LEVEL TWO ONLINE PASS!!
WHOO-HOO!!! I just got confirmation from Parelli, Inc., via email regarding my recent Parelli Audition.
I've passed Level Two Online!
Only one more savvy to go (FreeStyle Riding), and that
BLUE STRING is MINE!!!
*happy dancing all over the place, can't wait to tell my horse*
In other news, I interviewed with a temp agency, and not only am I up for the job I applied to, but my mixed bag of odd qualifications might be the perfect fit for a couple of creative positions they've been trying to fill for a LONG time.
You bet, I'm buying my lottery ticket today. ;-)
Labels: breaking news, horses, positive thinking
Geico
begin rant/
Hey, Geico—do me a favor. Make a decision about which ad campaign you'd like to use, then STICK TO IT. Nothing drives me more bonkers than seeing ten different types of ad campaigns for a single product in one season. Cavemen. Geckos. Jason Campbell Celebrity Endorsement "I have some good news though...". Money with eyeballs
PICK ONE!!!
I'd rather take my business to a company that knows the meaning of the word "consistent".
/end rant
Labels: things that piss me off
Death By Chocolate
Man Dies After Falling Into Vat of ChocolateAnd I'm surprised nobody has used the obvious headline (though I did).
Yes, my sense of humor is perverse at times. (I do feel for the man and his family, of course.)
So. Anybody else glued to the TV yesterday for the MJ Memorial? It was nicely done, I thought. Classy.
Progress report on my garden: I haz tomatoes and peppers. My six tomato plants all have at least one green 'mater on them, and my nine pepper plants are all producing. There will be some food this fall! The corn looks good. I planted nine little plants, and someone promptly munched down one of them. But it recovered! I can't even tell it was ever munched. They are growing nicely, though nowhere near as tall as what I pass on the way to the barn.
My grass is also growing nicely, heh.
That's all. Might have a stash sale this month, so stay tuned.
Labels: breaking news, nothing important
Hay, Happy 4th, Belated
Happy 4th to everyone. I'm a bit behind. My Independence Day activities included helping to unload 20 bales of hay and trim the horrendous flare off of my horse's front hooves.
In the interest of saving on farrier costs (since my
AANHCP trimmer lives on the eastern side of the state and has to travel, and there are no AANHCP trimmers closer to me yet), I'm doing it myself for now. I sort of know how—in 2006, I was considering becoming one myself, and I took two clinics that year, one of which was an INTENSE two-day study of the anatomy of hooves, trimming them, mistakes, diseases, etc and included up-close viewings of cadaver hooves. Yes. The preserved hooves of dead horses. I thought I'd be grossed out, but I found it so fascinating I forgot to think about what I was holding in my hand.
Anyway, I learned just enough to be "dangerous", and before putting everything on hold because of the parental illness situation, I'd also invested $600 in trimming equipment, so... might as well use it. My interest in becoming one is renewed, too. It might be a good stepping stone on the way to PNH. It's a practical skill, after all.
Sunday, I assisted the barn manager with putting up a bigger load of hay. Twenty bales were nothing compared to yesterday. The entire load was 400 bales. It took the hay man three trips to deliver it all. We got 2/3 of that put up before the BM had to go to work. (No rain for the next few days—the last load can sit outside and be OK).
Putting up hay means one person stands in the hay loft and stacks the hay; another person stands at the bottom and loads the bales onto the hay escalator thingie that transports the bales from ground to the second story loft.
(photo: Legendary Farms)I was the loader. Keep in mind I am out of shape, overweight, and each bale weighs 50-80 pounds. Times 266 (approximately 2/3 of the load). Can you say "ow". I will recommend hay loading to anyone who wants full-body conditioning. It worked my abs, my biceps, my squat muscles, my knees... ALL of it.
The interesting thing is,
I'm not complaining. I actually LIKED doing this. (In 100-degree heat or 20 below wind chills, I might feel differently.) I also actually liked trimming my horse's feet (which involves standing in a bent-over semi-squat the majority of the time). I feel a good sort of exhaustion today.
The most interesting thing is the hay delivery truck. The hay man pulled this contraption with a big tractor. The contraption is a stacker. What an invention! All the bales are stacked on a flat bed, with a huge rake at either end. The bed raises like a drawbridge and lowers itself so one of the rake edges touches the ground. The bales are stacked two stories high, held in place by the top rake. Then, these arms that look like battering rams push against the stack while the drawbridge/flatbed thing with the rakes pulls away from the stack.
The hay man then retracted the battering ram arms. (If he set it up just right against the barn wall, the stacks stayed put; sometimes, they'd fall down, which we wanted anyway because it's safer than to try to pull them down with a rake.) Then, the drawbridge tilted back flat, and the front rake shot forward. It was wicked cool to watch.
I was curious, so I asked the hay man about the equipment, and found out it was originally developed in the West, in Montana and the states where the ratio of cattle to people is much higher. Not a lot of helping hands around, so they created a device to stack the hay and unload it. Pretty cool.
Here's a picture of one—found on the internet:
(photo: New Holland Agriculture)
I learned about the hay process, too, how it is baled. It's all so fascinating to me. And yes, I thought his tractor was sexy. ;-)
Labels: horses
Pull Up
Monday was my birthday. Whoo. I'm only owning up to 27. That was a good year.
It was a quiet celebration. A friend took me to Olive Garden (at my request) where I partook of the Grilled Steak Crustada with the four-cheese pasta, unlimited salad and breadsticks and Asiago-encrusted flatbread as seen on TV. I've been seeing the ads and just drooling.
I'm happy to say, it lived up to the hype. It tasted EXACTLY like I thought it would. YUMMY.
The soup (no leaves for me, remember?) was so filling I had leftovers of Crustada and pasta. Plus there was the Corona with Lime, and the after-dinner coffee. Their coffee is REALLY good, did you know that?
My sister blew my mind and sent a decent-sized check. Never saw
that coming.
And I have a birthday coupon for a buy-one-get-one-free entree at Qdoba.
Birthdays rock.
I did not get the job I interviewed for a couple weeks ago. Oh, well. God has other plans. I applied in person at two places today, though. And there are more offerings in the paper (to which I've applied). I don't think it's time to apply for public assistance just yet or stand on the corner with a sign—something tells me SOMETHING is going to slip neatly into place IF I can stay focused on it, and ignore the discomfort that is trying to distract me.
If you've read Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, Joe Vitale or the other Law of Attraction (LOA) gurus, you know what I'm talking about. That pre-manifestation energy shift that causes discomfort within us, and that exhibits as impatience, anxiety, doubt, fear, hopelessness, desperation?
Yeah. That. It's just the signal that the energy is shifting to make way for the manifestation of your outcome, but we misread it and redirect our thoughts away from the goal and onto the
emotion that's coming up. Then we derail the manifestation.
That's why people say, "I set all these intentions and did countless affirmations, but this LOA Shiitake doesn't work." It works.
But only when we figure out the trick to it.I've figured out the trick.
Plug my ears and go "LALALA CAN'T HEAR YOU" to all the doubts and fears that try to rise up in me when I'm not paying attention, and stay focused on MY desired outcome.
I have two analogies. One is like breathing through labor pains, which I've never experienced, but I had bad enough cramps that I can relate. The other comes from personal experience.
When Wildflower was still alive, and I was still a bit nervous about riding balls-out fast, we used to go trail riding and whenever it got too fast, I'd panic and pull her up short. Such a tolerant horse, she just sighed and put up with me.
One time, I was out with a bunch of friends, and one wanted to break off and "cowboy" through the woods—go fast. I went with her. We got up to a canter. Then, gradually, we sped up until we were galloping—or cantering PDQ. Faster than I was used to.
This was the point where I'd normally get a thrill of panic and pull her up. But on this day, I didn't. I rode through the fear. I knew I was safe with her. So, I breathed deeply. I acknowledged the panic rising, the adrenaline rush. I kept breathing, focusing on my balance and staying in rhythm with her as she chugged along, hooves pounding the forest floor, wind buffeting my ears. At the peak moment when every fiber of my being was screaming out PULL UP PULL UP—
I pushed my hands
forward so I wouldn't pull her up. It peaked—the adrenaline rush was almost more than I could stand to experience—
Then suddenly, that feeling was behind me. It was like I'd broken through an invisible wall. All that remained was this exhiliarating feeling of hyper-awareness and joy. Freedom like I'd never experienced. I reveled in it as we continued to gallop along. Then my horse ran out of steam, and gradually dropped to a canter, then a trot, then we caught up to my friend and paused for a breather.
It was one of the most amazing experiences of my life.
And dealing with manifestation is like that. The adrenaline wall is like the misinterpreted emotions of fear, doubt, hopelessness and impatience that come when you begin to wonder,
what is taking this so long? Why isn't it happening? Asking these questions creates resistance, which derails the manifestation. It actually repels it. The moment you say, "why isn't it here yet?", it stops coming to you. Even if it is RIGHTHEREABOUTTOMANIFEST. It just veers off to the side like a dog that charges you then gets distracted at the last moment.
To conquer it requires staying focused on the goal, rather than the emotions—firmly refocusing on the goal if necessary—and to recognize the emotions for what they are: the signal saying,
hang on, it's coming. The manifestation is developing.The energy of it starts small and rises to a deafening crescendo that peaks right before it manifests visibly.
That energy crescendo is what we sense, and IT is the cause of the feeling inside we identify falsely as discomfort.
It's not. If anything, it should
excite us to feel this, once we recognize what it is. And if we recognize this, and ride it out even as every fiber of our being is screaming, PULL UP, PULL UP, stop the feeling from coming any closer... THEN we get over the hump and achieve our wildest dreams.
Let's watch and see what the next few days brings, shall we? ;-)
Labels: breaking news, horses, Law of Attraction, musings
