Life changes

Just a quick post to say I foaled out the last mare of the season last night! Whoo! I will be going back to days and I am so excited to sleep at night again. Literally can't wait. Someone remind me of this when I'm exhausted and trying to nap at 5 pm tonight. :)

The infamous last foal of 2015! 

Brief hiatus

Digby from earlier this week. 

So as you can tell, I took a brief (ok several week), unexpected break from blogging. I had a lot going on in my personal and work life that required basically all of my time, energy and focus. I didn't stop seeing my horse but I didn't ride or work him nearly as often as I'd like. Mostly because I have to pick ticks off him daily (HATE THEM!!!) and sorting through his mane and tail every time I see him has become awful time consuming. I got four off him today! Ugh. Gross. I've had Lyme disease before so ticks are my least favorite ever. To be fair, I didn't really like them before I got Lyme and now I reallyyy don't. I'm sure they have some impact on the environment and a reason to be alive but I'd be cool if they disappeared and weren't replaced with an equally foul bug. 

But anyway, I'm back! Whoo! I'm still (ughughugh) on nights but we're down to one mare so hopefully she foals soon (... Like yesterday.) and then I can go back to days! I have TONS of catching up to do both in reading and writing my own blogs. It may not happen. We shall see!

What do you do for a living?

Let's hear it! What do you do for a living? Did you go for something to support your horsey habit? Do you work in a job with flexible hours to make horses easier? Do you work with horses?

As for me, I'm a horse girl. I've only had horse related jobs my entire life but I'm potentially changing that soon. Rather than blabber on, I present you my job (all pictures taken in the last 2 weeks... I have roughly 10,383,665,721,986,362 baby photos and most of them are terrible like this. Babies are hard to photograph on an iPhone because they're constantly moving.)

Technically a yearling and not a foal. Still super cute.

 

Leaping!

More of the same foal running around. Mom does. Not. Care. "Must eat grasses."

Foal and Mom enjoying a lovely sunrise

Different foal, same sunrise :)

 

Would of been SUPER cute, but then there's Mom's nose!

The little forelock tuft's babies get just kills me!

Finals Week. We meet again.

So in the winter, I started taking college classes again. It should be noted that I graduated already a few years ago with a Bachelors degree. This time I'm at my local community college, just to get into the swing of things, potentially go back full time/part time in the fall for a different degree, you know.

 

 

I'm not full time enrolled but I'm taking a few and I work 54 hours a week. (Albeit, I'm writing this post at work right now so I usually get a few hours a night to study/watch Netflix/etc.) It is now finals week.

 

Which means this is pretty true:

 

And I'm not doing a heck of a lot of Digby riding for the week. I had originally planned to ride today and hopefully on the weekend. I was also meeting with an advisor who is in my potential future career choice. I mostly wanted to talk about 4 year colleges, career opportunities, if she had any advice for getting a job afterwards. We scheduled it for today and I thought, ok, fine, I'll just ride the hony on Thursday. After waiting 30 minutes, she never showed up. I called, emailed, nothing. Hmph. So really, I waited around and did stuff at home because I didn't have time to go to class, ride and be back for this meeting, essentially wasting a sunny, high of 78 day that I could of been riding. I don't have an indoor so I try to plan to ride any day that's nice out. Thanks for that, no-show meeting person. I drove home, took a shower, cuddled the dog in the sunshine and had a summer shandy in honor of Cinco de Drinko. I felt a lot better after that. Adult beverages and vitamin D for the win.

 

Sunday Funday

Had a lovely ride on Mr. Digby today! I've decided to bring him back into work now as he's finally gaining weight (praise hallelujah!) so we've started walking under saddle and I did a bit of long lining yesterday in the trot. 

Typical between the ears shot. (Pics or it didn't happen!!)

I did trot a bit under saddle today but a trailer came onto the property just as we started working and I knew it was either "trot it out" or "pick a fight and jig for an hour." So we did a few minutes of trotting each way until he realized his horse friend was in fact just getting ridden as well. He was forward and pretty darn awesome for the first time being ridden, minus one bareback ride, since probably December.

Good hony!

Video as promised!

A short video of some of our time spent in the round pen and then him actually going out into the field. Note wild leaps and cross cantering. Wild child Digby! He had been in for about a day and a half so I threw him out and let him leap around before actually testing any buttons out. These clips are after he bucked around for a while.

Also if Digby was a girl, the song would likely be his theme song. :)

Thursday's Must Read - "Body Image, the Show Ring & Why Something Has to Change"

I'm working on a cute video for the blog from some video clips of me letting Digby take a spin in the round pen (spoiler alert: had a SERIOUS go button, paired with some feeling good freshness made for a fun time, but we had a pretty decent whoa none the less! Good hony!) from Wednesday.

In the meantime, I'd encourage everyone to read this blog post over at horsenation.com, regardless of how old or young you are, what you compete in, or if you don't compete at all. It's a fairly short blog post and it's 100% worth it.

20 million women and 10 million men suffer from an eating disorder at some point in their life (link to scientific research plus more stats found at nationaleatingdisorder.com) and based on statsitics in 2012, 43.7 million adults were listed as having "any mental illness" in the past year the U.S. alone (link to scientific research and more stats at http://www.nimh.nih.gov/). I personally know several equestrians and non-equestrians who have battled eating disorders, anxiety, depression and I've heard comments like those that are listed in the Horse Nation article. If you are blessed to have never suffered from any of the above, I believe it's important to support those who do, and even more so, encourage friends, family and bystanders to keep an open mind.

The program (a blog and FB page... for now!) she discusses, Riders for Well-Being, seems to be new but I'm eager for more content and contributions!