7:24 p.m. | 2002-10-30 A Few Good Horses. First, an update on Boss. Yesterday she had an ocular migraine which causes weird visual disturbances. She saw vivid colors and crazy patterns and thought she was having a stroke. Fortunately, she wasn�t. She just had an acid-like trip sans the acid. Trippy, man. But she�s fine now. ** On to other things� I love the mounted police who trot around on horses in the downtown area. Okay, that may be a slight overstatement or maybe a misstatement. I don�t really �love� the mounted police, I mean shoot, I don�t even really know them. But, I do appreciate them and I�m sure they�re great people. I actually love their horses. When the mounted cops stop for lunch or coffee, they tie their horses up to trees, lampposts or the little decorative fences that encircle outside caf� areas. For whatever reason, I find that completely and utterly charming. It looks like a scene from a metropolitan-western movie. Dichotomy. Sigh. Really, it�s the little things in life that bring me joy. These cops, like all the others, are here to �protect and serve� us and they do. Their horses get a lot of attention as they�re people magnets. There�s a lot of weirdness in the area they patrol but not usually anything too dramatic or dangerous. (Not counting bombs and such.) But sometimes, things go amiss. One day, an officer was breaking in a rookie horse and was trotting along with his mounted partner. Suddenly, something spooked the rookie horse and it took off, galloped into a street with traffic, hit a mini-van, shook it off and continued galloping down the street. Needless to say, all parties involved, including fleeing pedestrians, were quite surprised by all this. It took many officers to get the rookie horse stopped and calmed down. Luckily, no one was seriously hurt and only the minivan and rogue horse sustained damage. The next day, there was a little blurb in the local paper about it. The paper noted that the rookie horse was still on �probation� as he hadn�t completed his training yet. Unfortunately, this little incident resulted in the horse failing his probation and he was removed from the mounted police training program. Alas, he flunked out. Poor thing. So, now you know. Not any old horse can be in the mounted force, only a few good horses can. your thoughts? seed flower