phone, and my younger son still looks at it a bit like a landmine he’d rather not touch.

I was prompted to activate this phone (a hand-me-down from my mother) when my older son started talking about going to We Day on July 2nd, on Parliament Hill, and I thought, Hmm … if he’s going to start doing things like that, I might want him to have a phone.

I thought that. Me.

Which brings me to the point of this post about technology issues. We think our kids have issues. We worry about it. But, in some cases, anyway, we are the cause of them having technology in the first place.

Hands up – yes – I know there are many of you who have had kids pestering you for years that they want a phone. Please, please, please. Everyone has one.

I know there are kids who really, really, want this technology.

There are also kids who don’t, though. I know there are. I know my kids, and their friends, aren’t the only ones who would rather not be reachable all the time. Who don’t want to worry about taking care of a phone on top of all the other things they’re already juggling – homework, extra-curriculars, house keys (those are hard to keep track of).

But I think if we’re honest we have to admit that we, as adults, sometimes really like our kids having technology. It makes our lives easier. It means we can take our kids out of after-school care a little bit earlier and save that extra money. It means we can run a bit late, and just text them. It means, in some circumstances, we don’t have to pay for a babysitter. It means we can ask them to do things around the house before we get home.

I’ve seen this with teachers, too. It’s already evident in just the first, short week, of high school. My son doesn’t take a phone to school. You’re not really supposed to – right? It’s a bad idea to keep valuable things in your locker. You’re not supposed to be distracted in class.

The school says this, and teachers say this, but then they turn around and assume everyone has a phone, and they assign work that way, too.

Twice this week my son was asked to do in-class work on his phone.

This isn’t really cool. I don’t think you can have it both ways. You can’t say, “Don’t bring phones to class,” then say, “Oh, but since you have them here, this is a piece of work for which smartphones are required.”

I do think parents do this as well. We want our little kids to watch less TV … except in those circumstances when the TV keeps them quiet and lets us get things done, or sleep in a little on weekends (hands up – this was us, since our kids woke up at 6:00 a.m. every weekend morning). We ask our kids, “Why are you always on your phone?” but we insist they have the phone with them whenever we might need to contact them.

This, obviously, is not a cut-and-dried issue. Phones aren’t going away. And some, very social kids will want them for their own reasons. But it might help if we asked ourselves whether we’ve ever pushed our kids to carry phones because we wanted them to. And then also ask ourselves whether, in all cases, it’s really that necessary. Sometimes, it will be a very useful thing. If my child is on Parliament Hill on a very busy day, in an atmosphere when there are security anxieties, I think it’s good for him to have a phone. If he’s going a couple of streets over, to a friend’s house, where I know the parents, not so much.

Like I say, some of you will think that I have no idea what you’re going through – the pressure your kids have put on you to buy them phones. And to that, I will say, “You’re right – I don’t.” But some of you may find a bit of this rings true.

The other thing I’ll say is, your kids are right when they tell you “Everybody has a phone.” Most people have now given their kids phones. The only people who can change this, or turn the tide, or even make a very slight difference, are us. If it’s not always normal for kids to have to always be reached, all the time, then there will be less ammo in the “everybody else has a phone all the time,” argument.

Do I really think this is going to change? Maybe not. I guess maybe I just want us to own the problem a little bit. It’s not all about kids being addicted to technology. It’s not all about them being glued to their screens all the time. Maybe you can’t get them to stop using a phone, but if parental demand eases off, maybe their use will, too – even just a little bit.

Just a thought …

My Writing, Your Writing, Other People’s Writing …

 

There are a lot of people who want to write. There are also a lot of people who want writing guidance. This means, not infrequently, there are people who ask for my advice about writing.

This is something I’ve thought about quite a bit. Two things are true 1) I’m happy to help other people write. 2) My first priority is to write myself.

Are these two things mutually exclusive? For me, right now, they mostly are. Currently I don’t have time in my life for one more thing. I don’t even have time to write as much as I’d like. So, any time spent helping other people write has to come from somewhere else.

I don’t want to say nobody can be a Helper of Other Writers and also a writer themselves but, in general, my observation would suggest one does tend to come at the expense of the other.

I follow many, many, many writing / publishing “experts.” People who make money from advising, or coaching others who want to write, and / or who provide services to other writers. The thing I’ve noticed about most of them is that they either have relatively few books published, or their output of published books has dropped off drastically as their “writer support” activity grows. Generally, as well, the books they’ve published recently, tend to be non-fiction books addressing things like writing craft, or writing motivation, or publishing how-tos.

Maybe someday I’ll have fewer demands on my limited time, or I’ll have fewer books banging around in my head demanding to be let out, but for now, I need to write first, help second.

Still, though, I do like to help.

So, this is what’s happening:

1) I’m starting a Young Ottawa Writers club. There will be a website (when I have an hour to build it). It’ll meet once a month, at my son’s high school. This is a totally selfish endeavour for me. I like being in the high school. I already know some of the students interested in joining the club, and I can’t wait to meet new writers. I’m positive I’ll learn as much from the students as they’ll learn from me. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about this once we actually get going (yay!).

2) I’m hosting a get-together on Tuesday, September 12 at 7:30 at the Westboro location of The Cupcake Lounge (if this sounds like an invitation, that’s because it is – please come!) which I’ve started thinking of as a “Writer Exchange.”

In my effort to do some networking, and provide some support, while not robbing too much of my precious writing time, I decided might as well get a bunch of interested people together.

And, while I’ll provide some information, and answer any questions I can, I’m also hoping to connect people with different areas of expertise so we can all support one-another (that’s the “Exchange” part).

I think it will be useful, I’m sure it will be fun, and – heck – we might even do it again if all goes well.

So, that’s what’s new and coming up in the writing support / advice area of my life. In terms of the actual writing … well I have a manuscript to send to my editor, so I’ve got to go!

Saying Good-Bye to Summer …

It’s been a great summer … there it goes …

This day – the last weekday before school starts again – is always bittersweet.

I’ve gotten so used to having my kids around. I’ll miss them.

I missed Evan a bit when he went off to CJ’17 in Nova Scotia, but it wasn’t for that long, and he had a great time:

Ready to get on the bus … for 19 hours!

 

It was a bit muddy …

 

… but the weather improved.

 

And he saw some amazing things.

 

It was Canada’s 150th birthday, so there was lots of celebrating going on, especially in the Capital.

We tried to hit everything that was on offer – it would have been rude not to!

MosaiCanada was astoundingly beautiful.

 

I have at least 50 pictures I would have liked to post here.

 

For our family this was one of the most amazing pictures of all, as we got our younger son to smile

Blog-Reader Bonus

Hey everybody! Happy August!

I was out running and I just remembered this story I wrote at the end of 2016 at the request of my friend who pretty much volunteers her life away for CANTER – a thoroughbred re-homing organization. She runs the CANTER Illinois branch and they have great listings, and a great website – to learn more, or support their work, visit https://canterusa.org/illinois/.

This particular cause is pretty dear to my heart because the horse I ride – and have been riding for years – is an OTTB himself. For those of you who haven’t seen it before, here’s Martin’s full-on, bad-ass racing photo:

Isn’t he cute?

These days he’s a much-loved former racehorse, who will live out a good life because he was given a chance to have life after racing. CANTER works on making sure that happens for as many horses as possible.

Anyway … the story I wrote ended up not being run by CANTER USA, so I thought I’d offer it here, for all of you. Here goes:

Leah Lang-Glusic rides former racehorses. Her favorite riding moments come on cross-country courses jumping at an average pace of 35 kilometers per hour (~20 mph). In just a few years she’s gone from working in the city as an investment banker, to owning and running a successful eventing facility and competing at the four-star, or Olympic equivalent, level.

And her philosophy for accomplishing all this? “You go the slow way.”

It’s something Lang-Glusic says many times, many different ways. “It’s not just the best way; it’s really the only way if you’re going to do it safely. That’s my big soapbox that I’m on all the time.”

She’s aware her progress might not look slow to others. “If you talked to my parents today, and asked, ‘Did you really think Leah was going to get to Rolex in five years after becoming a professional, and having only ridden prelim level?’ they’d say straight up, ‘Absolutely not.’”

And the fact that her four-star mount, AP Prime, was a $750 off-the-racetrack buy just five years ago makes the rise seem even faster.

Still, Lang-Glusic’s meticulous approach becomes apparent when she talks about her daily routine. “My mom and I do all the barn chores, and I do all the feeding … My favorite quote from George Morris is proper stable management is loving your horse. It’s not giving your horse kisses and treats, it’s making sure every detail of your horse’s program from their vetting to their nutrition, to having eyes on their legs every day, to spotting that colicky posture from ten acres across the field – it’s all those things that really constitute loving these animals.”

And, when Lang-Glusic lists off some of the specific steps along her and AP’s road to Rolex – the only four-star eventing competition regularly staged in North America – it does sound like a long, slow trip:

* “It’s four years ago, riding him through dressage tests where he was feral, and had his head in the air.”

* “It’s two years ago, getting in the truck to haul AP 22 hours to Bromont.”

* “Last year I literally spent six weeks doing nothing but walking him for 30 minutes a day under tack.”

Perhaps it’s not surprising Lang-Glusic is so committed to slow, careful development, considering her first love was dressage. Early in her riding career she spent two years doing nothing but dressage, and her horses still do dressage four or five times a week.

“I love the process of dressage; the ability to get on your horse and ride it, and actually make its body feel better from the work you’re doing. And I also like the idea that you can work, and work, and work and it’s never going to be perfect.”

At the boarding school she attended for high school (Ethel Walker in Simsbury, CT) Lang-Glusic says she “begrudgingly” chose the eventing stream over hunter-jumper with the reasoning that eventing would give her at least one dressage lesson a week.

“Then I did my first horse trials and that was that. I was hooked.”

Today, her assessment of cross-country is simple and straightforward. “Cross-country is why any eventer events. It’s why we do this.”

Trade-offs are something Lang-Glusic understands extremely well. You build a horse slowly to be able to go quickly. You give up many of the small luxuries in life to be able to do what you love.

“There are so many days when I’m just like, ‘Can I just sit on the couch and drink hot cocoa with my dogs and not do anything?’”

“There’s not much else to my life,” she adds. “For the last six weeks (before Rolex) I had people that wanted to visit me and I said, ‘No, you cannot come to Florida right now. I have no extra time. I have no extra energy to give you.’” She pauses, then adds. “When you take the week or two off after Rolex, you’d better treat those people in your life really well.”

Still, the long hours, the patience, the working on foundations, have a huge pay-off for Lang-Glusic. “The rewarding part is every time I’m in the start box with any of my horses, it’s because they really are prepared to be there … I’m sitting there because I 100 per cent believe in all the homework that they’ve done, their ability to do it, (and) their want to do it.”

Lang-Glusic strives to surround herself with like-minded people and organizations. Each of her sponsors provides a product or service she truly believes in, and one good example of a group she loves working with is CANTER – the volunteer-run organization working to provide retiring thoroughbred racehorses with opportunities for new careers. It was through CANTER that Lang-Glusic found AP Prime.

“CANTER is one of my favorite organizations,” Lang-Glusic says. “They have completely reinvented the way that people are becoming connected with thoroughbreds. They’re getting rehomed at such a greater rate, and they’re getting rehomed to good homes because people have the information to make good decisions.”

Not only did CANTER connect Lang-Glusic with, as she puts it, “the horse that’s made my career,” but she’s just acquired a new prospect through CANTER Illinois, The Duck of Reed (barn name “Ducky”) who has her “really excited.”

There’s quite a bit for Lang-Glusic to be “really excited” about. Promising youngsters in her barn, a planned return to Rolex on AP, and competing at the world-renowned horse trials at Burghley in England as a big – but achievable – dream.

But while part of her is always planning ahead – “I am always thinking,” Lang-Glusic says. “My brain is never quiet,” – she also makes sure to enjoy the moments, and the partnership, she’s worked so hard to reach.

AP Prime may not have been bred to event, and Leah Lang-Glusic may have launched her career in an office, but together they’re able to do the thing they love the most.

“My horse is never happier than those moments on cross-country. That’s the gift I get to give to him. For me, and the horse I do it on, there’s nothing else. That’s what I was put here to do.”

Turning the Page

 

This is what our summer’s looked like so far. Kid reading – All. The. Time. Kid saying, “I just have to finish this page / this chapter / this book.” I haven’t once had to say, “Stop playing video games!”

The thing is, it’s not our reading kid doing this.

It’s our other kid.

To be fair, our younger son has always loved English. He aces it. His teacher called me in partway through the year to explain to me why she felt she had to give him 100 per cent on his English assignment even though, technically, there is no such thing as 100 per cent in English. So, he’s always loved words, but usually ones he’s written himself.

This reading other people’s words – avidly – is a new thing.

It started – or, at least, seemed to start – with a certain series, and from there he just took off and hasn’t pulled his nose out of a book since.

So, in the interests of others out there, who are hoping / wishing / praying their older tween / young teen boy would become a bookworm, here are the books that have been consumed in our house so far this summer. Maybe one will stick for you?

The series that started it all: Young Bond

 

This is Book One in the series. The first five books were written by Charlie Higson, and it was then taken over by Steve Cole. Both my kids have read the entire series. Both seemed to like all the books pretty much equally – lots of discussions about how great the plot is, how much action, etc. General consensus is that all the books have errors in them (!) which quite bugged my kids, but the later, Steve Cole books, have even more mistakes.

Parental pain-in-the-a** alert – these books are (for some reason completely unfathomable to me) pretty much impossible to get new in North America. Why?

We got books One and Two in Waterstones in Cardiff in March, and they were prominently displayed in the teen section so I thought, “Great, I’ll just order the rest at home.” Yeah, right. For some reason, the publisher doesn’t seem to want to actually sell these books.

So, what can you do? They are easily available from Abebooks, where you can find them used, but in very good condition, and they’ll cost you $1 US, plus about $3 US shipping. Totally worth it. I was also able to find some of them at our library, and some are even available as audiobook borrows from the library.

When we ran out of Young Bonds to read: The Last Thirteen

 

These books have been in our house FOREVER – my older son saw them in a Scholastic catalogue and they were some great price for all 13 of them, so my parents bought them for him for his birthday. They weren’t being read, but he didn’t want to get rid of them, so we took them to the cottage where, suddenly, BINGO, change of scenery, my younger son was completely willing to pick them up and start reading.

He plowed through nine-and-a-half in one week. The remainder have been on hold, since there were some more Young Bonds waiting from Abebooks when we got home, but he plans to read the rest of the series before the end of the summer.

Parental pain-in-the-a** alert – Thirteen is Book One. I know … duh. I think somebody was trying to be cute, or clever, but I don’t find it either. I just find it confusing, and possibly tear-inducing, when you decide to buy one, to see if your kid likes it, before you buy the whole series, and you buy One, only to find that is the final book in the series, and the mystery’s over. So, buy the whole series, and get your kid to read Thirteen first, or if you’re only buying one book, buy Thirteen (I know … it’s confusing just writing it … when my older son warned us about this, I thought he was being a jerk and trying to mess his younger brother up).

Other books:

The Greatest Zombie Movie Ever

Both my kids laughed out loud while reading this one.

And, another series – Bone.

He’s spent this weekend holed up in his room, reading this series, and I really don’t have the heart to yank him away from the written page.

There you go – these are the books obsessing my thirteen-year-old. Maybe one of them will obsess yours too …

And if you have any of your own recommendations, please feel free to share!

The Little Things …

For those of you not in Eastern Ontario, it’s been a rainy summer – there; you’re caught up – that’s all you really need to know.

For those of you in Eastern Ontario, you know it rained like the dickens at the beginning of last week. It started raining Monday night and we lay in bed listening to about four or five separate thunderstorms, and heavy, heavy rain on the metal roof, and water sloshing, and streaming, and dripping, and racing off the eaves – All. Night. Long.

And when I got up and went for my run on Tuesday morning, this is what I saw:

 

This is our access road to the highway. I’ve never seen so much water on the road, but from a distance I thought maybe it was just a shallow covering. Maybe I’d be able to tiptoe through and keep my running shoes (mostly) dry.

 

Upon closer inspection, not so much.

I took off my shoes and socks, and waded in. In the very middle of the road, it was well over my ankles. Toward the sides it only got deeper.

I kept running, came home, and as we all sat around and looked at the grey outside, my older son started pacing. “Hey,” I said. “Want to go see the flood with me?”

We went.

 

It’s a very short walk, but on the way I took pictures of things I’ve looked at a hundred times, but never photographed.

 

 

If you look closely, you’ll see the white tails of three deer (they were bucks) running away in the above photo. We have a bit of a deer infestation on the island …

 

These turbines are very far away from our cottage – they’re on the other side of a huge bay – but they look really close in this photo.

 

We finally reached the (temporary) river and, of course, we waded right in.

 

 

I wasn’t the only one taking photos:

 

 

We headed back and I took a photo of this tiny gate-to-nowhere which I’ve always loved the look of:

 

 

And that was it – a small, short outing. By the next day the flood was gone and you’d never know the road had even been covered but ever since, every time I run by it, I smile.

Now it makes me think of my son.

It was just a little thing, but I’ll always hold it close.

Island Series – Box Set

Just a very quick email to let you know the first three books of the Island Series – Appaloosa Summer, Wednesday Riders, and Join Up – are now available in one download, and it looks like this:

This is a great deal, anyway, since these three books would normally sell for $10.97, and the box set is priced at $7.99, but today it’s an even better deal, because today it’s FREE!

So, go ahead, download a copy and tell your horse-loving, book-crazy friends to get theirs too!

GET IT HERE!