Or just feel like you have, the best thing to do is go with it.  The truck, that is.  My truck led me to my couch, where we proceeded to nap for a few hours under my horse’s new cooler.  It’s clean, and actually a second hand fleece blanket that I picked up with the idea of using it as a cooler for Bailey.  It was just the closest, firstest, warmest thing I could snuggle under.  The added bonus is that the cats loooooove fleecey blankets, so I get some kitty cuddling, which has been scientifically proven to boost your immune system.  So have hot toddies, or warm cinnamon wine.  Ever tried that?  I was talking about Glugg today (mulled wine), and by the time I got home, it was sounded pretty damn good.  Although I seemed to have skipped the warm and the cinnamon, and went straight for the wine!  But Glugg still sounds so good, and I wish someone here would make me some.  Unfortunately, I don’t see that happening.  Oh well.

A hot toddie is not my husband, but basically any hot drink, tea, apple cider, whatever, with a shot of brandy, rum or whatever hard liquor you have lying around.  What, you don’t leave it lying around?  Anyways…..back to poor me.  I’m sick.  I don’t think it is the SARS/West Nile/Avian/Feline/Equine/whatever flavour of flu/illness/epidemic/pandemic/let’s all freak out and go crazy/call in the army/oh my flying spaghetti monster!!!  With the stuffy nose, the achy joints, the slight headache, and tiredness, my guess would by some kind of coldy virus.  You know, the kind of virus that we have not been able to find a cure for.  AKA the common cold.  The way my ears feel, I’m pretty sure that’s it.  I’m just begging you, FSM, please leave my ears out of it this time.  I hate being deaf.  I hate the achy, pain-like-a-knife-somebody-shoot-me that my ears become when I get a cold.  Cause really, what’s to love about that?

yjr rmf

oops, meant to type:

the end

Psych.

Wasn’t really the end of this garbledegook post of mine.  I had a great day with Bailey.  He reaffirmed my affection for him, and the fact that he is the most awesome horse in the universe.  We didn’t do much, but he needed his feet picked out and the mud brushed away, and he was good.  I’ve been having problems with picking his back feet in particular, mostly my fault, cause I’m a bit leary of a horse’s back end sometimes.  And he has kicked before when I’ve tried to pick out his back feet.  Not meanly, just a ‘you’re bugging me’ kinda thing.  As I get older, I get less brave.  Today I was young, he lifted his feet, I picked them out, it was all good.

Okay, so that’s a bit garbled.  But honestly, on Halloween day the Christmas decorations were being rolled out.   Do we ever get a chance to shop without some holiday or festivity looming in the background, encouraging us to spend, spend, spend!  I spend just fine without any added encouragement.

Speaking of Halloween, we had a remarkably low number of kids coming by, and the gangs of zombies, witches and weirdoes that are usually out on the streets that night were quite noticeably missing many members.  And not just arms and legs, whole bodies.  Sorry, my bad.  On the news, parents were being encouraged to send their kids out with masks and gloves, and to wash – yes, wash – the packages of candies before their kids were allowed to open them.  Is there something really sinister out there that the government knows that we don’t?  Cause all this swine flu shit seems like a mighty big over reaction.  And the flu shots, the centers for flu shots, the news updates on the centers every frackin’ half hour, has really made me say WTF??  Anyway, back to ghosts and such, where was everyone?  Is the swine flu really causing that much panic?

The Sorcerer and the Cheetah

Who knew Cheetahs like Candy Apples?

Bailey's Costume...pretty good eh? Looks like a horse!

Exhibit A

Proud?  Of this?????

Exhibit B

Proud!

Exhibit C

Definitely Proud!

Explanation A:  I cleaned and organized my tupperware drawer.  As Martha says, that’s a good thing.  It’s been bugging me for a while, but I hadn’t bothered to do anything about it.  Finally did the other day.  It’s a start.

B:  What can I say?  She is my beautiful, sweet, smart and loveable child.  Of course I am proud of her.

C:  Sisters cuddling, watching tv together.  A rare moment of peace and quiet, when they are truly being sisters, just hanging out!  They fight like cats and dogs  but there are times when you know these two love each other.  Makes me glad that they have each other.  As the saying goes, You can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your family.

Yes, I still love AC/DC.  Always.

But just letting you know my laptop and photo capabilities are back!  The keyboard finally came today, so my resident genius computer guy was able to fix it!

Just to prove it, here is

The Sorcerer

' Hobbo Village '

Bailey

So far so good!  Seems to work.

Well, we’d all be riding!  So far so good with the wonder horse.  You’ll have to forgive me if for the next little while this becomes more of a horse blog than anything else.  I’m tempted to start another one, dedicated to Bailey and his training progress and just basically how fracking awesome all this new horse ownership stuff is, but I’m afraid it would eventually decline as did my tomato blog.  Or else I would write very little here, and spend what little writing time on Bailey’s Blog.  Hmm, Sarah, you even gave me a good name for it.  I’ll have to see if it’s taken….Well, what do you know?  New blog, Backing Bailey.  I’ll write all my horsey stuff there, and save this for the rest of life.

So, ….here I go again.  TGIF.  Really.  I’m so looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow.   It’s been a long week, sleep deprivation wise.  I’ve been reading till way too late at night, and waking up so tired and very reluctantly, but new books+new horse= must read as much as possible to train this baby right.  Really liking the clicker book, it’s funny cause I’ve already been doing that kind of thing, but not with a clicker, rather with my voice and carrots.  It really does work, I gotta say. But back to sleep.  I need more of it.  I really need to make myself go to bed on time.  If I don’t get at least 7 1/2 to 8 hours, I’m just not a fully functional human being.

As much as I love my husband, I’m so glad I have the bed to myself this weekend!  His semi-annual-gaming-weekend-with-buddies-in-Hamilton is taking place.  So it’s girls weekend at my house.  The girls both have parties tomorrow,  I have a feeling I won’t be getting as much done as I was hoping to on Tornado-hit-my-house-oh-wait-we-are-just-messy-people Street.  But we’ll see.

We’ve planned a chinese food pig out for tomorrow night.  Eggrolls, fried rice, chicken balls, shrimp and noodles, yum!  The girls are gonna help me make dinner (or so is the plan) and we are gonna watch a chick flick under cozy blankets, complete with popcorn and chocolate.  Doesn’t it sound fun?  Reminds me of ‘Treat Night’ as a child,  when we would walk to the corner store with Mom and spend our dollar on whatever candy we wanted, come home and watch ‘The Love Boat’ and ‘Fantasy Island’.  Dad was playing in the band, so it was girls’ night almost every Friday and Saturday night.  Dating myself with those tv shows, but I loved it!

sore in places that I didn’t know were muscles!

I had my first riding lesson in almost 20 years, with Tracey Casselman tonight, riding Mr. North (who is probably thinking the same damn thing!!!—tired and sore—but happy)

When you ride alone all the time, you tend to pick up bad habits as well as get lazy.  I figured if I’m going to ride Bailey anytime in the near future, I should probably do some work on myself first, so I signed up for lessons, riding with two other women around my age.  North was an amazing old boy, I had a blast and worked my butt off (compared to what I usually do).  Tracey is a very positive coach, who knows her stuff, and is, at the same time, fun.  She rode in  Grand Prix’, and trained with Jill Henselwood.   She reminds me of Cathy Inch in a lot of ways.

So onwards with lessons!!

A quick addition to the previous post….the Brrr… was a reference to our chilly temperatures of late.  I realized later that I hadn’t actually complained about the frost and the -5’s and -8’s we were getting.

And finally, Amazon sent me a couple of really cool books today.  Were they actually for me?  Or was I bad opening the parcel?  One I had actually looked at buying, cause I’d been to the author’s website before and liked what she had to say.  Unless Todd is planning on buying a young horse to train….oh wait….he kinda did, didn’t he?  But the training is up to me.  Anyhow, a big thank you to my sweet sister.  You are too thoughtful sometimes (even if you wanted them for yourself, at least I get to read them first!)  You never did let me know about backing Bailey with me at Xmas time.  Are you willing if he’s ready?

Thanksgiving is still one of my favorite times of year.  This year, as usual, we drove to Monica’s in North Bay.  Mom and Dad drove from the Sault, and brought the bird with them.  I baked the pumpkin and pecan/cranberrry pies.  We ate a lot of turkey and pie!

I did some serious thrift shopping (my North Bay tradition) and also scored some great shoes/jacket/boots at Mark’s Workwearhouse.  It’s my favorite M.WWH store ever!

We all had a pretty great time.

Unfortunately, my laptop is still out of commission, so is my easy access to my pictures.

Bailey is still my wonder horse!  We are slowly learning how to lunge.  So far just he is just walking on a small circle, we’ve done that a few times now.  He’s been a pretty good boy.  I’ve been watching Chris Irwin videos online, he’s all about the body language, and I’m trying to incorporate what I know, what I’m learning, and what Bailey has to tell me into the whole process.  So far it is working well.  I’m going to ask him to trot on the lunge within the next week or so, but I want to put a saddle on him first, so that he will associate the saddle, bridle, and the lunge with serious work (not hard work, but just so he knows it’s not goofy time.)  I’ve had a bridle on him a few times, just in his stall, and he was good about it.

All I can say is I love my horse.  He is the cutest, smartest, handsomest, friendliest, bestest, ….I think you get where I am going here.  He is totally completely AWESOME!!!  He is mine!  My own, very very own, coolest horse in the fracking world, mine.  I own a horse.  I am a horse owner.  I have a horse.  I belong to a horse.  A horse belongs to me.  Wow.

Didja hear? I have a horse.  His name is Bailey.  He is the fracking cutest thing.  The smartest guy.  The calmest 2 year old ever.  Born to race.  Mine.  Mine.  Mine.  My horse.   I bought a horse.

You have to put up with me, just for a bit.  I’m still honeymooning.

I HAVE A HORSE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

CROWN THE MOMENT

So there he is, folks.  My new sweetie! In all his glory and silliness!  In case any one is wondering, when he rolls, he really gets into it.  And the movement on this boy is something to see.  What a trot.  What a canter.

He is settling in nicely, he is pretty much just taking it all in stride.  I’m completely smitten.  We are going to take it nice and slow, starting with lungeing for a while, and work our way up to actually sitting on him.  He is completely unbroke, but really well handled by his previous owner so he is well used to humans and their weird demands.

P.S.  I’ll tell you about the RCMP horse auction that I went to last night in the near future.  It was pretty interesting.  And one of the boarders at T-T bought himself another RCMP horse, this time a gorgeous 17.1hh 4 year old gelding.  He is supposed to be coming tomorrow.  Can’t wait to see this boy in person!

Okay, I’m so excited I can’t sit for long.  I need to dance…  I need to shout…  I need to sing…(Actually, I did that in the car all the way home from Kingston.)  I bought my horse today!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I went to check out a two year thoroughbred bay gelding in Kingston today.  I fell in love.  I bought him.

I am now the proud owner of  ‘Crown The Moment’, aka Bailey, son of Crown Attorney (Queen’s Plate Nijinsky stakes winner), and an absolute doll, in your pocket, how ya doin’ pleased ta meetcha kinda boy.

I’d post pics, but my laptop is out of service, (an unfortunate incident involving Meg and a glass of water), but hopefully my genius husband will fix it, and when my new baby becomes an official Quebecer on Saturday, I’ll take tons more pics and post them.  I’m so thrilled.  So over the moon. I found him.  My bebe North.