Day 673: Rainy day problem-solving

I figured out what to do with the highly scented but gorgeous white lilies - I gave them to Z! She's now living in a condo an easy walk from our house, so I carried them over there in a bucket. It was raining and I was also juggling an umbrella, and at one point I dumped all the lilies onto the sidewalk, but no harm done. I got to see her new place. It has no heat at the moment, but she's going to put in some sort of cork board flooring with heat underneath.

Then I actually succeeded in catching Bella, the kittens' mother, so she can get spayed tomorrow. I tried the trick of putting an entire can of wet cat food into a bowl inside and at the back of the cat carrier. She was too smart for a while, and seven other cats were jostling for access to the food, but after she retreated beneath a lawn chair, I brought the carrier to her then looked in another direction until she was inside. She's an excellent mother, but this street really does not need more kittens. I'm hoping this will solve the problem for a few years - or until the next litter of kittens gets dumped down the street.

Also today

This evening one of the other teachers at J's sword academy, a younger woman named Ginger, gave an online talk on mounted combat, which is her area of expertise. It was quite interesting - it's an art, like other historically informed martial arts, that people are working to keep alive. One thing I hadn't realized was that dressage, which is an Olympic sport, is actually based on combat moves. I'd always thought it was just some interesting stylized thing they'd trained horses to do, but no, it's purposeful. Some of the moves were strange to see, like "mezair," in which the horse keeps repeating a move that keeps its momentum going in case it needs to burst forward. Another strange one was "terre-à-terre," in which the horse basically bounces repeatedly between its front and rear hooves. Ginger's horse Trace hasn't learned either of those yet, but he can do lots of other related things. We also learned that medieval saddles look like what you'd find on a merry-go-round. Ginger and her colleague Megan are starting an equestrianism school called WhiteRaven.