How I’m Doing: Part 1

As I’ve not been terribly active in the model horse hobby in recent years, I thought people might like to know what’s up. I still have my collection, but add new pieces infrequently.

2015 Horsing Around 'Sioux' in bay roan
Horsing Around ‘Sioux’ by Brigitte Eberl

As I collect fewer figurines, I’ve switched to hunting for horse books from my childhood or books I might have loved reading as a child if I’d had access! I clearly missed out on a lot of great horse stories over the years.

Books from left to right: Tall and Proud by Vian Smith, Challenger by Patsey Gray, Vicki and the Brown Mare by Sam Savitt and Red Embers by Dorothy Lyons
To be read…

This whole nostalgia reading kick means you may see various horse books for sale in addition to figurines, as I read and resell.

I’ve not been doing any live showing the past few years and here’s why:

First, my knees were starting to give me pain. This got serious last year when a mere hour of raking leaves left me using crutches for several days! Next stop, the doctor! What did the doctor say, you may ask? He said the same thing he has always said when I complained about knee pain:

“You need to lose some weight.”

My reply, “But I lost 20 pounds last year and the pain is WORSE!”

At that, he checked my records, realizing that it was time to do something different. He sent me to an orthopedist who took X-rays and proclaimed my general knee health good enough to see me through years, but also told me that my knee caps were tracking to the outside of my knees. Progress! We knew what was causing the pain!

She prescribed physical therapy to strengthen the various muscles that support proper knee cap alignment. I finished with my PT sessions in April and now hit the gym at least twice weekly to keep those muscles up to par. I wear knee braces and am not entirely free of pain but it’s far better.

The heck of it is that when the knee pain first happened it was a very gradual thing. I hurt a bit as I moved around, so I got less active. As I sat more and stayed off my feet, my muscles lost strength and the pain got worse. A really vicious cycle that I could have avoided! Lesson learned!

I’ll watch what I eat while I’m at it! My hope is that losing more weight will ease my pain levels.

Fun times getting older! But I could do a live show now!