The good, the bad, and the ugly

The Bad: I got laid off from my job and unemployment is barely going to cover my bills.  And since this happened a week before my trip it's far to late to cancel.  Sadly, we'll have to cut back and be more selective with some of our touring choices :'(

The Good: I was really starting to hate my life there.  The environment was unfriendly and growing more uncomfortable by the week, so I'm actually relieved in a way.  I can chalk this up to a lesson learned, start looking for a new job before getting stuck in this situation!  At least while I job search I'll be at home all day so I can ride and study for my CPA exams a LOT in the mean time.

The Ugly: Poor boyfriend will have to be buying most all of the groceries and probably more than his half of rent until I get another job.


As anxious as I feel about all of it, everything is already lined up and booked for the trip, boyfriend is taking care of the ponies and a couple of friends have agreed to come out and exercise the horses a few days each week so they don't go completely idle while I'm away.



These cuties always cheer me up

 Until next time, I'll be surfing job postings :/

Look out Europe...

Lock up your kids and practice your emergency evacuation procedures... because Celeste and Susanna are coming back!!!!!!!!

That's right folks, I'm excited to announce that it's official, one of my best friends and I will be returning to the motherland.  Two summers ago I flew over to meet her in Spain and we traveled for two weeks within Spain/the Balaraic Islands.  She's doing the same oper job again this summer and her parents offered to pay half my plane ticket again if I can adventure with her again this summer!   This time we'll be meeting in Dublin, Ireland traveling to the west side of the island than around the lower rim before flying to England.  There we'll spend a couple days with her relatives in Cheltenham then go to London (right after the Olympics and right before the Paralympics) before taking the chunnell train to Belgium.  In Belgium we'll go first to Bruges were we'll get to meet up with my best friend Isa (who I haven't seen in something like 8 years!!!!)  then ride back to Brussells with Isa and spend the night there before I fly out the next morning.  Susanna will continue on with the epic adventure through Germany and Italy before returning the Spain and then home to the good old US of A.  I'm so excited I can hardly believe it!!!!!!

The big move

Poor Reily, he most think we're crazy.  It was dusk when we brought him home from Maryland, now it was completely DARK and we moved him again.  Truth be told it was all perfectly planned.  But as they say, the best laid plans always go to sh**.  Or at least they say something close to that.  Well we had been planning this move for a while, part of the reason I allowed myself to get Reily was because I knew we were going to be moving so I'd only have one month to have to pay extra board.

Wondering why I'm packing up all their junk. Little did they
know they were moving that day night.

The original plan was to move us humans (plus dog and cat) to the new house on Saturday, then drive back across town Sunday afternoon and meet my friends who were kindly helping me move the three big boys in their large 3 horse slant load and the little fella would ride in one stall of my very small 2 horse trailer and the other stall and the back of my truck would be used to haul all of their stuff, gear, etc.  But then something came up and we had to bump up the horse hauling to Saturday.  So at 11:30 I left the big strong men at the house to finish packing the moving fan and headed out to load up all the ponies' gear and supplies so I'd be ready to put said ponies on trailers at 1pm sharp, drive the hour to the new place and unload in the daylight, give them plenty of time to look around before setting Reily loose in the new feild because, unlike the others, he'd never experienced electric fence before and horses tend not to learn to mind it well in the dark.  Unfortunately, when my friends arrived at 1 they're trailer had a flat and the spare was at their house... trip #1: 35 mins to go get the spare, 1.5 hours looking for but can't find the spare nor any spare with the correct number of lug nuts on the rim, 35 mins back to the farm... trip #2 take flat off trailer, 35 mins back to their house to change tire and put good tire on correct rim, 35 mins back to farm with new tire, put on trailer.  That makes it almost 5pm... in December... in Virginia... the sun is well into setting and there's already very low light.  Well we had no choice but to go ahead and move them.  Sadly that means that by the time we reached the new place the horses were unloading after 6pm and it was pitch black.  We turned on all the flood lights that we could but it was pointless.

At this point it would be best if I explained that the other 3 had lived here before.  It's actually my parents old farm but they don't live there anymore so we're renting it until we can buy it, so the other 3 had all lived there for at least 8 years prior to this.  We tried letting Reily loose with the others hoping they'd guide him and keep him out of trouble... we're such optimists.  He promptly walked straight over a t-post (snapping it in half, talk about thank goodness for faulty materials!) and through the gate which wasnt' yet hooked so there was luckily no electric current, but then the other horses started running so he ran back (through mind you) the fence again, breaking it a second time, undoubtedly getting shocked and then they were all just going crazy.  So we went out and caught Reily and Napoleon (poor pony always get stuck babysitting) and banished them to the run in for the night.  After fixing the fence we had planned to leave Boo and Scotty out in the feild but then Boo, for no reason what so ever, ran through one of the gates himself so he and Scotty got banished to solitary confinement each in a dog kennel for the night.  It was outrageous.  Luckily the next morning brought a nice, sunny day with it and they were all freed into the big field together.  Reily learned the fence in no time and now their just happy little munchers!

His recovery is going well also.  He's on anitbiotics for a few more days but luckily he's not a picky eater (at least relatively speaking) so he hasn't been too irritated that there's some weird white powdery stuff covering his food and it's not confectioners sugar, he knows that much.  And lord knows I've kept every inch of him slathered in antibiotic ointment every second of the day to keep out bacteria, promote his hair to grow back, and deter any excessive scar tissue so his skins probably as soft as a baby's bottom oily enough that he could pass as an otter.  The only particularly bad thing about his injury is that because of the location of the wound he has some minor "subcutaneous hematoma" meaning that air bubbles are entering through the wound and being forced up into his body in the layer between his skin and muscles.  The body can break down some of this on it's own but the air can carry batceria so the vet wants there to be as little in there as possible, so 3-4 times a day I have to "deflate" him by pushing all the air bubbles back towards the wound and essentially forcing it back out the way it came in.  The only way I can explain it is that you can hear the bubbles moving around in there and it feels like rubbing your hand across bubble wrap.  Unfortunately every time he moves he's potentially letting more air in the cut, but locking him a stall wasn't an option yet.  Luckily since he's living right out the back door I can deflate him as many times as need be each day.

If only we could all be lightweights

Reily didn't used to be Reily, he used to be "Angel" short for his Jockey Club registered name "Sometimes An Angel".  But now Reily is Reily, or soon to be known as "Slow Your Roll" on the show scene because I just think that's a more badass better show name for a gelding then Angel... maybe he didn't like the track because the other horses made fun of him for being a boy and being called Angel.  That's my theory anyways.  Either way, he is now going to be Reily aka Slow Your Roll the badass three day eventer!

The sexy, sexy rig.

Have you ever made a 10 hour round trip drive in one day.  After you did that, did you really feel like doing it all over again five days later... yeah, neither did I.  And with a truck and trailer no less.  Luckily I had my Dad's heavy duty (but gas guzzling) truck, my absolutely amazing trainer's 2 horse trailer, and the greatest boyfriend in the entire world to sleep in the truck keep me company.  So I got everything ready on Friday night, we left the house at 6am, we stopped for gas about 15,000 times and eventually made it to Laurel Park Racetrack in Maryland just after 11am.  The big surprise was that when we got out of the truck we were greeted by a film crew.  No legitimately.  They were actually filming to make the "advice" book written by Kim Clark, the founder of Thoroughbred Placement and Rescue (TPR, which is the group I got Reily from), into a DVD and since they were at the track that day and we were picking Reily up that day they asked if they could film us.  My answer,  "Anything to help out Thoroughbreds, so sure!".  And so that's Reily and I's film debut, I'll have to remember to buy a copy when it's done!

I told you they were filming! How embarrassing, I started
wrapping backwards! I guess I had stage fright :(

Anyways, we went ahead and bubble wrapped the chestnut monster who had already been given a half dose of Ace (a mild sedative) to help keep him from stressing too much on the 5 hour ride home.  He may be big, but that Ace hit him like a drunken sailor, what a lightweight!  In a cute way though.  So off we strode to load up, after only a mild hesitation he walked right on, we closed up and scooted on down the road, because we had another 5 hours before home and at that point we were racing to beat the daylight.  In the end we didn't succeed (thanks to the slowest KFC EVER, and the insanely frequent gas stops), because it was dusk when we pulled into the farm.

Now if there's anything that I wasn't mentally prepared for when we got him home it would be his balance.  They'd warned me that he wasn't going to be very sure footed coming straight off the track.  You see, race tracks in America are the most perfectly groomed places you'll ever see.  By that I mean that everything, literally, EVERYTHING is grated to be as flat as flat can get.  So OTTB's tend to be clumsy the first time they experience hills or any kind of rolling terrain.  Well I thought I was prepared for clumsy... I was wrong.  By the time we got home the Ace had completely worn off and he was very excited about this new developement.  In his excitement he managed to trip himself, not once, but twice, because at home there's almost nothing but hills.  Before he could fall on his face anymore, we put him in his stall and locked the run-in that surrounded the stall so that when we let my other horses loose they could see but not reach him.  Unfortunately it wasn't the other horses who really wanted to get to him, it was Reily who really wanted to get to the other horses!  His legs are so long it looked like he could almost climb right over the stall door and walk out.  So rather then wait and see if that happened we did something I never would have imagined I would do the first night... we locked my poor Shetland, Napoleon, in the run-in area right outside his stall so that he had company.  Luckily, Napoleon's a trooper and he was happy enough to stay with him all night since he had as much hay and water as he wanted and the other boys couldn't run him off of it.  So that's how they were this morning when I got to the barn to check on them.  Scotty (QH) and Boo (TB) outside the run-in staring in, Napoleon still munching away on hay inside the run-in, and Reily standing with his chest pressed against the stall door desperatly trying to reach Napoleon to convince him they should be best friends.