friday nite peace

Last week was Not So Good.  Let’s just say the Not-So-Good part started at Sudden Onset of Extreme Dizzinesss, went directly to Extreme Panic, made a bee-line for the ER with help from the serendipitous timing of a visit from my dearest long-long-time friend, and then ended with the realization that I am a Mo-ron.

This realization made me feel a lot better right away.  Although to arrive at it, I had to ride my spinning carousel of a living room while trying to focus my spinning eyeballs long enough to research my predicament on my spinning computer.

Now, after almost two weeks after fixing the Mo-ron part, which means going back on the SSRI I had inadvertently stopped taking cold-turkey, which was the cause of the dizziness, I am feeling like My Old Self,  Which is, as you know, mostly OK with some not OK parts.  Bottom line:  Drugs are good, at least for now.

So this week I have been spending a lot of time just being thankful for my life. For being able to watch summer evening sunsets from my front porch, work at a job that is enjoyable and pays me well enough to afford my front porch and drugs, have my lovely Mommy close by and willing to come babysit me anytime I need her, have a great big, sweet horse to ride, and have the comfort and support of my dear friend who I have just simply adored for about 42 years or so now, exactly when I needed her here, even though she lives 3000 miles away.

Tonight, Friday, the end of a busy and so-much-better week, I am reminded of something I wrote a few years ago while in a similar state of under the influence of gratitude.

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About 25 years ago, when I was more of a City Girl, I used to go with a friend to the Sacramento Symphony on Friday nights. We would get all gussied up in fancy dresses and jewelry (hers) and drive a red BMW convertible (hers) and act like Real Women of Culture And Sophistication. I loved the symphony.

At that time, I was also wearing suits and pumps to work, studying piano, taking college courses at night, buying my fingernails, living in a townhouse, and probably smelling better overall.

Fast forward to now. I still consider myself to be a Real Woman, but it occurs to me that the Culture and Sophistication parts have officially hightailed it out of here, as far from my present being as my feet are from their next pedicure.  The little black dress, good jewelry and convertible replaced by riding pants, boots, and my dirty beater SUV, I head out on a Friday night to different sort of symphony — dusty old Garth Brooks hits blaring from a loudspeaker.  I sit on a garage sale-quality dinette chair, eat a home-made pulled pork sandwich courtesy of Daisy’s Chuck Wagon, and watch local horse people do team penning.

• Team = Two or three riders and their horses
• Penning = separating a single young cow from a herd at one end of the arena and moving it down to the other end, into a pen.

The team sits waiting at one end of the arena.  When given the go-ahead by the announcer, they start walking, trotting, loping or galloping (depending on the horse and/or rider’s desire to actually get close to those cows) toward the herd of terrified or bored (depending on the cow) cows at the other end. The cows are wearing numbers, zero to nine. There are several of each number. The announcer calls the number of the cow to be penned when the riders have started down toward the herd.

The teams have to find one cow with the correct number, cut that cow out of the herd and then make it go by itself to the other end of the arena. Since the cows know by Herd Instinct that they are safer if they stick together (safer from what, one wonders, when the closest thing to a cow predator within miles is Daisy herself, and she’s busy with pork), the cut cow will try its hardest to get back to the herd, in which case the rider’s job is to yell “HAH HAH HAH YIP YIP YIP” and jerk their horse’s head around trying to get them to track the cow and scare it down the arena and into the pen.  The horse’s job is to either to be obedient to the rider’s jerking or jerk the rider around in a bucking frenzy. Which is way more fun to watch if you are the audience. Definitely more fun if you are the horse.

Or, the cut cow just won’t care anymore since it has been doing this team penning crap every Friday night for 6 weeks in a row and the outcome is inevitable — it gets driven down to the other end of arena, goes into the pen, waits for the applause, and then toodles on back to the herd. So the cow just plods along resignedly in a Just-Shoot-Me stupor, infuriating the rider who wanted to show off his riding skills and giving the horse a much-needed break from getting his head jerked around by those same riding skills.

And this goes on for hours, as long as there are teams that want to pen, and the cows are still awake. Long past sundown, and into the wee hours possibly. I don’t know, I didn’t stay until the end. But when I left, Garth was still singing and I thought this was just a way cooler Friday night than the symphony ever was.

Killing Me Softly (a.k.a. Yoga)

Yesterday was a Red Letter Day.

I think.  I have always thought of a Red Letter Day as a day chock full of pleasant surprises, but just to make sure what I write is as accurate as my wisdom-wrapped-up-in-nonsense can be, I looked up the meaning of the phrase.

I love Wikipedia for this sort of serious academic research, but this time I chose instead some obscure UK site.  Because I thought the British description would be more interesting. Because of their penchant for misspelling common English words over there.

Red-letter day*

Meaning

In earlier times a church festival or saint’s day; more recently, any special day.

Origin

This comes from the practise (see, told you) of marking the dates of church festivals on calendars in red.

The first explicit reference to the term in print that we have comes from America. This is a simple use of the term “Red letter day” in the diary of Sarah Knight – The journals of Madam Knight, and Rev. Mr. Buckingham … written in 1704 & 1710, which was published in American Speech in 1940.

(aside:  wondering what Madam Knight had to say in her journal about her red-letter day with the Rev. Mr. Buckingham in 1704 and/or 1710.  historical novel fodder.  Oh Wait.  Dim memory of an English lit class.  The Scarlet Letter.  Dang, Hawthorne beat me to it.)

The practise is much earlier than that though. William Caxton, referred to it in The boke of Eneydos, translated and printed in 1490:

 “We wryte yet in oure kalenders the hyghe festes wyth rede lettres of purpre.”  This makes no sense to me whatsover, assuming purpre = purple.  I am now too lazy to look it up.  But it doesn’t have to make sense to me —  I am studying Spanish, not Olde English.

Back to My Hyghe Fest Day

First, I got to work at home instead having to go in to the office.   This is good because I didn’t have to drive my always-a-potential-adventure-in-panic  commmmuuuuuuttttttteeeeeee, all the way from my little ranch in the boonies to midtown Sacramento.  Plus I get to play music as loud as I want while I’m working.  Plus I get a lot of work done while The Black Thing (my beast of a bloodhound) snores contentedly on my feet.

Then I went to visit my horse “Big”, who, having had some joint injections the day before, needed some bandages removed.  This was good because Big stood still while I used scissors around his hooves, which is always a potential adventure, especially when the horse is, well, big.

Then I went to Walmart.  Always a potential adventure, but I was on a mission — to get a Walmart manicure inside of 40 minutes (40 being the maximum manageable number, even though I was already reliably Rx-ed, in anticipation of the onset of panic to be caused by the enjoyable relaxation of a manicure countered by the crowd of Women of Walmart already packed like large, interestingly dressed mani-pedi-ing sardines in the little salon) by my favorite manicurist Kevin.  Who is Vietnamese.  No surprise there.  Except for his name.  He has a different given name I’m certain.  I asked him what his real name is, and he just smiled,  shook his head side to side, said “No No No” as if he was already suffering my butchering of his name in an attempt to pronounce it.  What Kevin doesn’t know is [1]  I work hard at pronouncing correctly the proper names of all cultures, and [2] if I can say Merry Christmas in correctly pronounced Korean**, then I can surely not butcher his name.

40 minutes later, manicured in hot flamingo coral to honor today’s 4th of July fireworks that are an Extreme Fire Danger and therefore against the law in my county, I headed to my first ever yoga class.  At a training stable.  During a warm evening after a 90-plus degree day.  In a barn.  Upstairs in a loft that was behaving suspiciously like a sauna.

Even though it killed me temporarily, I loved LOVED loved the yoga stuff.  I could not actually do any of it.  Well, hardly.  I could do the sitting cross-legged while breathing position and the laying down while breathing position.    But I loved the quiet confidence, reassurance and encouragement of my friend and fella horse rider Jackie who was instructing the class — I’m wondering if I call her Sensei or something like that — I’ll text her and ask — and I loved the trying to do it.  Even though most of it was pretty much torture, I liked it and I kept trying.  And I really liked that I kept trying.    And I was introduced to some of the position names which I now forget.  Get Down Dancing Dog, Wonder Woman, Warrior One (maybe that’s Wonder Woman), Surfer (maybe that’s Warrier Two, or Three), and Child something, among others.  Each of the positions were very hard for me to do,  but I can see how with practice I could get this (I don’t know if I have that many years left on the planet but surely it is good for me and should extend my planet time, dontcha think?) and be just as graceful as Jackie.

But never as tall as Jackie.  She is very tall and very lean and very limber and exceedingly graceful, both in yoga and on horseback.  I hate her.  But I adore her.  I am guessing Jackie has the perfect physical conformation for yoga.  My present physical conformation is only perfect for writing while seated super comfortably in my big super comfortable leather chair.  And, maybe, for riding my big Big.

Now, I’m typing my hot flamingo coral fingernails over to an on-line Yoga Mart to order a good yoga mat and some cute, short-round-person yoga clothes.  And some East Indian jewelry.   And some incense.

*http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/red-letter-day.html

**당신에게 크리스마스 축하!  (Tang-shin-eh-geh ku-ri-su-ma-su chuk-ha!)

I love science. except when it is gooey and smelly.

I have my very own Museum of Natural History right here in my home.
Normal people might call it a refrigerator.
I discovered the Museum when I started to clean the fridge, after I came home this afternoon with brand spanking new groceries. And found an ancient Museum artifact taking up the space where I wanted the brand spanking new eggs to go.
The complete evolution of food —
1. Real food = future expiration date. Or, I’m sure it’s still food because I just put it in there yesterday.
2. Questionable food = past expiration date but not quite ancient history. Yet. This category includes what might be considered real food except it is elk meat, or fish with heads/eyeballs intact. Expiration date notwithstanding. Whatsoever.
3. Produce that has composted. Inside the fridge. Which is a phenomenon worthy of a museum, since normal planets require heat to make compost.
4. Ancient history food = still looks something like food but only because it is petrified. Expiration date > 3 yrs ago.
5. Bug corpses. I count them as food since there are lizards in the kitchen who would consider them food.
6. Unrecognizable congealed globs of brown, mossy green and black liquid. Or, basically, the lowest form of food. Or, basically, how all living things end up.

20/20 vision but not in my eyes

I don’t see well, never have.  Discovered that I was nearsighted while in elementary school.

From kindergarten through fourth grade, my kid persona  was the epitome of the teacher’s pet — smart, obedient, studious, attentive, shy but friendly when friendlied-to.     My teachers called on me frequently and  I always knew the answers to their questions.  I basked in the little-kid glory of getting the best grades in most of my classes.  I loved loved loved school.

Then starting in fifth grade, I became inattentive and disruptive.   I didn’t know all the answers, didn’t raise my hand as much.  I got scolded by my teacher Mrs. Bryant for chatting with my neighbors.  And getting called out for bad behavior by Mrs. Bryant, who I adored and whose praise my nine-year-old self lived for, was utmost humiliation.  My young self-esteem was all about being the smartest and best-behaved kid in the class.  Suddenly I was becoming one of the kids that was always getting yelled at.  Soon I would join the ranks of delinquents in the walk of shame to the Principal’s Office.  What had happened?  How did I get started on a downhill slide to Kid Skid Row?

It was all because of where I was seated in the classroom. From grades one through four, my desk was always near the front of the classroom, close to the action at the blackboard.   In fifth grade, my desk was in the rear of the classroom.  Mrs. Bryant apparently got a clue, recommending that I get my eyes tested.  I couldn’t see the blackboard or make eye contact with the teacher from the back of the room.  So I disengaged.

A few weeks later, I was wearing winged cat-eyed montrosities that were the latest fashion in 1960’s eyewear …

fashion eyewear in the olden days … mine were light blue frames topped with white wings

… and happily on a climb back up the teacher’s pet ladder.

Now my eyes have an even harder time.   Since I am old.  Each lens in my glasses contains three different prescriptions — long distance, medium distance for arm’s length, and short distance for reading.  I have no idea what my 20/whatever is, but it must be very bad.

I’m writing in this direction today because I got laid off yesterday.  Good for me,  because I hated that job and the organizational culture I was working in.  Scary for me, too, because I don’t have another job and I am not made of money (yet).

But, great again because God  has a way of leading me, whether I think His timing of particular events makes sense or not.  It can feel a bit like whiplash …. “Wait … what?” … but now I get to put my minds’-eye where my mouth is.   And my mind’s-eye vision is usually perfectly clear. In its landscape, I see 20/20.  In that clarity, I believe I see what God has in mind for my life.

So, time to put the visualization thing to work again.  It has worked before.  For example, from 1990-1996, I lived in a small, semi-dumpy townhouse.  My master bedroom window directly overlooked a busy street.  I lived 5 minutes from the grocery store and right next door to a pair of teenage brothers whose extracurricular activities included vandalizing cars.  Including mine.

I knew that place was not my real home.  I started visualizing where I wanted to live.  I journaled about it and kept the written pages with me at all times.

“4 Jan 1996

My dreams come from God and God has the power to accomplish them.

My creativity heals myself and others.

There is a divine plan of goodness for me.  There is a divine plan of goodness for my work.

 

My dreams for my life are simple and achievable.  Sometimes what I want is so clear and so close.  I don’t know how to get there but I think if I see myself living the life I want, that is the only way to get started.  I seem to be able to create, to think creatively, to live beyond just existing.  But there is something missing — the real plan, the road.  I’m going to start seeing it, visualizing it every day, writing it down, telling myself over and over again what will happen, how I will live my life and place the inch pebbles that will get me there. 

 

My home is a small place in the country.  There are lots of trees, maybe an orchard.  The house has lots of light and a fireplace, not too many rooms but they’re large and there’s room for guests.  I have a good kitchen and a nice room to work in.  The animals have their own place, too.  The kitchen has a window that overlooks the yard, maybe a small pasture where there are 1 or 2 horses.  I don’t know how the house is decorated but it is comfortable and clean, not too dressed up, formal or silly.  Things I love and things I make are all over the house.  There is some kind of porch that I can watch sunrises or sunsets from.  I have a garden and I grow vegetables and flowers.  I keep the kitchen well-stocked with food and I cook!  I have lots of animals and people enjoy visiting my home, and best of all I enjoy sharing my home with them …”

Six months after writing that, I  bought the little house that is still my home … three bedrooms on five acres in the Sierra foothills …   kitchen windows look out over pastures and there are four horses out there now … the fireplace is a wood-burning stove … i have my large watercolor quilt and original artwork hanging on my walls … room for lots of  dogs and cats and they are everywhere now, usually where they aren’t supposed to be …   my front porch faces west to great sunsets  … a huge garden area …  I have learned how to cook …

Now, I’m putting the mind’s-eye to work again on something new.  Can’t wait to see what it comes up with.

the Zen of the Parting with the Saddle

No, I didn’t fall off today.  I resurrected these from some old posts on my old blog, to keep me humble while I am trying to teach Mo how to teach me how to jump.

These were inspired by Stormy, one of my quarter horse mares, who is now a pasture ornament, while I was healing a football-sized hematoma on my backside from one of her dirty spooks.  Which is why she is now a pasture ornament.

A Haiku Poem:

Cooler day, windy
Says “Be Spooky!” to the horse
And “Eat Dirt!” to me.

Another Haiku Poem:

Neighbors have big party
Says “Act Silly!” to the horse
She does. Rider flies.

One Last Haiku Poem:

Wind blows, horse blows up
Rider now riding on air
Briefly. Hello Earth.

Okay, one more:

Hello Earth. Meet Butt.
Horse stands calmly now of course
Waiting for cookie.

me on Stormy, with Sunny our angel palomino

more Autumn … to-do lists can be fun, too

… as long as they don’t contain too much to actually do.

I am a gifted to-do list-maker.   I write to-do lists that list the to-do lists that I need to write.

Lately I am spending a lot of time looking around my farm and writing conceptual to-do lists of all the maintenance that [1]  I should be thinking about and [2]  that I should be writing the actual executable to-do lists for, that will list the actual to-dos needed to prep the farm for winter.      Usually, nothing actually comes from all of this looking and thinking and writing, but I give myself brownie points for walking around and looking at possible future when-I-am-good-and-ready farm chores.   I also give myself brownie points for having nice handwriting.

The problem is that I am a bit dyslexic when it comes to accurately writing down what I am actually seeing.

what my eyes see:  (barn needs cleaning and repair)

what I write down:

seen:  (horse-bent gate needs to be put back on its hinges)  (and turkey needs to be put in the freezer for Thanksgiving)

written:

I don’t know what it  is about autumn.   Perhaps my maternal instinct, which has never wanted anything What-So-Ev-Er to do with any actual human children, foresees the cold and wet and mud involved with winter caretaking of large outdoor-style creatures, and prefers to ignore them and care for some little indoor-style creatures inside, where it will be slightly warmer and/or not quite as wet and muddy as outside.

winter chore things

Or, more likely, my version of maternal instinct does not even wish to care for little indoor creatures as much as just to pile them in furry stacks on the bed to serve as extra pillows.  (Aside:  I don’t need them for warmth.  I am and always have been, change of life notwithstanding, Way Too Hot.   I  build a fire in my woodstove just to add cozy visual ambience to my knitting/reading nest in the living room.  The rest of my house stays at the same comfortable temperature as the one in the magic ice cube-making compartment in my fridge.)

Or my maternal instinct does desire the pitter patter of tiny feet.  Galloping in fours at top puppy- or kitten-speed away from me when I am trying to catch them to show them Pee Pee Outside or Pee Pee In The Box, depending on the young’un’s Genus.  After they have Pee Peed Inside Anywhere They Feel Like for the third time inside of 30  minutes.

Cuatro and some kitten or other

Reminds me to add something to the fall chore to-do-someday list.

There was a time a few years ago when there were usually not less than 5 animals in my bed at bedtime.  Not counting me.

I kid you not.  Meet my bed.

this is why German Shepherd Dogs are considered one of the smartest canine breeds.   the Febreze was Cuatro’s idea.

I slept so well then.  Now, with only one dog with the athletic ability to jump on my bed without assistance, and one cat who graces the very foot of my bed only now and then, and only when that dog, her favorite,  is snoring comatose nearby, I don’t sleep well at all.

So, I’m thinking  two or three kittens and a puppy should do it.

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Cisco, the best dog that ever graced my planet, with yet another some kitten or other.

welcome Autumn! or not.

I live on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada mountains, north central California.   Near Sacramento but far enough away that I can tell people I live ” in the Sierra foothills”  or perhaps the more historically exotic-sounding “near Coloma,  you know, Sutter’s Mill, where the California Gold Rush got started.”

It is the beginning of October, which means Autumn is just around the corner.   But not here.   Here,  it could be four more weeks of Too Freaking Hot Still, followed by Skipping Autumn Altogether,  directly to the Mother Of All Storms that will launch our Winter (aka Just Rain), leaving me without power and water for a few days and having me daydreaming about living in a tidy little condo with a garage and prefab landscaping maintained by someone not named Carol,  that has year round electricity and running water, and fewer opportunities for field rodent corpse pieces to find their way into my shoes.  And fewer games of lizard soccer played in my kitchen by some of my outdoor barn cats who sneak  indoors somehow during the wee hours with a soon-to-be-soccer-ball lizard buddy (scratch scramble scramble *thud*  scratch scramble scramble *thud*).  And fewer skunks following my barn cats into the kitchen to watch the game and help themselves to the inside cats’  leftovers.

I kid you not.  Meet Flower.

what’s one more cat?

Which brings me to my upcoming annual one week Autumn (or not) vacation from my day job.   This vacation will be spent cleaning house (scrubbing the kitchen floor of lizard remains-stains), doing farm prep for winter, riding a lot, working on The Book,  and of course, working incognito at my day job, since I have to take vacation to get time away from work so that I can caught up on my work.

home, when there is Autumn

the toolbox

first, there is some movement on the fat front.  movement away from me, which is good.  but i’m not allowed to know how much movement until end of this month.  In the meantime, it is very interesting to feel parts of me shifting around and not being there anymore, or not being as big as before.  I can tell this because i am able to pull up the waistband of my underwear to just below my bustline.   When I can get the waistband up and over the boobs, real progress.   And a trip to Walmart for different underwear, I suppose.

For now, though, I wanted to go through my disorder repair toolbox — I need to cowboy it up a bit, I think, given the Paxil withdrawal experience and learning how to live life with GAD  in new and fun ways.    I’m thinking about what stuff needs to be added, but here is the list of the most frequently used items:

1.  Mo:  The best and biggest tool.  He can be the best person on my planet one day, and then the biggest moron the next day.  Heart pounding cardio and hypnotic rhythm.  Self-confidence and humility.  Fresh air and dirt.   Cuddles and nods.  Physical strength and wimping out.  Powerade Zero and peppermints.  Slender legs and helmet hair.  The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.  or deseat.  which is on the way to de ground.

2.  Deep breathing exercises:  These are for anxiety and they work.  I am learning pranayam from my co-worker.   It is a set of peaceful, meditative breathing exercises that improve the flow of oxygen and reorder my chakras or something.  I suppose.  I am not 100% convinced of chakras but I do feel more reordered somehow after I do deep breathing.  I also feel more anxiety from doing deep breathing.  This is another Murphy’s Law, or maybe a Catch-22.  When I do deep breathing I feel like I am doing something good for myself.  But the fact that I need to do deep breathing means there is Something Wrong, which the Heebie Jeebies read as a Welcome mat.  I think I just need more practice.  And perhaps a half hit of # 9.

3.  Cigarettes:   These work well.  They are especially effective at counteracting both the benefits and the stresses caused by #2.  And Yeah Yeah, I KNOW.  I am just not going there until [1]  significant fat loss, to make room for what I am going to gain back when I quit and  [2] the  100%-off-Paxil date plus a yet-to-be-calculated probationary period.   In other words, not in the very near term.  Get over it.

4a.  Music.  Old skool R&B, classic rock, blues, Latin and classical.   Stuck in the 70s mostly.  Except for Chopin, who wrote Nocturnes while he was stuck in the 1800s.  The Nocturnes were my favorite pieces to play when I studied piano.  This was before my planet invented horses.

4b.  Old Movies.  1930s-50s.  Film noir, crime/mystery, Hitchcock, Bogie, gangsters, westerns.  Roy Rogers and Trigger.  Another sickness of mine — I have collected 88 of the total 90 movies that Roy Rogers made.  Also have CDs of all of his early radio performances and releases with the Sons of the Pioneers, before he became Roy Rogers and got Trigger.  Don’t get me started on this topic, btw.

5.  Knitting needles and yarn.   To keep my hands moving — moving my glasses from my nose to the top of my head and back, back and forth until the glasses get Put Down Somewhere and then … you know this part already (see headaches).

6.  Chopsticks:  These are sticks like knitting needles, except they are prettier and fun to eat salad with.   So, good for both mental and physical well-being.

7.   Lily, Lulu, Rainy, Stormy, Ody, Roushone, Dudie, Tinkie, Pootie, Phooey, Babalooey and Izzyboo.  Having furry ones at home to care for helps focus me on other things besides mild vertigo, brain zaps, housework, and my newly developing anxiety about doing deep breathing.  (see #2).

home

8.  Job:   On a good day, a good anxiety fix.  On a bad day, still a good anxiety fix due to throwing things and screaming expletives.  Although sometimes, rarely, throwing things and screaming can sometimes make me feel a wee bit out of control, which can cause an Episode, most times throwing things and screaming make me feel utterly normal and happy about life.

9.  Xanax.  Duh.

10.  My Bible.  Ditto.

11.  My Book.  This is actually just My Storyboard at this point.  But it is a real storyboard taped on my real wall with real things on it that contain the whispers and nudges and glimmers of possibilities of a real mystery novel.   If ever I learn to write like a real writer.

Paxil 20 – Patience 0

So far, I have weaned myself down by half — from 40 mg to 20 mg.

I am definitely feeling it since the drop to 20 mg 5 days go.  But nothing really horrible, honest.

My normally very very long patience fuse is basically gone.  I am very easily annoyed, wired up, quickly reaching peak irritability at little things.  Not really my normal self.  But the part that is still normal is that I remain very easily amused.

The irritability manifests mostly while I’m working — remember, won’t you, that I LOVE my job.  Really.  It is a great job.  I am helping my company implement Health Care Reform.  Politics aside, actually non-existent on my planet, this is very good work for someone like me … Federal and State laws, intense deadlines, really complex business and systems problems to solve, really smart and hard working people to collaborate with, a few morons to keep things interesting (and ANNOYING), working at home most of the time because I have too much to do to spend commute time to drive into the office.

Aside:  My workdays have been so intense that I have dispensed with proactive feeding of horses at home, which requires about 15 minutes — go find the hay cart, drag it to the hay barn, fill the cart with hay, deal with the annoying hay twine, drag the hay cart down to the pasture where the horses are, toss hay over the fence, fill the water troughs, chat with Pootie the Cat.  To save this 15 minutes that I typically don’t have when meetings start at 8 am and go to noon,   I have invented Horse Fast Food, which takes about 3 minutes:  Go to the barn gates, open them up and call the horses.  Wait for the first one in line to come through the gate.  This is usually Rainy, the Pork Butt sorrel mare center front in the photo below.  Point the lead horse to the hay barn.  The others will follow.  Voila.  Horse Fast Food.  Hours later go check on the horses.  For no reason.  Because there is Food, there is no need to go anywhere.

So let’s talk a bit about the Morons, since this is how my patience fuse got blown a few times this week.    These are people that have jobs in my company.  Mostly they are merely voices, since we do most of our work via telecom and Webex.  Some of these Morons are actually very intelligent people.  They just don’t do anything except speak a lot of words to demonstrate their intelligence.  I go into meetings with a mission, agenda, things that need to be accomplished so I can get Something Done and then get onto the next conference call.  Morons go into meetings to talk.  Some of them are academics — they know a lot of stuff, and they need to tell everyone what they know, all of the time.

Some are really Sales or PR folks deep down, they talk as a performance.  They “raise issues” and poke holes at things and speak the Execu-speak that they think makes them sound like they are VP material and if they keep speaking that way, eventually someone will promote them.

Some are merely auditory communicators — they have words stacked up in their esophagi like big long freeway traffic jams and they MUST speak each and every word in the order in which they have stacked it, without variation of any kind.  If you interrupt them, or in my language “So-and-so, there were too many words in what you just said. Could you restate more concisely?” , they raise their voices and backtrack, rewind and start over where they were five minutes ago.  I could really go truly psycho.  If this happens on a conference call,  I Mute and Multi-Task  — do something else while playing the phone meeting voices on low volume, sort of like the Relaxing Sounds of the Ocean that my clock radio has to help me fall asleep to.  That I still don’t fall asleep to since [1]  I don’t sleep in the room that has that clock radio in it,  since that is my bedroom and since Insomnia Galore, I can’t fall asleep in my bed and [2] also because of Insomnia Galore, relaxing sounds of the ocean are really annoying sounds of the ocean.

To finish up with the Morons:  I try to punish them for talking so much by giving them ACTION ITEMS.  These are tasks that the Morons need to complete.  This only works to the extent that I get the malicious glee from causing them to panic.  Since they usually don’t have to do anything other than produce words, like the balloon words that come out of the characters in comic strips, they get a bit weird about getting Action Items.

Aside:  Sandie will remember that we had a long philosophical, first year of college-age discussion, possibly under the influence, about what would happen if all of the words we spoke could be seen coming out of our mouths and floating into the air, like in comic strips.

Many other symptoms … head (brain/jaw) zaps (feelings of electrical shock); high energy/wired feeling; loss of appetite.  The loss of appetite is really strange.  I really don’t have desire to eat — I do, of course, but only when my stomach is screaming for something.   Pacing.  Racing thoughts but not like those that come with anxiety episodes.

I am still taking the Relaquil for the natural anxiety relief aspect.  I am convinced it is making a major difference.  I am dealing with all of these symptoms pretty well, and even the anxiety hits have been short and pretty easily managed.  And not to forget my major source of therapy — Mo the Horse — continues to be a huge help.  We are back to jumping again (bad ankle steadily improving) and so, the utter terror of jumping helps keep me calm and sane.

Ok, now that did sound a little nuts.

Fun ways to get exercise with animals in a storm

We had a pretty big storm last night.   A California-style storm, which is strong winds and heavy rain.   I had seen the weather reports that said the storm would last until early morning, so naturally I had to go out in the middle of it to get Chinese food.    Mostly because of the soup.   I always need a healthy dose of wor-won-ton soup to weather an all-nighter of bad weather.

Later, after the restaurant, loaded with the next day’s breakfast of leftover won tons and chow fun, I slogged it back home from the restaurant, down dark, curvy country roads, slammed by the wind, windshield wipers on crack, through small floods and around downed tree limbs and over a few downed skunks.

As soon as I get home, I begin the evening workout:

1.  Round up the horses and get them into the barn.

2.  First, put on muck boots and oiler.  But before that, put on 3 pairs of socks and sweatpants over leggings.   All of this clothes-putting-on is enough to get me into a good sweat.

3.  Don’t let the dogs out before you get the horses into the barn.  Or, if you forget and let the dogs out first, make some popcorn before you head out to round up the horses.  You will enjoy the popcorn while you are watching the rodeo.

4.  After the rodeoing has ceased, catch the horses one by one and lead them through the storm into the barn.  For horses that want to be caught, this is easy.  Just fill a bucket with some grain, or rocks that sound like grain when you shake the bucket, shake the bucket and a couple of the lazier horses will walk right up to you.    Throw a rope around their neck before they figure out you tricked them with rocks.    For the other horses, who think letting the Human catch them means certain death, or worse, having to go to work, you will need more ingenuity and courage:   Just take a leisurely stroll around the farm, meandering just close enough to the horses so they can see you, and then start walking away in the opposite direction.  Every few moments stoop over and pretend to pick up something off the ground.  The horses will think you have found something good to eat, and they will start following you.  Just keep doing this until you make your way into the barn, then close them inside.

5.  Make sure you put hay inside the barn before you close the horses in.  Or you will have several pissed off horses confined in a small space in the middle of a storm.   This is where the courage part comes in.   You don’t want this.

6.  If you didn’t let the dogs out before, let them out now.  Then spend another 20 minutes slogging around the farm in the storm trying to entice Lulu the bloodhound away from her overpowering olfactory focus on dead rodents, manure and whatever other yummy smells she is chasing at top speed.   Lily the Golden Retriever is much easier.  She will just glue herself to your thigh no matter what direction or speed it needs to travel to catch up with Lulu.  She knows that there will be a cookie in the vicinity of that thigh eventually.

7.  Dogs inside, now herd the cats indoors.  This requires that you create the desire for them to come inside in spite of the dogs being there.  To create this desire, I open a few cans of tuna and place them strategically throughout the kitchen, and then open my kitchen door.  Voila.  Cats.

8.  Finally, to cool down, a few elbow lifts with a five-pound weight in one hand and a one-liter bottle of Bailey’s in the other.    Then relax and enjoy the endolphins.