Talk about a tremen-dous time--my five-day visit with Julie at her paradise of a place in the Wisconsin north woods was wonderful! I really enjoyed hanging out with Julie and her Cairn companion Kaile, nightly suppers together with her mother next door (which is a good walk away!), and meeting Julie's horses Rhiannon, Pony, Ostara, Gabby, and Roxy. The woods all around were beautiful, the air was so fresh, and Julie even made green bean casserole from scratch for me, yom!
No trip there could ever be long enough, but even at five days there was nearly no time for sleep, what with several thousand photos and drifts of information to sift through for the book...most of it stashed away in the secret space revealed in the photo above, behind solid but swiveling bookcases!
On another floor of the house, Julie's showstring of legends--possibly the largest gathering of Congress champions on the planet--was enjoying semi-retirement (earlier this year Julie and the gang competed for the first time in more than a decade, entering a local live show).
Although their photo images have long been engraved on my
brain, it was the first time I'd seen any of them in person...and I
couldn't help going into groupie mode, grabbing the chance to shoot my very own photos of the stars!
On that week-long trip to the U.S.--first to Julie's house, and then down to the Ohio storage unit holding me and Corky's collections--I shot 1,970 digital photos of model horses. (Upping the number was the fact that I photoed every horse with two different cameras...just in case a memory card went bad, as happened last year.)
Then there were the paper ones. From her hobby hideaway
behind the bookcases came 853 (a hefty stack, but really just aIn trying to shorten the stack, I sorted the halter photos into groups by horse color to try to make it easier to spot any duplicates. In the photo below, it doesn't look so hard when viewed from above. But as you can see in the shot below that, the actual height of some of those stacks (especially the stack of bays on the far left, and the even taller group of greys right behind it) was a little daunting!
Which brings us to the logistics of actually getting all these horses into the book! Corky and I are rethinking the design now to try to fit them all in without having to go to a second volume. But, wow--we were hoping there would be a lot, but this is exponentially more than we'd imagined! (It's a nice problem to have, though!)
I still need to interview four hobbyists, after I finish up a different project this month. We're continuing to plan for publication in 2011. Thanks very much for your patience, and please stay tuned for more updates!
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