#chez nell

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It's Christmas

No matter your fandom, it's time to watch.

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Temperature knitting with Cat

[Textile, 2020]

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Introducing (after a time of him being with us) the addition of Buddy Duncan, Esq. to the Nettlestone household.

Here he is in his terrifying glory--the picture the local pound posted to attempt his adoption. Naturally, I could not ignore a Pomeranian whose true name was clearly Kim Shin.

I fretted to my friend that someone else might snatch him up before I was able to make it over to the pound to meet him and force them to take my money. “I--don’t think you’re going to have to worry about that,” she told me, a little taken aback at my blinded-by-dog condition.

Anyway, welcome to Chez Nell, Buddy Duncan! You named yourself b/c “Buddy” was literally the only sound you responded to. You appear to be old as old can be, but you’re frisky and those aren’t cataracts I’m assured, and your hearing remains sharp and your hips flexible.

We’re currently growing his hair out (he was shaved due to mats and skin infection when he was at the pound) so we can take an amazing post-adoption photo to send to his previous keepers. I’d say in two more months we should be ready!

*Shout out to local Animal Control--they had a great selection of dogs and almost none of the hoops to go through other adoption-facilitators have begun using (I grew weary with all the needed documentation for those agencies though I’d used one in the past). The cost was $85 which included his license, a far cry from the $250 local agencies were asking, and the hard-to-satisfy restrictions they have adopted.

Adopt and rescue wherever best meets your needs, but never forget your local “dog catcher” might still be your best option!

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Um, have I hung some curtains in order to increase the feeling that my house/hideout is in the middle of Sherwood?

Yes, yes I have.

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Full disclosure, Gentle Readers. 

I am a pre-teen girl obsessed with horses.

[pre-teen girl in spirit only at this point]

I mean, there’s a reason that I’m neighbors with this: 

[the foregrounded green roof is a boarding stable and show barn #horselifegoals]

Anyway, I don’t know much about Lee Min Ho, but after watching him ride in multiple shows I can confirm that anytime the man is on a horse my interest easily triples. And he hasn’t embarrassed himself yet (at least in the shows I’ve seen). In fact, I’m pretty sure that in TKEM there’s only one shot, (at the racetrack where he makes that running mount) that is not, in point of fact, LMH, but a stuntie.

Feel free to check out the beginning of the video above to see him riding bts. He’s one of very few lead actors that (afaik) are ever filmed actually galloping on their own mounts. [In shows like The Legend of the Blue Sea, The Great Doctor, and The King: Eternal Monarch]

But here’s what really has my attention and curiosity:

It’s a terrible screen-grab, but here Lee Gon and Maximus are arriving with Tae-Eul in the Kingdom. When they left the Republic, and LG lifted her onto Maximus [sidebar: he probably should have asked her if she’d ever ridden before], he sits her a modified sidesaddle, both legs to one side, which had me worried bc they had some distance to travel, and some of it at speed. By the time they’re in the bamboo forest, though, she’s now astride, which allowed me to unclench a little. And then I thought I noticed that he’d given TE his stirrups?!?!?? [*I also made a mental note that he must have also stopped to adjust the stirrup length?!?? BC no WAY is LG’s leg length comparable to TE’s]

This, right before they ride for the obelisks–at what seems to be some rate of speed. Umm…seemed a bit odd.

But here, in the screenshot above, once they are in the Kingdom, Maximus has–a totally different saddle. They’ve given TE and LG each their own sets of stirrups (not at all the saddle configuration she had in the courtyard when TE was lifted onto her), and frankly, I am way too invested in wanting to see what the saddle underneath them looks like, if it’s still the Western that LG has on Maximus usually, or if they production team has also modified it with with two tandem seats…

I mean, viewers are probably not supposed to notice this at all–it was caught only in a brief shot or two–but I would imagine it added to the comfort-level of the actors (as well as their safety) as they sat that horse through numerous takes over long time periods–and it also makes me more confident that the shots of TE and LG racing toward the portal between worlds was actually still the two of them on Maximus, rather than astride those hobby horse dummies in the LOTR bts.

Anyway…that’s all the horse obsessing for today from Chez Nell- - -

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Gentle Readers, living in the heart of our county’s horse farms--this takes up A LOT of our time in the car...but still we persist with all diligence

Please prepare yourself for an update post that contains more than a fair amount of commentary about tack and The King: Eternal Monarch.

This is a follow-up to the post “I am a pre-teen girl obsessed with horses”

You may recall that the pre-teen part...I lost some time ago.

Update #1: My neighbors, who own the boarding stable and show barn, sold their property! (It’s literally been on the market off and on ever since I moved to Chez Nell). This is TERRIBLY exciting, b/c the sellers had sort of reached their ceiling of what they could reasonably continue to afford to maintain and add-on to the property (for example, they had never managed to swing installing any kind of A/C in the massive show barn), and the property was bought by what seems to be some AMAZING folks with the following bona fides (to start): a CHA Certified Instructor w/ 25 years experience teaching, and it will be a USPC Certified Riding Center! The new owner graduated from Foxcroft and is a Certified Horsemanship Association (CHA) Level 4 (Master) English/Jumping Instructor and CHA Level 3 Western Instructor.

To stop spouting qualifications: I am VERY excited. I am near enough to walk to this facility. Little Cap shall see himself enrolled directly!

Update #2: You might think, Citizen of the Republic and Subjects of the Kingdom, that I had completed both my fangirling and my obsession with Maximus’ double saddle.

You would be wrong.

In fact, in my subsequent re-watches, I’ve actually taken MORE terrible-quality screenshots.

The lovely and horse-alert @lafseanchai​ had suggested what was in-use on the show for JTE might have been a sort of “cheater” stirrup.

(an example, this one to accommodate a child rider behind the adult) (there is also a version that hangs from the saddle horn in front)

To refresh our minds: double stirrups above and below

Below are some further images I managed to find (some from BTS videos):

If “cheaters” are used, they are to the front of the existing pair, but were not hung from the horn. This amazing saddle has enough hooks and latches to work for California Closet, so affixing them elsewhere would be no challenge.

Blurry picture, hoping it might show something more to someone else than it does to me--

Seems to show an added seat behind the cantle, a second cantle, if you will, draped over in a matching white.

The crudely done outline (by me) shows the ornamented pommel, standard cantle, and again, what seems to be a second cantle (presumably so that Lee Min Ho wasn’t seated to ride on the back edge of the saddle/the horse’s bare back)

This saddle is so amazingly ornate--I’m not even sure what I’m seeing here in the area of where JTE’s front stirrups would have attached. The saddle top even better reveals the “second cantle”. But the straps in front of the visible stirrup--could they be for JTE’s stirrups?

Here, the saddle (before the alterations made for double riding) in shot when Lee Gon is going to lift Tae-Eul up. Single set of stirrups, one seat, two cinches. Isn’t she a pretty saddle?

Interestingly (to me) the BTS footage reveals definitively that Lee Gon DID ask Tae-Eul if she’d ever ridden/sat a horse before. It WAS in the script.

You cannot expect me to end this post without showing this shot of HOW Lee Gon was able to lift JTE so high like a feather and sit her on Maximus in the graceful, effortless way he did. [He was lifting her to at least the height of his own shoulder, and his hold on her looked minimal) Thanks for the beautiful scene, TKEM--and thanks, too, for revealing the truth behind the fictional lie!

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So, Gentle Readers, I was at trimming a holly bush that had grown far too big for its britches in the wake of all this rain of late, and my heart stopped when I uncovered this.

It took...awhile...to cut back the bush’s overgrowth to see it this clearly and photograph it. In the meantime, as it was there in the shaded dark moistness of the bush, I had plenty of time to move from terrorized to resigned. Was I about to have to call the authorities and be subjected to cadaver dogs invading my side yard? Was it just some old surgical glove one of the Nellets had filled with water or dirt, tied off, and thrown it into the overgrown flower bed? What? What? What? my mind kept asking, not liking the answer that seemed to be rising from the grave right before me.

Screwing my courage to the sticking place, I put my faith in Google, and found the answer: Dead Man’s Fingers fungus. Manipulating the branch confirmed six “fingers”, not simply five. And while the pictures Google has are not so unsettlingly grasping at a branch, clearly from a shallow grave, it’s the same stuff.

I would not need to call on the police. Or Buffy Summers.

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Summer, 2021