07.28.06
Posted in Horses for the horse crazy at 5:28 pm by petArtist Cmoses
Today we hitched Gilford, our 3 yr. old arabian/percheron, to our Meadowbrook cart for the first time. Up til now he has been pulling a smaller training cart. He took it in stride as usual, looking very nice put to the Meadowbrook. Dad took him a few turns around the pasture then out into the street, away and back for a short walk and trot.
Gilford (Bask’s Commandant) put to Meadowbrook cart
Dad with Gilford in harness
Gilford has been going out solo (ie., not accompanied by me on the mare and/or Glendale being ponied) a few times now without issue. He and his horse friends whinny at each other when he leaves and then he settles right down. So far so good.
This gelding, foaled and raised by us, was introduced to saddle at 2 years old and also hitched to a training cart, with help from Tom Curtin, in June 2005. His riding and handling is per the natural horsemanship method. Prior to that he was ground driven by us, and had plenty of other desensitization and exposure including roundpen work and ponying beside his Arabian dam.
Sweet and friendly guy, likes to please!
More about Gilford:
See Gilford and Glendale’s percheron sire Silent Commander, running in ocean surf in a fantasy art print, at Of Wind and Sea.
To see pix of Gilford and his brother Glendale as foals, birth to 6 months, click on their links under their sire’s stallion portrait at Black Stallion Portrait
ALSO see other posts in Blog under category Horses for the horse crazy:
- post of July 28, 2006, story and pix of Gilford’s early training– Colt in Acadia
- post of June 11, 2006– Fun with Horses Weekend
__________________
Connie Moses, petArtist– website since 2001:
Portraits With Pets.com aka PortraitsWithHorses.com
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Posted in Horses for the horse crazy, Other interesting stuff at 5:24 pm by petArtist Cmoses
Early excursions with our first Arabian/percheron foal, Bask’s Commandant aka. Gilford, as appeared in Newsletter for Granite State Carriage Assoc. 9/22/03
Colt in Acadia Sept. 12, 2003
R. and I, with management’s consent, took our 3-month old colt (now called Gilford) on our yearly week-long Acadia vacation in Sept. Our choice to do this was not made casually, as we had spent the foal’s entire baby life exposing him to everything possible, teaching him to pony beside his mom and to understand that certain things are his job not a game. We had advance permission from Wildwood Stables to bring him; he was stalled with his mom, and ponied out with us on our excursions on the carriage roads.
Connie brings Gilford and his mom Willow’s Bask out for ride in Acadia National Park, Maine
Gilford was first haltered at 2 days, introduced to leading about 4 days old, first ponied at 1 month, and trailered at 2 months. He went in a parade at 2 1/2 months led from the ground, next to his mom, and with his Aunt Abby pulling her cart. I still practice with him and the spray bottle (his imprint training at birth was mostly just handling his body.) Since day one he has ALWAYS been corrected for acting nippy or threatening towards people, and in that regard he shows great respect along with curiosity towards humans.
Connie ponying the colt at 3 mos. beside his Arabian dam
The basic procedures of teaching him to be handled, halter, lead, and tie were gleaned from books readily available (thank you Dr. Robert Miller and John Lyons); often however this training is done at a much later age, usually after weaning. No one had told me I couldn’t do certain things with a baby horse, so I figured it’s so much easier (and safer) to introduce stuff when he’s smaller rather than larger. We show him the world from beside his mom, who is a very sensible and stable mare, and he goes where she goes, willingly.
I am first to admit he is pretty laid back and not skittish, but how much of that is early exposure I don’t know. He has plenty of energy when he feels like frolicking, but seeing and doing many different things is his normal life. I think that’s the way it should be.
Dressed for Old Home Day parade when Gilford was 2 1/2 mos., with Abby (morgan/percheron mare) put to our Meadowbrook cart
**UPDATE** See Gilford at age 3 pulling a cart, along with his baby brother Glendale being ponied at 11 months old, on posts Horse Peaches Training Cart and Carriage Driving Young Horse Training and many others on Blog, especially in August 06.
__________________
Connie Moses, petArtist– website since 2001:
Portraits With Pets.com aka PortraitsWithHorses.com
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07.22.06
Posted in Other interesting stuff, Web Design SEO at 5:05 pm by petArtist Cmoses
REALLY REALLY VERY BIG TIP ABOUT GOOGLE SEO:
Google offers help to webmasters at Google Webmaster Central.
I found this area accidentally while Googling. You’ll want to open a free “Google account” to use these resources fully; then read everything about “Google Sitemaps” (NOT the same thing as site maps for visitors.) A “Google Sitemap” is a file which you prepare specifically to direct and inform the “Googlebot” (Google’s first-run spider.) Also research the robots.txt file here, plus get feedback from Google on your site’s “spiderability” and other statistics.
More TIPS on SEO and site-building in future posts, under Category of Web Design and SEO…
__________________
Connie Moses, webmom and petArtist– website since 2001:
Portraits With Pets.com aka PortraitsWithHorses.com
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Posted in Web Design SEO at 4:41 pm by petArtist Cmoses
After initially publishing version 1 of my web site (now) Portraits With Pets, I needed to “optimize” the pages so “search engines” would pay attention to it (ie. “index” it, ie. put it into their databases), allowing more people to then find it. My initial web pages, although showing fine large quick-loading images, were practically “content”-free as far as search engines could tell.
Because I had created visual “pages” in Photoshop and “sliced” each page up into .jpg (graphic file) “images” for the web page built in GoLive, I had very little descriptive text typed directly ONTO the page. Such text, typed on the page, is the “content” that “spiders” (indexing robots that “crawl” the web) look for. Had I been more experienced in website building or better educated, I would have realized this and built my pages differently from the start.
So I reworked my pages, starting with my home (”index”) page, which is the primary entry point to the site and usually the first one to get “crawled” by the search engine “spider” robots. I typed lots of informative text onto my page. I made lots of “text links” and “button links” for “navigation” into the rest of the site. I pared down and honed and fine-tuned my “keywords” and page “titles” and made sure all my “images” had “Alt text” (pop-up text descriptions) and that each page had all the “meta tags” it needed to provide info to the search engines’ “bots.”
In addition, I built a “links” page with “outlinks” to other websites, and began an ongoing effort to get other quality websites to “inlink” to Portraits With Pets. (When sites link to each other it’s call “cross-linking.”) Google is very keen on seeing other website links “inbound” to your website and “ranks” your site higher when it finds these, based somewhat on how highly Google ranks the OTHER website.
Today my website is in pretty good shape and Google has taken notice. I am indexed well for my niche search terms in Google, also quite well in MSNsearch, and reasonably well in YahooSearch. Many of the smaller SE’s find me. A website is an organic thing and the maintenance effort is never-ending, so now I also have this weblog to share such trivia with you (setting up a “Blog”, now that’s a story for another day.
___________
Connie Moses, petArtist Portraits With Pets.com and PortraitsWithHorses.com
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Posted in Web Design SEO at 4:29 pm by petArtist Cmoses
Or, Web design for laypersons
The idea of making my own website appealed to me for several reasons. I wanted to showcase my pet and horse portraits; I wanted to do something original and to control how it looked; I was comfortable using computers; and I didn’t have the money to pay a pro webmaster.
Being familiar with other Adobe products, I chose GoLive5 as my website-building application. GoLive is a fully-featured site-building application which functions through visual page layout and also through source code (”html”) editing. The operator does not have to know html coding because the program writes the code for you.
I assumed that learning GoLive would be fairly simple. Boy was I wrong! Many things are not intuitive in GoLive, the interface was nothing like Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop, and I had to learn to think in 3 dimensions instead of only two. Plus, the manual was 900+ pages and decidedly NOT novice-user friendly.
So I attended a couple of web design seminars, then I found help from a tutor and I learned just enough to be dangerous. First I planned out a structure or “hierarchy” of pages. I built individual pages based on a look (”theme”) which I designed. I started by building pages in Photoshop to look how I wanted them. I then made small byte size “.jpg” files (for fast loading in a browser) from these Photoshop pages for my artworks and graphics, using Photoshop’s “save-for-web” feature.
I figured out how to make “rollovers” in Photoshop Image-Ready and import them into GoLive AND GET THEM TO WORK in GoLive (should have worked automatically, don’t you think?? since Adobe produces both applications…) I used Photoshop “automated” batch processing to build some web galleries of photographs and images, and learned how to put those on my site and into “popup” windows for easy return to the “parent” page. I built “text links” and navigation “links” and “buttons.” I spent days and weeks and months.
GoLive has so many capabilities I will never learn how to use them all, and web design techniques are continually evolving as well. My site is pretty basic in functionality and it looks unique. I just keep figuring out how to do what I want to do.
So learning all this, I got my stuff onto web pages to be visually OK, then I “launched” the site (presented it to the world) in 2004.
___________
Connie Moses, petArtist Portraits With Pets.com and PortraitsWithHorses.com
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07.15.06
Posted in Pet tributes at 4:11 pm by petArtist Cmoses
~May it ease
your sadness a bit
to know that your
precious memories will
always be a bridge
between this world
and the next,
between your loved one
and you.~
By…~Anonymous~
found in message board post at
http://www.in-memory-of-pets.com, where you may submit pet tributes and add candles…
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Posted in Horses for the horse crazy, Other interesting stuff at 2:34 pm by petArtist Cmoses
Our hearts and prayers go out to Barbaro and his many caregivers. Such a cruel twist of fate for such a marvelous animal to suffer such a terrible accident. As a horseperson, I have been a little astounded at the degree of general public sympathy for this horse’s plight.
Barbaro unwittingly serves as a spokeshorse for animal causes everywhere, with his obvious spirit and determination. I’m sure he would love to be a continuing reminder that ALL animals are deserving of our love, understanding, kind treatment and support of their lives.
Let’s remind ourselves that even wild creatures are never truly free of the influences and effects of mankind’s actions, and in that regard they are powerless to protect themselves. Stopping short of a diatribe on global warming and politics, I merely ask that each person caring about Barbaro right now will make one major commitment to a personal change in their own habits or lifestyle to help improve the environment we all share, and thus help people AND animals the world over, in honor of Barbaro.
To see other Barbaro posts here, type in Barbaro at top right…
__________________
Connie Moses– Blog: petArtistWithPeaches
website: PortraitsWithHorses.com (horse and pet portraits)
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07.11.06
Posted in Horses for the horse crazy, Other interesting stuff at 9:26 pm by petArtist Cmoses
Hubby and I took our 3 horses and played last weekend (July 8-9) in the Keene/Peterboro NH area, first at our friend Kim’s on Sat. (who has Abby now, our former morgan/percheron driving mare) then at an organized carriage drive on Sunday (put on by Granite State Carriage Assoc., held in Lyndeboro, New Hampshire– THANKS TO THE TURNERS! See Horse peaches training cart for pix from the drive.)
Kim ground-driving Abby
Dad and Kim with Abby put to Kim’s Meadowbrook cart
At Kim’s we helped her hitch Abby for the first time to their Meadowbrook cart, gave her a kick start driving and then Kim took her husband and little girl out for a spin. We went out afterwards on our horses with dad driving Gilford, and me riding our arabian mare and ponying Glendale on the dirt roads around Kim’s farm.
Our 3 stooges Gilford and Glendale (full brothers, Arabian/percherons) and momma Arabian mare Willow’s Bask, at Kim’s barn
3-yr. old Gilford studying sheep
Our 3 horses were turned out in a paddock next to sheep and llamas, momma mare certainly got all snorty at the llamas every time they showed their faces! They were pretty ok with the sheep. Pix are our 3 stooges at Kim’s barn.
The horses went like pros both days– though it was his first drive away from home, Gilford (our 3-year-old perch/arab) didn’t do anything worse than startle sideways once or twice, and Glendale (Gilford’s 10-month-old perch/arab brother) acted like he’d done it all his life, being ponied, tied to trailer, trotting on dirt roads, passing another horse & cart in opposite direction etc. They were even exposed to gun shots passing a gun club and no biggie.
AND on Sunday dad had Peaches (our English Setter 2 yrs. old) in the cart seat half across his lap, which was no easy feat in the training cart but all was fine. SEE LYNDEBOROUGH PIX in Post of August 8, Horse peaches training cart. A five mile drive only, my Arabian mare Willow’s Bask was a little bit tender-footed in coarse gravel on the road in spots, but I took it easy with her. Sorta surprising because she’s been barefoot almost a year now, since foaling Glendale.
Gilford put to our training cart on July 2, I shot from atop my mare using a small film camera
Gilford with dad and Joonatan our Finnish exchange student in 2006
Parting shot of Joonatan, dad and Ezra on recent hike in Belknap mountains…
___________
Connie Moses, petArtist Portraits With Pets.com and PortraitsWithHorses.com
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07.06.06
Posted in NEWS at PortraitsWithPets, Other interesting stuff, Pet tributes at 8:44 am by petArtist Cmoses
To you who miss departed furry friends, I extend ONE-HALF OFF regular pricing on custom memorial portraits. From Sunday thru Sunday, July 9-16, for as little as $255 (includes insured flat shipping costs of $15) you may choose to honor one or two subjects in your watercolor giclee of 8×10 size (regular price $480.) Half price off larger sizes as well, for example 14×11 custom watercolor giclee would be only $365 shipped. You may even have two custom portraits for the regular price of one.
TO START your half-price memorial commission instantly (beginning July 9) with $250 secure PayPal deposit (credit cards accepted,) click PayPal Payments at top right on my website’s home page, Portraits With Pets.com and mention MEMORIAL with your order. Or Email connie@portraitswithhorses.com or call Connie at 603-528-1531 or 603-490-9694. Any questions can be commented below.
This Private sale is in consideration of friends lost…
If you have experienced the loss of a companion– dog, cat or horse– my heart is truly with you. Many of my commissions are for pet memorial artworks from photos and snapshots, and I also have created commemorations of people’s lives– see MEMORIAL PORTRAIT EXAMPLES at page bottom here– Quick-view pet portrait galleries or go to http://www.portraitswithpets.com/pages/QBOverviewPortraits.html
My role is to make such works comforting and celebratory of life, and the process as easy and simple as possible. Since each portrait is so unique, we can discuss all options together and of course I’ll freely advise you on the creative possibilities.
Gift Certificates for Portraits are also included in my special In Memoriam half-off pricing– see Portrait Gift Certificates info at Gift Certificates or go to http://www.portraitswithhorses.com/pages/INFgiftCertifs.html . So if you’d like to show your care for another in a situation of loss, please Email me now– connie@portraitswithhorses.com Don’t delay, this offer ends at midnite Sunday July 16.
Connie Moses, petArtist
Celebrating life’s beauty and joy
___________
WEBSITE since 2001– Portraits With Pets.com aka PortraitsWithHorses.com
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07.05.06
Posted in Horses for the horse crazy at 1:55 pm by petArtist Cmoses
Horse friends, please note my “Pet Tributes” category (which you may Email me contributions for)… there’s a poem here ode to a horse that I wrote for Charlie Brown, who had a long and full life.
Charlie, a handsome chestnut with 4 white socks and a big blaze, was an elderly gentleman living alone when we moved in next door in 2000 with our mares Willy and Abby. Well, Charles suddenly got re-interested in life, prancing around (at HIS age) showing off for the girls, and before long they were sharing his pasture, to his great delight!
Thanks to Charlie, I was able to tell when Willy was in heat and able to get her bred to the percheron stallion Silent Commander. Then Charlie helped raise baby Gilford in his first 2 years of life, before finally arthritis and poor health got the best of him.
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