Friday Favs – End of August
Happy Friday, friends! I keep randomly waking up at 5 a.m., which happened again today. I’ve accomplished a lot, but still managed not to finish this post until after noon. Oops!
Side note: The new WordPress update is evil and I’m so sorry this post looks all smooshed together. When I try to add extra space between paragraphs and pictures, it laughs at me and says no. Anyone else struggling?
Here’s what’s been up around here lately!
1. The Dodo video below showed up on my Facebook feed last week, and I totally fell in love. The black kitty looks almost exactly like my Bear cat, except Bear has a little white star on his chest. The parts with Temporary Random Kitten are my favorite, only partly because I also have a Temporary Random Kitten at my house!
After watching this compilation a good dozen times, I looked up the originals on Youtube. If you want to fall down the same rabbit hole I did, there are 68 videos at Talking Kitty Cats youtube channel! The early ones are pretty rough, but they start to hit their stride after 10 or so.
2. I had such a weird Saturday at work! I’m so used to it being unbearably hot, so a rainy day where we all wore jackets was STRANGE. When I checked the weather the night before, it was a 50% chance of rain all day, so I wasn’t even sure we would open, but we did!
(This is a kind of long story of my day, feel free to skip since it’s nothing spectacular, but I’ll throw in some cute horses for good measure!)
My beloved Bailey horse was limping when he trotted up in the morning (They stay in a big pasture over night, so when we first get there, we fill all of the feed buckets at the barn, then someone goes down and opens the gate and they all make their way up for breakfast.) so he got the day off. Thankfully it was just because he’d lost a shoe and was feeling kinda tender-footed, and the farrier would be there Monday to do new shoes. He works so hard for us, I was kinda glad he got a break, even though I missed him!
We had 7 people scheduled on the first ride, 2 on the second, nobody on the 3rd, and 2 on the 4th. One of my coworkers isn’t 18 yet, so she can’t take out rides solo, so it would be me and the other guy doing the 2 person rides if nobody else joined them. Works for me because I LOVE doing small rides solo. 2-4 people is so much easier and fun than leading 10-12. So the other two took the first ride out, and right as they were leaving it started to rain. We still ride in the rain as long as the guests want to and there’s no lightning, so I waved goodbye to them and then went and hid in our little office-shed and played games on my phone for most of the hour.
One amusing but frustrating thing – at one point during that hour I looked out the window and Belle’s saddle was hanging off her sideways. I didn’t take a photo since it was so rainy, and I couldn’t find one anywhere on the Googles, so I made you guys this lovely work of art as a diagram:
If not for the breastcollar, which goes around her chest, it would have been hanging totally under her belly. Poor Belle is super round and hard to fit, but I think someone had put the wrong saddle on her because it VERY MUCH did not fit right. I had to unhook everything (while being rained on), take it all off, and re-saddle her. She’s known as Hells Bells or the Hellbitch around the barn, but I’ve never had problems with her and she was such a good girl while I was doing this. She started to move and I said a firm WHOA and she stopped in her tracks and stood still. Good girl. <3
Anyway, our 11:30 riders didn’t show up, so we sat around doing nothing. We had two people stop randomly a little around 1 and I was going to take them out but my coworker was going totally stir crazy so I let him go instead. Finally for the 2:30 ride we had 6 people instead of the 2 originally scheduled, and I was like “OMG PLEASE LET ME SIT ON A HORSE ALREADY”, so I took them out. Other than getting horses ready from about 8-9:30, I’d been doing NOTHING all day. Nothing is fun for awhile, but after five hours I was SO ready to work! I rode Roark since Bailey was out, and was reminded how much I love him. He’s such a good boy! Unlike Bailey, he’s also used as a guest horse, so he’s not always available for me to grab. (We generally match guests to horses, then pick who we want to ride from whoever is left. We try to keep the mules just for guides, and we have a brand new horse named Dutch who I haven’t even ridden yet who is still guide only, but otherwise Bailey is the only other guide only horse.)
My two coworkers took the horses we weren’t using on the 2:30 ride down to the show barn, so once I got back all we had to do was make one more run down there, tie them up to their hay, loosen girths and breastcollars (we don’t untack if they’re doing a show that night) sort out the cash from the day, and head home.
Tomorrow is supposed to be rainy again, so I may not end up working. The weather forecast changes every five minutes, though, so we’ll see!
3. I was poking around on my insurance site trying to find a way to make my premium cheaper (no luck) and discovered that Progressive customers get a free 3-month trial of SiriusXM! My cell phone data coverage suuuuucks where I live, so I generally can’t just listen to Spotify or something while I drive, so I’m pretty excited to try this out. Wanted to spread the word in case any of you have Progressive, too!
4. I usually buy Oreos if I’m buying cookies, but lately I’ve been very into Milanos! The double dark chocolate are my favorite, but the dark chocolate and milk chocolate ones are also awesome. They’re perfect for dunking (especially in Starbucks vanilla latte) and they just feel slightly fancier than Oreos.
Okay, I’m winding things up after only 4 this week. Too much to do, too little time! Hope you all have fantastic weekends. Send some love to all of my Disney cast member friends who are not only dealing with the insane crowds as the new Star Wars area opens, but also a big ol’ hurricane heading straight for them. It’s kinda a nightmare, but omg do I wish I was there. I miss that kind of craziness!
Linking up with Bright on a Budget & A Little Bit of Everything