The End

Tomorrow is the last horse show of the season for us. It is bittersweet. This is the first year that I have committed as much time, money, and energy to showing. We had a blast. The kids are leading the points in their respective classes as far as I know. Shawn is glad it is over I think. Alyssa would show everyday if she could.

It is also the last planned show for our 19 year old arthritis mare. We bought her as a yearling. I broke her when I was 10 years old and did all the riding on her for the first 5 years or so she was shown. She was my baby. She then took my sister through her first years on a horse and started several other cousins and friends. Then she started all three of my kids. She's getting too old to keep going in the showring, but I hope she can still be ridden. She often limps, a result of the years of hard riding we put her through. She's been the most wonderful babysitter I've ever seen. She's been to the state fair with at least 3 different kids. I was hoping she'd go one more time, but I don't think it will happen. I'm glad she was in my life. I'm glad she lived long enough to be in my children's lives.

We are showing her youngest baby now. This little mare was meant to be her mother's replacement. Even though they are different colors and different sizes, they are the same exact horse with the exact same temperament.

Thank you, Cuddles, for carrying me through so much of my life. I hope your remaining years are the happiest you're ever had. I love you.

U Cad CKU COS

Loosely translated, it means "You can kiss me." It's exactly what the note my 6-year-old brought home tonight says.. followed by two hearts. It's from a boy in her class. She assures me that she has no intentions of kissing him.

Part of me panics because I am SO not ready for this. Part of me is jealous. I think I was about 13 before I got my first note like that - and it didn't have hearts.

It's Probably Green with Purple Spots

The sock monster has always wreaked havoc on my life. I hate folding socks. I hate it more than I hate doing dishes, well almost anyways. Tonight, with a little prodding, I decided it was time to see what the damage for say... the last year... has been. Since going back to work full time always, my solution has been to pile up and save the little lost left-overs. We we run out of matching socks, then it's time to get new socks. I never really deal with those lost little children that the monster leaves behind. As I dug through the bags of socks, there were all sorts of little memories. I've never been able to buy the same style twice, so I had a memory book chronicling the growth of my children. Most of the socks no longer fit the original owner. I passed those ones on to the next one in line. With all the sock drawers in the house full, I tied the remaining ones in knots to give to the dog to play with. It was nice getting the storage space back, but I dread starting my collection over. I've made a promise to myself that they get one chance next time. If they leave the dryer without a mate, those socks are moving to the trash. There will be no more grace periods.

A couple of months ago that I even started throwing away the socks with holes in them.

What a Girl Wants

Yesterday we took Megan to the toy store. It was the first time we've been there since she started talking in complete sentences. She played with a million things and commented "I want this" to everything she touched. As we were dragging her out of another section she looked around, sighed, and whispered, "I want everything."

This morning, as I was shopping online at my favorite Western store, I understood. Megan, I want everything too.

Future Shock

My son and I were at the mall last night and he wanted to stop at the game store. Behind the counter was your average 20-something burnout eating a bag of chips. He followed us around awhile, crunching, and giving me all the scoop on the latest and greatest games out (because I must have had a face that looked like I wanted to know?). After hearing about his life and his debt and his highest score on Zelda.... we finally get to that his father used to ground him by taking away his computer. OH! I say, wouldn't it have been easier to just take the mouse and keyboard away? Proudly he looks (up) at me and says, "Well, then I would have just used the TAB button!" He must have had one of those rare models that built it onto the monitor?

Next he tells me how computer savy his father has become, but not until after he built his computer. $400! He tells me, $400! And it's worth at least $1000! My, he is proud, but after being forced to listen to his life story and all of the things he buys his girlfriend, I was feeling less than patient. While silently wishing the son would hurry up already, I take a deep breath and ...

I cock my head and say, "Well that must have an AMD for $400, eh? What speed?." Slightly bewildered because I was wearing heels instead of my pocket protector, he recovers and sticks out his chest to say, "YES! An AMD Athlon 1400."

"Oh then its a few years old because mine is a 2600 and a few years old." He doesn't get it and drones on about how hard it was to find a motherboard for it because it is so FASTTT. I suggest he try the dumpsters behind the schools. Still not getting it, I shuffle the boy to the door where he stops to gawk at the XBox 360. Our helpful salesman is tell me how it's $400 and the new Playstation will be $600 and he's going to buy (fill-in-the-blank) because he has a compulsive spending problem. I suggest nicely that he invest in a better graphics card and just play pc games because you can at least download them.

Ut oh! No, he says he can't do that, then he'd have to "wipe his machine" and ....... into a frenzy he goes. Cutting him off, I suggest he try Linux. Finally broken, he sighs, "No, I'm not computer-savy enough for Linux."

Yea, I think, leaving the store....that's it in a nutshell.

And isn't it Ironic?

Tonight I discovered I have been cached and I reside in Google. For a living, in the daytime, I am a web designer and SEO (is there anyone between the ages of 23-33 who is not a web designer??). Anyways, I have commercial sites that have a PR 5 and 6 and... well my own personal blog that I ignore is a puny zero. I have no links outside the one in my msn group. All day I've been writing content and working link campaigns and analyzing stats and navigations.. I've been publishing articles! Granted the are not interesting, but they give great links.

Maybe someday I'll do that for my own little slice of the world. But who wants to come home and keep working? Incidentally, I rank #1 on Google for my name. I can be googled ;) and really I've yet to find anyone impressed by that...