Good Grief Charlie Brown!!!!

Okay guys...ready for some big time whining???? Better grab some cheese to eat while you read this, 'cause I am pouring out the wine...lol!!! Have I ever said that I detest spending money on school??? Well I do!!! Over the last three years, we have spent over $15,000 of our own money. (Not to mention the student loans that will come due six months after I graduate)

Do you know what I could have bought with that money??? How about a new car, a horse (a couple of horses, really!!), new appliances, new furniture, or a totally awesome family vacation to somewhere exotic and fun, like Antigua. Or I could have put it all in savings, and actually have one...lol!!! All whining aside, I know that my education will pay off in the long run, but I just forked out $458 for four text books...two of which were used. When the girl rang me up, my mouth literally fell open at the total amount. I was like "Are you kidding me???" Apparently she was not, and she informed me that a guy who is a physics major, just dropped over $900 for his. Guess I should just shut up and quit complaining, eh???
Then, to rub salt in my bank account's wounds, my husband and I got our taxes done on Sunday (which was a good thing!!!) and we had to pay for it up front. Know how much that cost??? Over $220 at H&R Block, and we were informed that the rates are down this year. Says who???

I am pathetic, I know, but I just got slapped for over $600 that I don't really have. I will have it in about one month when the check comes from the IRS, but until then, we are pinching pennies.
Ahhhhhhhhh....the joys of our crumbling economy!!! I will just have to focus on the positive, right??? Things could always be worse, right????

Anywho...sorry to vent and whine. I know my problems are small compared to what thousands of people are dealing with.
Thanks for listening!! :)

Name Changes

Hey there!

Just wanted to let you know that I am changing my blog name, and that I am sorry ahead of time if it causes any confusion. I am thinking that it won't, and that your blog rolls will update within 24 hours, but in case they don't...don't worry about having my old blog name on your blog rolls. It's fine.

Why the change??? Let's just say that I want to be a little more private. A friend of mine had an icky experience involving someone using images from one of her blogs to lure young girls. Creepy huh??? I don't want to go private, because that can really cause blogger turmoil, so I will just mix the name up a bit.

Sorry if I have confused any of you!!! I am still me!!! LOL!!!

Chittlins!!! (Not the Edible Kind)

Those of you who know me, know that I always call my kidlets by weird names, such as kidlets, cornheads, and shitlins...I mean chittlins...lol!!!! Do you think they will grow up thinking that I didn't love them enough??? Just kidding!!!

Well, when our weather WAS so nice (yes, that is past tense!!), the chittlins and I did quite a bit of biking, hiking, and walking/running around. I did that without my kidlets too, but I have to look like I am a great mommy, so I will only post about what I do with the cornheads...lol!!! (Remember that post I did about keeping it real???)For some reason, the kidlets like to show me up, and they run up the trail.....and back down the trail....up the trail....and back down the trail....up the trail....you get what I am saying right???? That they joyfully run laps around me, like the steep incline is nothing to them. Like it doesn't hurt their hips, or their knees, or their ankles, or their feet, and Eric was doing it with his backpack on. Did I mention that it weighed 15 pounds??? I tell you what.....Then, as if that's not bad enough, they stopped on the way down and made faces at me!!! (Actually we were still on our way up, and I had passed them for a change...lol!!!)

Near the top of this trail are some areas of columnar basalt that were left behind form a previous eruption on Mt. Rainier. Bet you didn't know I was a geologist too, did you??? Okay, okay...I'm not, and I only know what this is because of the little sign below it, which tells those of us who are not to out of breath to see straight, what it is.
Do you see how blue our skies were??? We had about one week of that, and now it is 38 degrees and raining again. Blechhhhh!!!!At the base of our mini mountain, was the resident elk herd. However (and I think this may have been due to the recent earthquake that we had) all of the resident elk herds had joined together into one big herd. It was an amazing sight, with more than 70 elk all congregated together. What was even cooler, was that we could see them from atop our mini mountain, so we knew exactly were to look for them once we climbed back down.

Well...I hope that your weather is behaving better than ours is, and that you are all having a great Friday! Talk/blog at ya' soon!

Heading Off....

Good morning to you all!!! As promised, I am done with the online journaling about my past equine experiences...for now...lol!!! I am sure that I have bored several of you to death, and I am moving on...

Oh, and Kacy??? This is the picture that I mentioned like a week or two ago. This trail made me think of you and your Wa mare, out practicing with natures cavalettis! :) You can't really see the downed saplings very well (they got bigger as we went along), but they were just the right size.

So, today I am back to school, and I am not happy about it...lol!!! Five days off was not enough of a "mind" break in my opinion. Maybe I should take that up with PLU??? Just kidding!! I will not be able to ride tomorrow, as I will be in class, so here's to hoping for better, warmer, and longer days, right??On a positive note, the sun has been shining around here, and it has been in the 60's for about one week. I feel like a whole new woman!!! And....it isn't getting dark until around 5:40. Can you all say "Yaaaaaaaaay!!!!"

Well, I am off to class. Hope that you all have great ends to your weeks!

This Is A Long One....Sorry!!!!

Okay guys...this is the last one! I promise!! And if you want someone to blame for all of this deep, equine induced soul searching, blame Chelsi over at Adventures of A Horse Crazed Mind!! She has been writing some really great stuff on this whole subject. LOL!!

As she has mentioned, there is something very therapeutic about writing down your thoughts and feelings, and I have seriously done a lot of deep thinking on this whole horses and danger thingy. It has been helpful for me to realize where my hesitations and hang-ups come from (beside the fact that I am a cautious person by nature), and I am sorry if this seems mundane to any you. After re-reading what I have written in the last two posts, and also after much thought (LOL!!!), I have come to the conclusion that I am a careful person who likes to think things through before I do them, and most importantly, that I am someone who likes to be in control.

Obviously having had two kidlets, I have learned to control my "control" issues so to speak (I don't ever want to be one of those psycho, boring, controlling mothers!!), but I still like to be in control of my own self, and of my own future. Who doesn't, right???

With this being said, I also like to be in control of my horses when I am on their backs. Something that is not hard to do with the right horse. This may be why I enjoy showing and doing arena work...the horse is on my turf, and under my control, and if I happen to lose that control, oh well...I am in an arena, right???

This is definitely not true when you are out on the trail. You may still be in control, but there is a lot more room for something to go wrong, and there are no walls/gates to protect you. Now I have trail ridden my whole life, but I primarily did so on a horse that could not be trusted while cantering or galloping, and there were many times that I thought my life would end by being thrown helter skelter, 25-30 mph, into a tree, or onto a stump, or over an embankment....you get the idea!So where does this leave me now?? A 34 year old mother of two, who loves to trail ride, and has a great horse to do so with? Well a year ago when I started riding again after my eight year hiatus, it left me terrified to canter/gallop, and I had a difficult time trusting Bo not to kill me. Bo also had some trust issues after an incident that took place while he was back at his original owners house, and so there we were...two nervous, unsure bodies, looking for something/someone to trust in again.
Because Amber knows Bo so well, and because she knows me so well, she ambushed me into galloping the first time that we madly ran down the trail. This was last May, and I had cantered Bo in the arena (control!!!), but not out on the trail yet. She took off on Waska...without warning...and Bo, who likes to be in front, promptly charged off after him. I remember that at first I was frozen with fear. This was it. I was going to die. And then I remember yelling at Amber to please slow down, because Bo was surely going to try to buck, and that I was a mother with kids, and couldn't afford to be hurt. She just pulled up along side of me, looked over, laughed, and said "Mel, Bo is NOT going to hurt you! I promise. Now quit fighting with him, give him his head, and lets go!!" And off we went.

Now look at me!!! I am a galloping fool...lol!!! I will admit that sometimes when I am galloping down the trail, leaning forward, with my hands up on Bo's neck, I start thinking of all of the things that could go wrong while we are running freely, but I now stop those thoughts, and don't let them come back in my head. I can't, or I won't gallop. It would be crazy to do so with the thoughts that try to come.

Anyway...Bo and I are really starting to build a trusting relationship with each other. We are finally connecting like I haven't connected with a horse in a long time, and that is because we are trusting each other. It really a nice feeling to have towards a horse, because I haven't ridden a horse that I can trust in years.

And don't get me wrong....Bo is not a beginners horse. He has to have a an experienced rider, because he knows how to pull a lot of crap, but I don't mind. I can handle it as long as he doesn't try to kill me when we are running...lol!!!

So thanks Chelsi!!! You have been an inspiration! :)

THE END!!!!!!

Trauma Pages Cont....

Now for part two of why Melanie is a cautious rider...lol!!! (This is actually the part that Chelsi suggested that I share with you) Oh, and I wanted to say that I appreciate all of your comments about my mom and sister. This is the first time that I have sat down and written about that incident, and it was really helpful for me. In retrospect, I think that what damaged me so bad about that accident, was having to live/deal with the aftermath of it.

Have any of you seen someone who has had 1/2 of their face ripped off, or seen someone who has undergone facial surgery??? Trust me...it is really nasty. The swelling that accompanies trauma to a face is unbelievable, and my mother looked like the Elephant Man for about two weeks. Not only that, but I was a typical "I hate my mother" teenager, and when she almost died....well lets just say it made me feel really guilty. Like it was somehow my fault that she got hurt. So there you have it! I think that I am now cured...lol!!!


(Shadest and Sienna circa 1995)

Now on to part two....This part is really simple. Most of you have read all about Shadest (my childhood horse of 16 years), and about how wonderful he was. And he truly was...don't get me wrong, but he had one tragic flaw, and that was that he had the habit of turning into a complete, full-out, rodeo bronc when you cantered or galloped him. And I am not talking about a little crow hop here and a bigger buck there...he literally would explode like one of those horses on the old Western movies. (I think that most of you have seen those and know what I am talking about) (Shadest and Beki in a Showmanship class)

Now I would like to think that he bucked like that because he was ridden by a bunch of young punks, and so he got away with it, but I remember the first time he did it to me, I jumped off of him when he was done, and literally beat the S%*@# out of him. Once I knew to watch for it, I would ride it out as best I could ,and then beat the snikies out him. I had chiropractors, saddle fitters, massage therapists, and acupuncturists check him out (multiple times), and no one could find any cause for his behavior either. And the bad part was that he was the best horse other than that. He would go anywhere and do anything, but you literally placed your life in grave danger when you cantered or galloped him.


Trainers??? Well they wanted me to "leave" Shadest with them for a month or two, and they promised to get the buck out of him, but being a silly, romantic teenage girl, I wasn't about to let that happen. In retrospect, I should have sent him to someone (with a good reputation), or my parents should have forced me to...I don't know.....

(Me and Shadest circa 1992)

As he got older, and his training kept progressing, I began to ride more and more English style, and had a Dressage instructor suggest that I ride him in a jointed Pelham with either double reins or a connector, so I would at least have some leverage to stop him from bucking. Thankfully it helped out a lot, but he was still dangerous, because you never knew when he was going to explode...it wasn't every time I rode him.

Thankfully I was never hurt on him, but as I got older, my sisters started showing and riding him, and Amber sustained a concussion or two, and a broken arm. By that point, we had had him for so long that selling him wasn't an option, and I began to look around for a trainer to take him to, as I was now a mother and did not want to risk my life anymore. As you all know he ended up colicking and being put down, so I never had the chance to try that last step, but I can tell you that if he were still alive today, I would not let my kidlets ride him any faster than a trot/jog. Even if he had gone to a trainer and they had fixed the problem. Would I still ride him??? Probably, but that is only because I knew how to keep an iron grip on his reins when we cantered.
(Shadest and Jen)

So now you can probably see why I will only ride well-broke and trustworthy horses today. I have been there and done that, and I don't want to do it again...lol!!!
Old Bo Bo has been such a blessing in my life, because I knew him from when Amber had him before, and even though he does occasionally have his out of body experiences (what Arab doesn't??) he doesn't buck or rear or try to kill me...lol!!!


Well I hope that I haven't bored you all to tears, and I do have one more tidbit that I want to share with you (later), and then I will get back to blogging as usual...I promise!

More Awards!!

So during all of my moping about (LOL!!!), I was given several awards from all of my great blogging pals, and I figured that I better hurry up and mention them, or I will get caught up in life and forget.

Look at this cute Valentine one from Natarojo over at Just Horsin' Around! I am apparently a "Spreader of Love!" Of course I am!!! It is better to be nice than it is to be nasty, right???LOL!!! Thanks a bunch!!

Then, Lisa over at The Laughing Orca Ranch, bestowed me with two awards. Goodness! What did I do to deserve that???

The first one is the "One Lovely Blog Award," and the second one is simply called "Friends," and is given to blogs that are charming and whose authors aim to make friends. So Lisa...are you saying that I am not superficial??? LOL!!! Just kidding hon...thanks a lot...really!!!!And lastly, there is the "My Blog is Muck Boot-tabulous" award from the glamorous (and "Punchy" )Meg, over at Lucchese to Louis Vuitton! Thanks Meg!!! LOVE the leopard print...lol!!!!
Again....thanks to all of you! It means a lot to me that I come to mind when it is ward time!!! :)