So! Here I am at the Oklahoma Horseshoeing School. It's Thursday night of my third week and this place is still kicking my ass. There's good days and bad days. Usually the good days are at the beginning of the week and the bad days at the end, since I'm tired and sore by that point. I'm still only able to shoe one hoof a day, though I hope to be able to take up 2 hooves at the beginning of next week. It depends on how well I do and what the instructors assign to me. At the moment, I'm really friggin' tired and sore. My knees didn't bother me until this week, so I'm taking a couple of Aleves now with breakfast to complement my nightly ibuprofins and glucosamines.
Today wasn't that great of a day. The horse I was supposed to put a shoe on was huge, the size of a small draft horse. And they assigned me a hind foot, which is heavy. I had a lot of problems holding the foot to work on it and the damn horse kept trying to tug the hoof out of my grip. I quicked him with a nail, too. I got so frusterated that the instructors had another student nail the shoe on for me and I finished the clinches. So yeah, not one of my best days...
How does a typical day go, you might ask? Well, I wake up at 6 am so I can make class time at 7 am. For the first two weeks, I was in the beginning class, so I had class every morning. Now that I'm in the advanced class, we're in the forge for an hour instead of class on Tuesday and Thursday. Then we have an hour break for breakfast and dorm cleanup. At 9 am we have to be out in the shoeing barn. We're there for 3 hours, then lunch for an hour at noon, then another 3 hours out in the barn. By the end of class, everyone's tired and sweaty, so typically I go back to the dorm and relax for a bit before taking a shower and doing homework. Yes, there's homework. And tests, too. But that part's been easy for me.
The hard part is the actual shoeing. It's an unnatural posture. I mean, how long can you stand pigeontoed and knock-kneed, crouched at the knees and bent over at the waist? Then, hold a horse's leg either between your knees or in your lap. Mind you, not all horses will stand still while you work on them, so factor in getting tugged and shoved around, too. The forge work isn't too hard. Mostly, it's just about understanding which part of the anvil will have what effect when you hammer a piece of hot steel against it. Part of the curriculum is making a variety of shoes and shoeing tools out of stock. I'm working on that still, but I'm figuring it out pretty well so far. I'm just deliberate in learning, which means I'm a slow worker. I've got another 9 1/2 weeks still, so I cautiously optimistic that I'll pick up everything I need to learn.
On the positive side, everyone here is very nice and helpful. Two of the students, Billy and Marvin, graduate this Saturday. Makayla and Blake were the graduates last week. It's nice to be able to look at the more advanced students and see what I'll be working on in 2 or 3 weeks time. The newer students are making me feel slow, though. Sarah is only on her second week and she's already done 2 feet in a day. Then again, she's only 18 and I'm closing in on 34. And Jack is already making handmade hind shoes, which is the next shoe from where I'm at. He's also in his second week. Isabelle and Tim were the students that started this week. We also have Park, who's a student from Korea. He doesn't speak a lot of English, so conversing with him is interesting at times. But he's a good fellow. There's also Alberto, who's two weeks ahead of me. He's really good already. We have Collin, who I found out is from the same town as my family and even graduated from the same high school I did. That's all the students at the moment. As for instructors, there's Jerry, Bill, and Austin. All of them are very good instructors and very friendly people. Jack is the owner (different Jack from above, obviously), but he doesn't teach really any more. According to Jack, we only like him because he's not in the barn.
Well, that's all for this installment. I'll write more as more stuff happens. I'm hoping to get a pair of handmade front shoes passed in the next day or two so I can progress on my forge work. I don't know how tomorrow will go as far as shoeing, but I'm hoping for a good day.
This is me, signing off.
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