Don't you hate angsty blogs?

HI BLOGGERS!!! It's okay, I didn't recorgnize myself either.

Fiction is nice. Fiction doesn't force you to lead an interesting life to create subject matter.

I do enjoy writing, and I feel more like myself when I do it, but then I always end up feeling bad when I don't have anything interesting to write about. Right now, it was kind of the only outlet that felt like it would help.

Anyone remember how happy and progressive I was like 4 months ago? Riding Xena, had just gotten Firefly, doing hill therapy with Mesa, driving Charm, doing fancy online stuff with Ghost, making leaps and bounds with my skittish mare, and generally excited for life? Well I guess what goes up must come down. Not gonna lie, this is certainly not a happy blog post. In fact, this is probably the lowest slump I've ever been in with the horses. Or in life, ever, at all.

Then what's even more been on my mind lately is this ASDFGHJPOIUYTREWDFGH!@#$%^&**&^%$#@ situation with video cameras. I have been ready to film an audition with multiple horses for AN ENTIRE YEAR now!!!! Last Christmas, I got a video camera. Was going to audition. Oh too bad that freaking thing took an expensive converting cord and an obscene amount of nonproductive customer service calls to figure out how to load it onto the computer. Sooooo that didn't work. I have sitting on it, somewhere, wherever the stupid thing is, the entirety of the first night I got Xena. And like some of the next day. Haven't watched it back, not gonna any time soon, and will never be able to get it online. Public service announcement: sony handycams are crap. Well I've been trying to make some videos with my digital camera, but it doesn't work very well. In fact, it's embarrassingly bad. It uploads in .MOV format, which Windows rejects. We have an old 2007 Macbook, so I tried editing them on there. Oh, it edits them alright, it sure does. But it won't upload to Youtube. I have to e-mail them to myself to upload it from my PC (I can almost hear you laughing at how awful this is... almost), which compresses it to such a stupidly small resolution that you can't tell the horse's head from its tail and it cuts out most of the audio. Greaaat. Macbook, out.

And then there's my horses. Have I mentioned the evil demon spawn of the devil plants we have here called goat heads? Yeah I think I've complained about them before. It's like if burrs had rose thorns on them, yeah it's like that only plus artificial intelligence which tells them how to destroy things by clinging to them. They make playing with ropes a literal bloody mess, causes you to want to micromanage the rope so it won't touch the ground, and are just obnoxious. Well not only is it unpleasant to play online at all, it's now below freezing every day and cold hands and goat heads don't mix. /tangent. What I was getting at is that my cart tires popped AGAIN. So I haven't driven Charm since like October. Ohhh you think that's all? HAH.
I got sick in the end of September. I'm still sick. It's effing December. It sounds like pneumonia but doctors just give you allergy medicine that doesn't help. So Starting about halfway through October, I haven't ridden much because I feel like a corpse running on caffiene.
Firefly got a 4" deep puncture wound on her leg the day I turned 18, November 2nd. It took about 3 weeks of my sick self hauling it out to the barn twice a day to walk her, hose the leg, and flush it out with an unseemly looking syringe for that to heel up. The day - I kid you not - THE DAY I went out to catch her, planning on calling the vet to give her the okay, she lacerated the other back leg on a loose wire. Brilliant. It was about a millimeter from the lowest joint in the hock... which loosely translates to "pretty freakin dangerous." So the vet prescribed a few weeks of stall rest for that. The first week I cleaned and bandaged it every day. Then after that, I had to just clean it out and put medicine on it twice a day. You'd think that would be it right? <--- obvious forshadowing is obvious.
NOPE! While on stall rest, she got an abscess on her hindquarters. No, seriously. It burst through a bunch of muscle, and was open about 6 inches long in that big muscle next to her tail. I have never seen so far into the insides of the muscle structure of a horse, nor did I want to. While I was flushing it, I'd sometimes look at her and say, "Honestly, horse, how many times am I going to have to violate an orifice you created with this syringe?"
The tendon was healing nicely, of course vet had to come back out and remove some proud flesh. Actually a lot of it.
My vet now recognizes my number when I call after, you know, calling her twice a week at one point for the same horse. She joked that since every time she comes she leaves blood on my barn floor, she should write her name in it and say "...was here."

EMOTIONAL FITNESS IS A MYTH!!! I'm sure of it!!!! *banging head against wall*
If anything, I've proved Karma doesn't work. Maybe it's just trying teach me patien-- OH shut up.

The puncture wound is just a bit of scar tissue now. The abscess is only open about 3 inches now, and the tendon is... well okay the tendon doesn't look a whole lot better. She's supposed to regain full athletic use of it though, which is nice. If either of us feel up to riding any time in the distant future. Somewhere in there, she rubbed most of her mane out... so between her scabs and scars and such she just looks like a ragamuffin. THEN, and I nearly forgot, Xena broke out in hives again about a week before Firefly's tendon injury. Oh, and this was after she ran herself through probably the same fence that Firefly cut herself on. She still has the hives and slight scar on her chest. Allegedly, they are deer tick allergies. She looks gross. She looks like she's never been brushed in her life, the bumps under her long winter coat are just awful. So yeah, no riding for her either, even if I felt up to it. Things like this make me feel like we didn't really move to a dream ranch of any kind at all... we've moved to a death trap.

The only slight snippen of possible good news? I got accepted to Fast Track 2011 for sure, signed up and going. Possibly the worst news? I have to go to Fast Track. Wtf Alex you're insane! Yeah yeah I know. But think about... I have to take either already super emotional Xena, hope she's not allergic to the campus, and also take her from a sketchy level 3 online to a confident riding horse in 7 months, if I started today. Which I can't because we're both sick. Or Firefly from a calm confident level 2, to a proper Parelli horsey in however long she's physically sound between now and July. Freaking out? Just a little. To add to that (and I swear this is all quite actually happening) the mares we bred this year are due next June. We lost the first foal we tried to breed in 2006, and this is the first year we've tried since. I basically just want to escape, and trade pretty much anyone for their life right now.

Soooooo I've been sleeping mostly. Because there's not a whole lot else to do. I spend too much time on the internet, watching other people enjoy their interesting lives on youtube. In fact, because I realized how I need to get out more, or at least need to meet new people, I decided I wanted to start a real show on youtube because it's something non-horsey to do. So I went camera shopping. Again. It wasn't any better. In fact it was worse. I got a new camera for Christmas which apparently isn't any easier to edit on. Now I need to go be socially awkward an return it and admit to the people at Best Buy that I'm technologically inept and just want a darn camera that works! I hadn't left the farm in 2 weeks before we went camera shopping. And the last time I did was to go to the animal shelter. The only place I ever leave to is Wal-Mart or the shelter. Social life? Sounds nice. But I can count my friends on one hand - 3 I met at the shelter and they live too far away to do anything regularly, and the others spend more time flying back to Los Angeles than with me. I'm an animal person, but when your pets are the only source of entertainment for miles around, even I want to rip my hair out every time I see something with a tail nowadays.


I'm going to die alone making crappy youtube videos.

*exhale*