El Blog de Kalin

2007-09-29T01:22:00.001-05:00

TESTING

Another Vocab Lesson!

2007-09-28T23:29:00.000-05:00

It's time for another vocabulary lesson, complete with pictures!

Big Blue -- Big Blue, also known as "The Beast," if you're me, is our truck. It's an '89 Silverado and it truly is a beast. It got Bradley and I safely through a terribly blizzard while we were driving home (home home, not apartment home) from school one time. Another time, it got stuck in our driveway in about 4 inches of snow and my brother-in-law Jake had to push it out with his Jeep. Since I was on my way to a family function, I arrived before Jake and told people about how I'd just had to pull his Jeep out of a snow bank. I'm tricky like that. Unfortunately, The Beast/Big Blue has succumbed to a myriad of problems and is now a big blue lawn ornament.

Those unfamiliar with Big Blue might initially get it confused with...

Big Boy -- Big Boy is our big tractor. Our only other tractor is a riding lawn mower, but that's beside the point. Big Boy doesn't have a whole lot to do on our little farm, but every once in a while you see it fly past with my grandpa at the wheel.

Dirt Pile -- I don't even know the story of the dirt pile, but it's pretty self-explanatory. Somehow, there came to be a large pile of dirt. Grass and trees eventually grew over it, but the name never changed. We used to sled down this thing for hours in the winter time. Actually, it was probably only 15 minutes or so, but it felt like hours.

Rock Pile -- The rock pile used to be the corn crib. Our property, along with our neighbors' property, were all part of a large dairy farm. It was split up and we got the chunk with the buildings on it. Somehow the corn crib was reduced to a pile of concrete slabs, affectionately known as the rock pile. I used to climb on this all the time when I was a kid, and the bottom part would fill with water during particularly heavy flooding.

Tire Swing -- This is probably the crowning glory of Big Boy. It's a tire swing, but instead of using a modest tire, my dad and grandpa went all out and attached a huge tractor tire to the tree. There was lots of trial and error regarding rope length, rope stretching, etc. Big Boy hoisted the tire up off the ground, if I remember correctly. Mostly I remember watching the proceedings from the porch and wondering why we couldn't have a normal tire swing. The answer to this question, I've found, is because we don't have a normal anything.

The Original Muse

2007-09-25T23:51:00.000-05:00

Back in the good ol' days before I was technically a professional equine photographer, I really only took pictures of one horse. That horse, as you may have guess, is none other than my 80's-fabulous Arabian, Masterpiece.

It's weird that he's 80's-fabulous, too, because he was born in '94. Whatever. Don't try to argue with him.

Remember this picture from a couple days ago? Flies! Ew. They plagued us the whole time I was trying to snap a good picture of the beast.

Piecey tried desperately to shake them off. Pictures taken in mid-shake are painfully awkward.

Reason #1 Piecey is 80's-Fabulous: He's intensely awkward.
Reason #2 Piecey is 80's-Fabulous: He has no butt, perfect for wearing tapered leg Jordache jeans that come up to your collar bone.

When shaking didn't help, he threw himself onto the ground in an effort to squish the flies.

Reason #3 Piecey is 80's Fabulous: Look at his mullet.

He made sure to roll evenly...

...on both sides.

We came to the agreement that I would take one semi-decent action shot before putting the fly mask back on.

But I tricked him and took some head shots, too.

Then he told me that the flies were grodie to the max and I agreed, so I put his fly mask back on.

You all can be expecting some big, huge, awesome changes to this site soon...ish. I've promised myself I won't even work on them until I've completely picture orders from the horse show.

I Lifted 80 lbs Yesterday

2007-09-24T22:32:00.000-05:00

"Eighty pounds of what?" I bet you're saying.

Eighty pounds of pure, undiluted belligerence.

I gave Bradley a bath yesterday. I know it can be hard to believe, especially for those who know him, but he can, at times, be a little...contrary. He didn't offer any sort of help while I lifted him into the tub, and he certainly didn't believe me that there was any sort of rule saying that if you don't jump into the tub, you can't jump out.

He'd gotten a few fleas on him, thanks to Olio, who is like a succulent angel food cake for fleas. A bath was necessary.

The bath wasn't his only activity of the day, though.

He sat around and intimidated the puppies from a distance.

Then he walked around looking for a new location at which he could intimidate the puppies.

Then he practiced his song and dance routine, which, of course, is directed at the puppies. It's called "Upside Down Teeth (Are Still Big Teeth)."

Home Sweet Home

2007-09-23T23:00:00.001-05:00

Ahhhh, a relaxing day at home. Today was the first day I've had without something big hanging over my head for a couple weeks. My speech on equine photography went well yesterday, even though I was the last to talk, which meant the vast majority of people have gone home.

Soon enough I'm back to the grind, as I have quite a few orders from the show I photographed. I need to be working on proofs and getting them to the printer, but today I took it easy.

They're harvesting the field around our house. This sight made me very excited, until I realized that the combine and trucks were just parked and that their operators were probably at church. I briefly entertained the thought of running over to take closer pictures, but decided against that.

Stella is a dog of action. Unfortunately, that action usually involves a lot of urine.

Mauler is also a dog of action, but he's a dog of slower, slightly tilted action. Stella is totally encroaching on his action shot, but that's ok, because I forgot to adjust my ISO, so it's all washed out, anyway.

I went to visit Piecey, and he gave me this "Hey, how the heck are you? What the heck are you doing? Why the heck aren't you in the field getting me some corn?" look.

Olio and I took it upon ourselves to find him some corn, and we did just that.

Close by, Mauler had died.

Just kidding.

This is entitled "Lord of the Flies," and it's an emotive portrait. I was trying to get him to run around, and he was trying to get me to understand the anguish of having your entire face covered with flies. We compromised.

Bad Decisions

2007-09-21T21:29:00.000-05:00

I know I mentioned something about how I'd post pictures and stories from the horse show I photographed. I will, but right now I am drowning in equine photography (what with the 30 minutes talk I'm giving tomorrow/today and on which I have done approximately zero work).

Instead, I'll tell you a tale of bad decisions, aka Kalin's Thursday Adventures.

It begins with me desperately trying to finish my statistics homework. I had plenty of time to turn it in, but I had to go out to our university farm and head up a Haunted Corn Maze work expedition, and I didn't want to be late. After running around the most ridiculously-designed building, I finally found my teacher's mail box and dropped off my homework before speeding out to the University Farm. I showed up in a sweatshirt, jeans and Crocs and was asked about 5 million times if I was really hot, because it was 80-some degrees outside.

Our main goal of the evening was to remove large bundles of corn stalks from the maze so that we can go in later and till up the ground. This was cumbersome because, well, it's a maze. There's no easy way out. The whole reason the ground gets tilled is because it's so uneven and full of sharp corn stalks, the likes of which can stab through your ugly-but-comfortable rubber shoes and into your foot. Getting a wheelbarrow full of corn stalks out of a complicated maze in 80+ degree weather is no treat, especially when you can't maneuver it without massive amounts of cursing.

Kelsey had the idea to get a large tarp, pile stalks on it, and carry that out of the maze. We went in search of a tarp, which involved a questionable adventure in the cattle barn, the discovery of a small Pocahontas poncho, a frightening ride in Matt's truck and the eventual stealing of a large blue tarp from these sheep.

We took it into the maze, after another frightening ride in Matt's truck, and started piling a whole lot of corn stalks onto it. When I say a whole lot, I mean a whole freakin' lot. Eventually it got to the point where we thought this giant blue tarp was about as full as it should be, and we gathered the corners and hoisted them onto our shoulders and tromped out of the maze.

Not really. I wish that had happened, but in actuality we followed the path until we knew that we were as close to the edge of the cornfield as we could get. After that point, the path veered off and looped and went under ground and through a swamp and over a rickety rope bridge and all that jazz. At this point I made a critical judgment error and said, "Let's just go through the corn."

We had to go across the rows, not down the rows, to get to the outside, which means that the spaces between corn stalks is not all that big. This maneuver is usually okay, because we usually are never carrying gigantic tarps filled with approximately 5000 lbs of corn stalks. We stepped into the corn, flailed around for a moment, and stopped. We were stuck.

"This isn't working," said Kelsey.

"WE'RE ALMOST THERE!" I shouted as I leaped into the row of corn in front of me.

The sound of cracking corn stalks nearly drowned out our laughter, not to mention the huffing and puffing caused by barreling through a few yards of corn field with a giant corn-stalk-and-tarp enchilada. When we finally burst out into the open, we looked behind us to see a large swatch of corn that was completely trampled down.

"Isn't there some saying about the road to hell being paved in good intentions?" I asked (rhetorically).

The Legislative Process

2007-09-20T13:03:00.000-05:00

I didn't post last night because I was buried in paper work. Most notably, an interesting petition anonymously appeared on my desk. It was in reference to the allegedly unfair distribution of ferret treats in my household. Though generally well-written, one particular bullet under the "Reasons Treat Allotment Should Be Progressive In Relation to Animal Weight" header caught my eye:

"Because she is a tiney[sic] rat and I am a big dog."

When I asked Bradley if he had anything to do with the petition, his eyes got shifty and he denied it. He also denied forging signatures on the it, though I brought up some pretty valid arguments to back up my accusations.

"Instead of 'Lil,' it says 'That one who came to visit you and made me so mad I peed on your beds.' It sounds like maybe this was written from your point of view, Bradley," I said. His eyes got shifty again and he asked me if someone was knocking on the back door, because he was pretty sure he'd heard someone back there and he'd go check it out, but he looked forward to continuing our conversation later. With that, he waddled with a purpose into the kitchen.

The petition got thrown away. Not because it was bad, but because I came home from a sorority ceremony and found an empty bag of ferret treats chewed open on the floor, so it was really a moot point.

I Suffer from OCD

2007-09-18T23:13:00.000-05:00

Not Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. No, the OCD from which I suffer it even more awkward and hard to explain...

Obsessive Crossword Disorder.

Yesterday I somehow came across a crossword puzzle. I was in a classroom we often use for ag classes. My friend Becca had done the sudoku during our Ag Ethics discussion and left that part of the paper under her chair until the afternoon, when I sat next to it and found it. Figuring I'd fill in a blank or two and throw it away, I picked it up.

I spent the entire class period working on it, soliciting help every few minutes. I stared at it as I walked out to my car with Shipley, to whom I give a ride after class. "TV, slang," I said.

"Tube?" Shipley offered.

"Starts with 'n'," I added. "Or maybe not. What's a vegetarian's source of protein? Nuts?"

"Tofu."

I stopped and used some shrubbery as a writing surface. I worked on it as we crossed the street and managed only to separate myself from it in order to drive to my apartment and work on pictures, but I was reunited with it later at a sorority event.

I was once again stuck. "Is anyone here Catholic?" I asked. A few girls reluctantly raised their hands.

"Who was pope before Paul V? His papacy lasted only four weeks," I asked.

"Paul the fourth," said my grand little, Kelsey, who, as you might imagine, is not Catholic.

"It starts with an 'l' and ends with an 'i'," I prompted. "Luigi? Was there a Pope Luigi?" We were doubtful as to the existence of Pope Luigi, but no one knew the actual answer.

Stoll, my little sis, who was raised Catholic, showed up a bit later. She told me that she thought maybe Pope Luigi was right, and Kelsey maintained that it was in fact Paul IV. I eventually lost interest in the crossword until this afternoon when I decided to see what the real answer was.

It turns out it was Leo XI, which makes a lot more sense than Luigi.

A Quick Note

2007-09-17T23:25:00.000-05:00

I wanted to drop in and let you know that I'm not dead or incapacitated or anything of that sort.

I took picture this weekend at a horse show as the center ring photographer, which was a lot of fun. The weather was gorgeous, the people were nice and I had a blast. I took over 1,000 pictures and am trying to get proofs online so that people can see them and order before they forget about and/or quit caring about the show.

This involves cropping, resizing, rotating and putting a watermark on every picture before saving it and uploading it into the appropriate gallery, so I'm super busy. I promised to have them all up tomorrow, though, so you can expect to hear from me afterwards. I've got some good pictures to share, too!

The Farm

2007-09-14T00:23:00.000-05:00

Today Bradley and I headed out to the University Farm. My sorority was having a bbq out there with the ag fraternity as our final rush event of the week. I went out early in hopes of catching some good pictures in the pretty light. Unfortunately, this plan was slightly foiled as most of the pastures were to the west of me, so that required me to shoot straight into the low, bright sun.

This was the beginning of my journey. Well, kind of. It was the beginning of the picture-taking portion, anyway. I'd actually parked on the opposite side of the farm by the horse barns and had walked all the way across to the far pastures.
You can't really tell from this picture, but that corn to the left is super tall! We wandered through it once in my Soils class (aka Crops part 2).

I hiked all the way down to that little white shed, trying to get some pictures of the cattle. Unfortunately, they were all back-lit, so the pictures weren't great.

I did get a half-decent picture of one of the bulls, though. All of the cattle on our farm are Gelbviehs.

Finally, some unshadowed farm animals! These little guys are part of some research my friend Matt is doing.

I'm pretty sure these two are Katahdin sheep, hence the hair coat.

I didn't tell them that I was well-acquainted with the people who would be slaughtering them next week, but I'm pretty sure I wasn't fooling this guy.

This one wasn't going easy on the judgmental stares, either.

"Why is she staring at us through that machine, Bahby?"
"I don't know, Bahbahra. I don't know."

After chillin' with my ovine homies for a while, I went back to the horse area.

This is D, owned by a classmate of mine.

These girls were riding some farm horses and said they didn't mind if I took pictures.

After that, I made my way back to the classroom building where my sorority sisters and the AGR's were starting to accumulate. We had a good meal and a lot of laughs, and Bradley begged several cookies off of people. All in all it was a good day.

In lieu of a real post...

2007-09-13T02:06:00.000-05:00

I'm just going to let you try come up with the story behind this picture yourselves.

Resume Schmesume

2007-09-11T23:34:00.000-05:00

I've been working on my resume all evening because I'm going to apply for a job.

Ha! No, I'm kidding, quit rolling your eyes. I'm working on it because it's due in my senior Ag seminar class tomorrow.

When it was first announced that we needed to have our resumes done, I mentally punched my fist into the air. "Yesssss, I already have a resume!" I thought gleefully. I'd made one for the purpose of applying for scholarships from our Walking Horse Association. Upon some investigation, however, I discovered that my resume is not necessarily what employers are seeking.

For one, it lists all of the FFA activities in which I participated (FYI: horse judging[reasons], meats judging, dairy judging, livestock judging, crops judging, record book competitions and public speaking...man, I miss FFA...) and the awards I won (team and individual) in those activities. Needless to say, some significant whittling took place.

I wasn't overly dismayed, though, because I got to flex my creative muscles while describing my position in the sorority.

For example...
Real Life: We dress in professional dress (which can be as simples as khakis and a polo shirt) for classes on Mondays. You get two freebie days where you can be casual on Mondays. We're a professional sorority, it's in our bylaws, etc. At our meetings, I say, "Did anyone not dress up today?" and if they raise their hand, I put a check mark by their name.
As Written on My Resume: "Tracked compliance with professional objectives."

I'm ready for the real world!

Assassination

2007-09-09T23:38:00.000-05:00

An attempt was made on Maizy's life last night.

I swung around in my desk chair to see this touching scene:

Peace and harmony!

I grabbed my little point-and-shoot camera, lest I miss this adorable shot while trying to unpack my SLR.

Bradley perked up at the commotion, but Maizy stayed very still. Suddenly I had flashbacks to pretty much every night that Bradley's inside at home and doesn't get sufficient time to digest outside. We're usually all deeply involved in something, but the noxious fumes that overcome us are impossible to ignore and we stumble, gasping, out of the room, returning only to usher Bradley outside and put an exhaust fan in the window.

"He's...he's trying to kill her!" I exclaimed to myself.

"No I'm not," Bradley insisted.

"Can't...breathe..." Maizy choked.

She's been pretty content with staying safely inside her cage today.

Ferrets Are Weird

2007-09-08T15:15:00.000-05:00

Maizy, as I've named my little ferret, is a weirdo. This sentiment is probably just due to the fact that I'm getting used to a completely different species. She's not weird in a bad way, contrary to what Bradley will tell you, it's just that ferrets as a rule are weird, I think.

They're like a combination of a dog and a rat and a cat. And maybe a parrot. Maizy liked the plastic squeaky toy that none of my dogs liked and chased it across the kitchen floor over and over again for a while yesterday. Now? I have no idea where the toy is. She's stashed it somewhere, which has led to a frustrated "If I was a ferret, where would I put a large plastic squeaky toy?" line of internal monologue on my part, but to no avail. I'll probably find it when I move out of here.

Another weird aspect of the ferret species is the general instinct of "Holy crap, is that a box?! I need to crawl inside of that!" I don't think there's a single inch of my apartment that hasn't been explored. This includes several poorly lit, dust bunny-haunted, tight passages. If there's a whole as big as a silver dollar, Maizy is crawling through it.

"Aren't you supposed to be more cautious?" I asked skeptically. "Aren't you afraid of, like, snakes?"

"Why, are there snakes here? Holy crap, is that a Wal Mart bag?!" Maizy asked from inside the Wal Mart bag.

There's aren't any snakes here (I hope) but there is one large, mildly perturbed dog. Overall, Bradley's doing quite well in the whole not-killing-ferrets goal we set last week. He did have one grumpy day, though, where he stomped angrily after her because she was running into the room next to the room where the bowl of food he was choosing not to eat was sitting. We've had a few growling incidents and one snapping incident (in which Maizy was not exactly an innocent victim). So we've had some intense discussions on how growling is inappropriate, and snapping is entirely unallowed.

Any time he growls at her, she stares up at him innocently, falling onto her side, as if the very power of his anger has knocked her over. One time, it really had nothing to do with the power of his anger and more to do with the power of his muzzle, as he (out of the blue) stood up, walked over to her, and knocked her over. We had a discussion about how pushing was not allowed.

He's still happy to be the only one allowed on bye-byes, though. He went to the Student Activities Fair to sit with me at my sorority's table on our campus's quad. He ate part of a snow cone and ignored any dogs that tried to be his friend. He also went to an aggie picnic at the state park yesterday, where he selflessly helped keep the park clean by eating any food that happened to be dropped and caused people to exclaim, "I've never seen a dog eat candy before!" while ignoring some more dogs that were trying to be his friend.

I'd love to write more, but it's time for Bradley's daily chauffeured bye-bye.

Sweet Sassy Harassy

2007-09-06T22:46:00.000-05:00

In one of my previous posts, I'd typed up an entire paragraph telling certain family members not to harass me about wedding photos, or else I would Photoshop them out and replace them with Bradley. For whatever reason, I deleted that before posting and consequently have been hounded by a few select sibling-type family members. You know who you are!

So I worked on pictures. I slaved away. I worked on them all throughout the night and into the morning, casting away the notion of sleep.

I called the orphanage where I volunteer and told them that the orphans would have to find a way to feed themselves, because I was busy with pictures.

I broke only to go to class, because education is important to me. While trying to satisfy my insatiable hunger for knowledge, my professor was interrupted by a disturbing email.

"It seems we've received some kind of threat," he said.

The students burst into a fury of worried murmurs. "You mean like a bomb threat? Here?! At our peaceful midwestern school?" someone had the courage to ask.

"Kind of," said my professor. "But it's really only directed at Kalin. Something about some pictures?"

And so I was expelled, and I strapped a tambourine to Bradley and he dances for money in our traveling gypsy show.

Anyway, family members know the link to see the pictures and I won't bore everyone else with lots of pictures of us blinking. There was this good one, though, of the four sisters and my parents that I didn't upload to the other link:

I also wanted to take the time to highlight the following hilarious transformation

This is my nephew, fake smiling. A valiant effort.

Luckily, my sisters noticed the general pained expression and remedied it. "Imagine that the Cubs just won the World Series!" April called to him before the next picture.

Like night and day.

The Interruptor

2007-09-04T22:57:00.000-05:00

I was absolutely going to get all the wedding pictures done by tonight, but I ran into an interruption.

Wait, what? No. Really?

Surely not.

Aha! The truth comes out: it's a robot ferret, doing the robot dance.

Even robot ferrets need names, though. Ferry the Ferret seems a little uninspired.

It's not really a secret that I'm a sucker for animals in need. This particular one was beaten up by the other ferrets because it was smaller than them. It had to be put in a cage with kittens because ...wait...that sounds familiar...

Olio at the pound from whence he came.

Luckily, this ferret doesn't seem to have the emotional problems that young Olio had. It's pretty outgoing and it certainly didn't poop itself upon being picked up by the worker (don't tell Olio I told you that story).

A Family Who Blinks Together Takes Decent Pictures

2007-09-03T23:11:00.001-05:00

While wading through the pictures of my sister's wedding, I'm struck by how much I really hate to use flash on my camera (or any camera, for that matter). Natural light is so much more, well, natural. Nobody looks like excessively pale robots with laser eyes and Peter Pan shadows unless they are, in fact, excessively pale robots with laser eyes and Peter Pan shadows.

There was an unfortunate chunk of time where I couldn't get rid of a large shadow on the pictures I was taking. I was exasperated and shook my fist at the heavens, cursing the shadow and exclaiming that I just didn't know from where it was coming. Luckily, only a few pictures suffered from the large shadow before it dawned on me that it was in fact caused by my hand, which was positioned right in front of my pop-up flash. Oops!

In working my way through these photos, I'm also struck by my family's blinking problem. I have not one decent picture of the whole family, because there is always at least one person blinking. There's also one picture where the entire family is...well, see for yourself:

I don't really understand it. It's wasn't the last picture or something, where we were all breaking out of formation. On my camera, it's surrounded by pictures of all of us in normal position. I think we may all have been in the midst of practicing for the dance reception. More on that tomorrow.

To my family members: The pictures will be put online soon.

Party Time and Awkward Time

2007-09-02T23:58:00.000-05:00

I've been gone this weekend at Marissa's wedding. Any time you get our whole family together, there's bound to be some good times. I'll write a real update about it tomorrow when I'm awake enough to mess around with pictures. Maybe I'll stretch out that post for weeks, updating with stories like: The Car Breakdown, Remembering Why I Don't Use Flash, Is That A New Stoplight?, Canine Anger: Bradley's Story, The Many Uses of Jazz Hands, Find Kalin and You Will Find the Party Trough and so many more!

For tonight, though, I'll share my Awkward Moment of the Day.

I decided rather randomly that I wanted Chinese food for dinner because I wanted some saucy broccoli. I checked the yellow pages online to get the number of the restaurant and placed my order. We've got two Chinese restaurants on the same street, within a block of each other: China Palace and Chen's Palace. I don't have any preference either way, but I wanted to make sure I showed up at the right one, so I made special note of which one I'd called (China Palace).

I showed up to collect my food, and was met with some confusion. Not a lot of confusion, mind you. They seemed to know what I was talking about and had my food for me within minutes. There was a minimal amount of negotiation required to get my beef and broccoli.

Arriving back at my apartment, I was greeting not only by Bradley's typical sashaying about, but by a phone call. From Chen's Palace. Telling me that my food was ready. I still had the web page with their phone number up, so I checked again and tried to explain to the guy that their phone number was listed under the China Palace name, which did not go as well as I'd hoped.

Apparently this is not an unusual occurrence, but I still felt bad. Not for long, though, because my beef and broccoli was delicious.

Lies, Intolerance and Mind Games

2007-08-31T00:47:00.000-05:00

I'm learning some tough lessons while away at school.

Lies
My economics teacher is a small, frail, older man who has a myriad of health problems. He's funny and likes to harp on our university. One discussion, revolving around self-interest, found the Department of Public Safety, aka the university police, under attack. He talked of how ridiculous it was that we have 2 pursuit vehicles on our peaceful little medium-sized campus. He berated the fact that, unlike in previous years, where if you needed to get into a classroom at any time you could call DPS and they would come unlock it for you, you must now fill out several paper forms to have the door unlocked.

"It's to prevent theft," he explained. "You know what's stolen around here? Nothing. Nothing gets stolen here. Once a baby grand piano got stolen, but that's because the guys walked into the building in uniform one day and took it in broad daylight and no one questioned them. Nothing else gets stolen!"

The next class period, two DPS officers showed up at our classroom with a camera. They came in, apologized for interrupting, and pointed up to the ceiling. There, wires dangled where once a projector had been mounted. Our professor shook his head. "You're making a liar out of me," he said. "I told them nothing gets stolen around here."

"That's not actually a factual statement," said the DPS officer.

I just realized that I had a somewhat lengthy conversation with my mom today about my need for a projector in the near future. It wasn't me, Mom!

Intolerance
Bradley has become completely intolerant of the idea of me not taking him on at least one car ride per day. There is no peace in this apartment until he feels properly chauffeured.

Tonight I went to the best Mexican restaurant around, El Vaquero, with my friend/sorority sister, Shipley. El Vaq just moved into a new building and I was going to celebrate with a margarita. 45 minutes, 2 lost orders, 1.5 margaritas and about 5 lbs of chips & salsa later, I was not feeling great.

Shipley dropped me off at my apartment and I wanted nothing more than to fall into bed for a bit. Bradley used his questionable herding instincts (which consist of him trying to physically push me places) to try to get me to the car for his Bye-Bye. I apologized to him, explained that I'd discovered that tequila was the devil, and fell asleep for 3 hours. Bradley spent the entire time scratching and licking himself. And probably planning on peeing on my bed when I'm in class tomorrow.

Mind Games
I bought a parking pass. This gives me the right to park in the proper parking lots, right? Correct. However, I think my school should have signs posted that say:

"Commuter Lot
Blue Stickers Only
Good luck getting out of or into your car, suckaaaaaaa!"

The parking spaces are close enough together that you can be perfectly parked in the center and you'll still only be able to open your door 12 inches. This isn't so much a problem for getting out, because usually the adrenaline of being late for class allows you to collapse your ribcage with no problem. However, getting back into your car is a bit more problematic. So far the best method seems to involve climbing on top of your car and laying in the sun until your bones are liquid and slowly lowering yourself down into the driver's seat.

I am BACK

2007-08-27T22:19:00.000-05:00

I don't know if I've ever mentioned it here before, and most of you who read this are related to me, so you know it anyway, but I'm in a sorority. It's a professional Ag sorority (Sigma Alpha). We don't have a house, and we're not your typical sorority-type girls. We do put on a wicked haunted corn maze, though, which basically consumes our lives for a couple weeks.

Tonight was our first meeting of the year. I'm the 1st vice president, after spending two years as 2nd vice president (with the job of educating new members). 2nd VP was a lot of work, and 1st VP is a cake walk. I was all clever and decided that after all that work, I'd take the easiest job on the executive board, so I refused to run for president, because being president is a lot of work, especially during Corn Maze, when basically everything falls on the president's shoulders.

My good friend Becca is president, and she does a great job. However, her sister is getting married this fall. Out of all the weekends, guess which one it just so happens to hit. Yes. Corn Maze weekend. And with the president gone, who takes over? The secretary? The treasurer? Please? No, it's the 1st VP. Dang.

That all wasn't actually the point of this post at all, but I'm prone to tangents.

So Bradley and I went to the first Sig Al meeting of the year (another benefit of an ag sorority: everyone loves dogs, everyone has dogs, and they come to meetings). I was complaining about my lack of internet, probably lying on the floor in the corner weeping with my arm draped over my face dramatically, when Brenna gave me a verbal defibrillating.

"I've got a modem you can use, if you want it."

It's worth mentioning that Brenna is the poor dear who recently took the Uncontrollable Bladder Cannon...er, Stella.

"WHAT?!" I shouted. I briefly stopped my sobbing.

"I've got an extra modem, you can..." Brenna started, but at this point I'd thrown Bradley over my shoulder and was slowly attempting to sprint to my car.

I got the modem and breathlessly (this is a nice way of saying I was wheezing from excitement) hooked it up and watched with delight as all the little lights lit up green.

So here I am. Back on the good ol' interwebs. Expect big things from me in the future*!

*Not necessarily the near future, and not necessarily especially big things.

Internetless

2007-08-26T19:25:00.000-05:00

I'm at school now. My summer is officially over and gone and the school year has begun. I gnashed my teeth and tried to build a time machine real quick like in order to go back to the beginning of summer, but alas, it did not work and here I am. At school. As we speak, because you know what's not working in my apartment?

1) Stella's bladder control.
2) Bradley's New Year's resolution to not be so judgemental.
3) My internet.
4) Several light bulbs that I haven't fixed since last semester.

#3 is the real kicker there. I ordered a new modem/router thingermajigger, and it will hopefully arrive within the next week. That's wishful thinking on my part, because it's coming from California, and nothing from California ever arrives within a week.

Until then, mis amigos, I am going to be going stir crazy in my apartment and spending lots of time on the computers in our science hall and maybe doing some other stuff like studying or cleaning or whatever.

I guess this gives Bradley and I time to perfect our rendition of Othello. Maybe we'll do an impromptu performance of it at Marissa's wedding next weekend...

The Homecoming

2007-08-24T23:45:00.000-05:00

Stella's coming home. She hasn't worked out for my sorority sister, due to some unfortunate bladder...issues...

The news of Stella's homecoming led to some confusion yesterday when I was playing with Bradley, Benvolio and Mauler.

"Look!" said Mauler.

In unison, he and Benvolio cried "Brownie is home!" They rushed over to greet him.

Following, I chuckled. "Sorry, guys. That's not Brownie. That's a chubby, excessively fruity tree, not a chubby, excessively fruity dog."

The Mallard Models

2007-08-23T23:37:00.000-05:00

I recently made the most excellent purchase of the AKC Mallard Squeak Toy, which is a big stuffed duck that honks.

Olio, after getting over his initial fear of the realistic honking sound, has really taken to this toy.

Today I decided to go take some pictures of the dogs, poor lighting conditions be damned, and use the Mallard toy to inspire them.

First up was Benvolio.

"Like this?" he said, anxiously.
"I'm really after more of an action shot. Pretend like you're a vicious wolverine or something!"

"LIKE THIS?!" he demanded.
"Um, yes, kind of. You're getting closer," I said, trying to correct yet encourage him. But he wasn't listening.

"I'm like Barbaro!" he shouted breathlessly.
At this point it was time to move on.

Bradley decided to take a stab at modeling.

"Good!" I encouraged. "But maybe a little less coy."

Bradley let me know that he did not know what I was insinuating, but he didn't like it. He's kind of a diva sometimes.

At this point, Mauler stepped up.

"Try looking a little less dumbfounded," I suggested. "Try to be a little more intense."

"No!" I shouted. "Less intense! Less intense!"

A good medium. It's a bold statement. I called it a wrap.

My Eyes!

2007-08-21T19:39:00.000-05:00

This is a picture I took a couple years ago when I was a freshman in college, messing around with my first digital camera and discovering the joys of macro shots.

I like that you can see all the little spindly bits in my iris. It looks so intricate and delicate!

It's a good thing that this is my last week of work for the summer, because if it wasn't, I'd be investing pretty seriously in some safety goggles to protect all that delicate stuff.

My eyes are under constant attack at work. I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but I work for family friends who breed horses. They've usually got just under 20 horses at any given time, and I clean stalls every day and take care of everything when they're out of town.

Besides the sawdust in the air and dusty pieces of hay flying at my cornea, there are two major threats to the well-being of my eyes:

1. Horse Tails
The horses are tied in their stalls and given a handful of grain to keep them occupied while I clean around them. They like to keep an eye on me and swish their tails a lot to see where abouts in the stall I am. With the amount of swishing going on, you'd think they were covered in flies, but there are never any pests in there (well, ok, today there was a giant horse fly in Shadow's stall, which I attempted to smite by bringing down the muck rake like the hammer of Thor, only to have it buzz away, mildly annoyed). Besides me, of course.

So the horses swish their tails around and horse hair is pretty course, so it really, really hurts when they whip you in the eyeball with it. Today I received by far the worst face lashing of the summer from Sassy, one of my favorite broodmares. I had to do a quick check to make sure my eyeball hadn't been turned to goop before I continued on with the cleaning. I think I heard Sassy snicker.

2. High Velocity Horse Snot
We got a bulk load of shavings that was kind of dusty, and the horses really didn't care much for them at all. To show their disapproval, they spent a lot of time snorting and sneezing and finding other ways in which to force copious amounts of snot out of their heads at high rates of speed.

They like to stand at the front of their stalls, especially as I'm tying or untying them, and shoot snot straight at my eyes. Yes, it feels as gross as it sounds.

Tomorrow I'm going in for my second round of sedation dentistry, so don't expect to hear anything from me in a day or two, if I make it out.

The Hand Off

2007-08-20T21:21:00.000-05:00

The Stella hand off went just fine. I didn't throw her into the Mississippi and she only threw up a few times (compared to Mauler, this is like the difference between your local creek and the Amazon).

I was in for a nasty surprise at my apartment, though. Besides it being ridiculously hot, my lap top wouldn't pick up my wireless network. Figuring my modem just needed to be unplugged plugged back in for a good old fashion reboot, I twirled around to do just that. Instead of being greeted with happy little green lights, I was faced with pulsating orange and a weird buzzing sound. I performed the standard unplugging and plugging back in and there was no change, until...suddenly...nothing.

There were no lights. Everything was black. I tried unplugging it and plugging it back it.

Nothing.

"NOOOOOOO!!" I cried, anguished, falling to my knees and shaking my fists at the sky.

You see, I have no TV in my apartment. I thought that perhaps this would allow me to focus on school work a bit more, but...well, the results have been questionable. Without the internet, there's very little to do, besides trying to teach Bradley how to play cards. But he cheats.

Luckily, I was entertained for a while by Antonio and William, my helpful customer support representatives. They arranged for me to get a new AC adapter, in case that's the issue. If it's not, I'm going to have to order a new modem, and it's going to be a long first few days at school.

The gang's all here...

2007-08-17T22:13:00.000-05:00

...but not for long!

It's a little-known fact that we have a lot of dogs. 6, to be exact. There's Bradley, Benvolio and Mauler, who are mine. There's also Blacky and Brownie, who were creatively named by their owners, my sister Marissa and my nephew Rhys. And then there's Stella, who's nobody's dog.

Mauler, Blacky, Brownie and Stella are all siblings. They're the hounds that have killed off the barn cats (not my latest three...yet).

From left to right: Mauler, Stella, Brownie, Blacky
This is from last Thanksgiving, when I wanted to dress them up in little pilgrim and American Indian costumes, but I never got around to it.

They're good dogs...kind of. They're troublesome, hyperactive and they like their freedom so much that they're willing to run through the underground electric fence that was installed for them in order to run around and get nabbed by animal control (Mauler and Blacky, I'm looking at you). But they're sweet, they like to cuddle and they serenade us when sirens go off in town.

You see, it took them a while to learn how to bay like normal hounds, but they did eventually learn. They'll start by howling a little bit with a siren they hear in the distance. By the time they've all given a little howl, they have become so mesmerized by the sounds of their own voices that they stand around in a circle and howl.

Here they are singing their hit single, "I Wish (I Didn't Have This Shock Collar)." Stella was beat boxing or something, that's why she's not in the picture.

Their happy little pack is being split up soon. Blacky and Brownie are leaving to live with Marissa and Rhys, which they'll greatly enjoy. Brownie leaves tomorrow and Blacky leaves in the next few weeks.

Tomorrow Stella is leaving to live with one of my sorority sisters. She'll finally get her own person to love, but if she howls on the 5 hour drive over, I may just push her out into the Mississippi.

Stella says, "See ya, suckaaaaaas!"

Expectations

2007-08-17T01:00:00.001-05:00

This is a lot like how we'll be dancing at my sister Marissa's wedding reception in a couple weeks.

We'll incorporate much heavier jazz hand usage, though.

Hurt Feelings

2007-08-15T22:38:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow I'm headed to the state fair to see the family friends for whom I work show their horses. Cute Little Blazey Face will be competing, along with Victory and Shadow.

Benvolio demanded to know why he wasn't being shown in the Ginormous, Vicious Dogs Who Are Really Big And Scary class. I informed him that there was no such class and, even if there were, I didn't feel he was the appropriate type to enter it.

His anguish was palpable.

Vocabulary Lesson

2007-08-14T23:52:00.000-05:00

Every region of the world has its own unique dialect. Our household is no exception. And so, in case any of you all every come hang out with my family, here's a short vocabulary lesson.

Antanna -- Pronunciation: An-tan-uh; The large radio antennae in the field next to our house. Any other antennae can be referred to with the proper pronunciation (an-ten-uh), but for some reason, you must add a random, nasally noise into the middle of this word when referring to the one by which we live.

Air Out -- My mom is a big fan of fresh air, which leads to the opening up of the house in order to flush out stale air. Air Outs occur several times a day and during every season. You are not safe from air outs, even if it's -40 degrees Fahrenheit outside. In fact, you can pretty much guarantee that the moment you get overly comfortable in the nice warm house, the doors will be opened so that icy air can fill your lungs and freeze off your fingers.

Baggies, The -- Bag worms, which plague the evergreen trees and bushes on our property. My father, Destroyer of Baggies, goes out and picks them off, depositing them into a plastic sack. Don't engage my parents in a conversation about The Baggies, though, because it will involve my mom describing how she prefers to squish them, complete with hand motions.

Wiley Marketers -- Wiley Marketers are basically anyone who doesn't leave a message. We have an intense, high-tech screening process through which our phone calls are filtered. Ok, actually, we just let the answering machine pick up. So if you're calling our house, you really need to leave a message. Or at least start leaving a message, like, "Hey, it's Kalin. *long pause* Anybody home? *long pause* Hellllo? *long pause, heavy sigh* Ok, well, *blah blah message blah*" and then usually halfway through the message, someone will pick up.
But if you're silent, we won't pick up. And then we'll look at each other and talk about the Wiley Marketers and how they have no etiquette these days and how it's weird that they've learned to disguise their voices to sound like Lil's, and to talk about things that Lil would talk about, but how we shouldn't pick up anyway.

This is just a very small sampling, but it will help you get your foot in the door of our lingo. Keep an eye out for future editions of the vocabulary lessons with which to educate yourselves!

Some Good Links

2007-08-12T21:35:00.000-05:00

I've got some good links that I frequent and I've been meaning to share them, but I just never get around to them. So instead of regaling you all with tales of how incredibly freakin' hot it is around here and how I might have almost died while walking through my niece's sprinkler (the well water was so cold my throat was closing up), I'll give you some good links.

All links open in a new window.

Etsy -- "The place for all things handmade." It's kind of like eBay, but instead of bidding on items, you just buy them from artists and crafty people who've made them. There's a lot of cool, funky, one-of-a-kind stuff on there. I know at least some of you who read this are incredibly artsy and crafty, so you can at least appreciate it and maybe sell some of your own creations on there someday (of course I will require a finder's fee which will be in the form of a very reasonable percentage of all your sales).

Good Search -- Better than Google! Ok, not really. At all. But, you can choose a charity and they will donate a penny for every one of your searches. It's not much, but it adds up. And if you're like me and you use Google several times throughout the day, you can switch to Good Search and contribute to the charity of your choice. Sadly, you can't choose me as your charity.

Woot -- There's a new product every day, and only one product per day unless it's a Woot Off. Some of them are ridiculous, but some are really good buys.

Tack of the Day -- For the Equestrian minded, this is kind of like Woot. A new product each day and some very good deals.

Click to... -- This links directly to a site where you click to feed shelter animals, but there are links along the top to fund free mammograms, save the rainforest, feed children, etc.

Enjoy!

My Merry Band of Mercenaries

2007-08-11T23:17:00.000-05:00

We've got a mouse problem in our barn. A big mouse problem. Yes, the problem is big. So are the mice.

This is because of:
1) my semi-anorexic horse, who leaves grain in his stall
2) the murderous hounds, who have done away with our barn cats.

It got to the point where'd I easily see three or four mice sauntering around each time I went into the barn. So I took matters into my own hands and imported some barn cats from work.

There's Gertrude, who prefers to be backlit.

This is Gregor.

Last, but most certainly not least, is Dapper Dan.

Dapper Dan should actually be Dapper Danielle, I guess. I was originally going to name her Li'l Scrappy because, well, she's little and scrappy. But I felt bad about that, so I opted for Dapper Dan instead.

They were mostly feral kittens, so I really had my work cut out for me. I knew that I needed a cat that could be picked up and set down wherever mice were, so I went about taming them. I used my super-secret training tool, which is soon to be patented and sold for outrageous prices, only through infomercials:

Ok, so it's just a clumpy piece of grass. Don't tell the patent office, ok?

Anyway, I played chase with them until they got close to me, and then I'd give them a real quick pet. And then I'd stop, but the next time I'd pet them a little more. And the next time I'd give them a little kitty butt scratch and before long I had Gregor and Dapper Dan running to meet me in the barn. Gertrude is still a work in process.

I honed their skills through intense grass chasing, but I knew we had to take the next step soon. So I gathered some garbage cans, some paper towel tubes, some little chunks of donut and made this mouse trap.

It worked! I caught three mice in two traps the first time. Excitedly, I carefully lowered Dapper Dan down into the trash can. Dapper Dan chilled in one corner, the mice chilled in an opposite corner. That wasn't quite what I was expecting from my star quarter back, so I pulled her out of the game.

I transfered the mice to a feed bin halfway filled with oats. Well, I tried to transfer the mice. Mouse #1 went in, while mouse #2 jumped to freedom. Oops. Now the mouse was in a container out of which it couldn't jump, but not so deep that the cats would freeze up, or so I hoped. I put Gregor in and watched him swat the mouse around for a while. I was really feeling kind of bad for the little mouse, as I'd hoped its death would be at least somewhat quick.

I pulled Gregor out and pondered what to do for a moment. As a last ditch effort, I put Dapper Dan back in and poked the mouse with a piece of hay to get it moving. That seemed to get Dapper Dan's attention, and she sniffed at the mouse a little. And then she bit it. The mouse did not really appreciate this and bit her back before diving around in a circle. Dapper Dan was having none of it and went after the mouse, biting it and getting bitten.

"Yes! Get angry, Dapper Dan! Get angry!" I shouted while taking a generous step backwards in case the mouse came shooting out of the bin and towards my jugular. Dapper Dan and the mouse went around and around, Dapper Dan growling and the mouse squeaking. Oats were flying out of the bin. I was hanging around several feat away in order to avoid any adrenaline surge-powered rodents seeking revenge. And then...silence. I peered into the bin to see Dapper Dan eating the mouse's head.

Wishing I hadn't seen that, but glad that at least one of my little gladiators was pulling their weight, I went out to get the third mouse, which was in a 10 gallon bucket. When I returned, I set the bucket down and looked in to see Dapper Dan sharing her mouse with Gertrude. It warmed my heart, except for those gross little bone crunching noises they were making.

That's when I heard more squeaking, and turned to find Bradley sticking his head into the bucket. He emerged, holding a mouse by the tail between his teeth, and walked out of the barn.
There went mouse #3.

I've caught three more mice and delivered them to the Battle Dome, as I like to call it. Dapper Dan has killed all of them, but the other two have partaken in the eating portion. All in all, I call it a success. Not only have I taught the kittens to kill things, but also how to share the joy of doing so with their loved ones. Aww.

Still Alive

2007-08-10T22:50:00.000-05:00

I'm not dead, no matter what propaganda you've heard claiming otherwise. I am, however, kind of worn out. I've been busy with trying to get some web and graphic design stuff done for our family friends/my employers, which takes up a lot of time on the computer. It's a lot of fun, but by the time I'm done, I feel like shunning electronics and killing semi-innocent rodents (more on this tomorrow).

Just so I'm not a complete bore, here are some pictures of one of the studs from work that I snapped this evening:

This is Victory. We've had an interesting relationship. He stepped on my foot at a horse show, once. And one time he leaped over the barrier I'd put in the barn aisle while moving him back to his stall and I had to run around the stalls to close the barn doors before he got out, all while having a heart attack.

When he was a youngster, I'd lead him to the round pen in the arena in order to clean his stall, and one time when my employers left for a show they took all the lead ropes with chains on them with them. So I was stuck with little cotton lead ropes and a 2 year old stud colt who realized he didn't have any chain over his nose. This led to some rearing, but I grabbed a nearby riding whip and yelled, "You may have testicles, but I have opposable thumbs!" and that was pretty much the end of that confrontation.

He's pesky, but I like him.

I Never Read Anymore

2007-08-06T22:53:00.000-05:00

It occurred to me last night that I never read anymore. Well, I never read anything of substance anymore. I used to devour literature, especially romance novels (of both the trashy and not-so-trashy varieties) where the men were virile and charming and the women were always contemplating slapping them for taking liberties, but never actually getting around to it.

"I do too read!" some part of me, rotting away with denial, tried to claim. "I read, uh, The Walking Horse Report!" I reasoned, scanning my room, which is practically covered in weekly editions of The Walking Horse Report. This satisfied me for a brief moment until I settled down to take a gander at the latest issue. The entire thing is pictures. Giant pictures, where the name of the horse, owner and some show ring achievement is the only text on the page. Not exactly outstanding literature.

And so I admitted defeat. However, since I was arguing against myself, I still won. That's not the point, but it's worth mentioning.

Anyway, the last two books I read from front to start were Marley & Me, which made me weep uncontrollably, and The Dogs of Bedlam Farm. I think I read both of those a year ago, even though I thought I'd read them this last semester until mere moments ago. Oops. My mind has started going thanks to my advanced age.

I think the demise of my literary life has been college, where I'm too busy reading things I don't want to read to take time and read the things I enjoy.

Thanks a lot, academia!

It Pays to Come from a Big Family

2007-08-05T20:10:00.001-05:00

This is one of the cooler youtube videos I've seen:

A baby buffalo is attacked by a pride of lions, then attacked by a crocodile who tries to pry him away from the lions before the adult water buffalo come back to save him.

I'm a D.A.R.E. Graduate!

2007-08-04T21:17:00.000-05:00

Today I woke up, enraged, due to mouth pain. I'd decided sometime during the night that there really had to be a better way to keep a person's cheek away from their teeth other than hooking one of those little mirror things onto it and pulling it to the side. I'd also convinced myself that this must have been what they did during all 118 hours or so of my dental procedure, because the corner of my mouth is all ripped up and I want revenge.

Also, my face was all swollen and my tongue and cheek and gums hurt and I was in an overall bad mood. I had places to be and people to see, however, as I was participating as a decoy in order to lure my sister Marissa to a restaurant where a surprise bridal shower was being held. So I swallowed my pain and swallowed a prescription pain killer and got ready.

The plan went off with nary a hitch, as my sisters April, Lil and I got Marissa to the fancy schmancy Italian restaurant at precisely the right moment to see the rest of our female relatives arrive (Did I mention it was a girls-only lingerie shower? In the middle of a fancy schmancy restaurant? That's how we roll.).

We stowed our gift bags to the side, made Marissa sit in such a position so that whatever gifts we'd gotten her wouldn't shock and appall the other patrons when she opened them, and settled down to do some eating. It didn't take long for me to realize that I was missing a grand opportunity: there was a fully stocked bar on one side of the restaurant and my lovely father was picking up the tab for us ladies.

"Do you think they have hurricanes?" I asked Lil. She assured me that they would probably make me whatever mixed drink I wanted.

A few minutes later, another question popped into my head.

"Do you think I would die from drinking alcohol and taking that Motrin 800 this morning?" I inquired.

"Uh, I don't think I'm really qualified to answer that," Lil said, bowing out from taking responsibility for my medical care.

"It said on the side of the bottle that it could have a sedative effect. Especially when mixed with alcohol. But it didn't say not to take it was alcohol." For some reason it took me about 15 minutes to get that sentiment across.

"You'll be fine," April said from across the table. I think she mostly wanted me to fall into a coma so that I would stop asking whether or not I would die from alcohol consumption.

This question and answer session lasted for a long time, until I realized that I was feeling a little hazy and I couldn't really remember much of anything from more than a half hour earlier. At that point I decided to give up on the whole alcohol thing and just ride out the high of my pain killer, which lasted all through the afternoon and into the evening.

I think I spent most of the shower staring at one of the hostesses' computer screens, which had a screen saver of the restaurant's logo bouncing around erratically. The rest is a little spotty, but I was pain-free and consuming calamari and talking about policeman strippers.

Now I've decided to cut the prescription painkillers out of my life, lest I become a moody novelist. Or at least until my mouth pain becomes ridiculous.

Sedation Works

2007-08-03T23:24:00.000-05:00

Well hey, whaddayaknow? That sedation stuff is legit, after all! The last thing I remember before my dental procedure is being told to take a nap. And then the next thing I knew, I was given Gatorade in a sippy cup and taken out to my mom in the waiting room.

What I do know, is that I was sedated from 9AM to 5PM, and have slept for approximately 8 years, I think. I got a root canal and several fillings done, and things are feeling pretty good besides a sore tongue/cheek and my jaw being achy from being open so long.

I'd like to publicly thank my mom, who not only woke me up every few hours to give me Gatorade and pain killers, but also dealt with Bradley in a nearly full-on attack of belligerence. I heard him scratching at the door at about 3AM in his usual melodramatic manner. "Hey guys! I need to go out! HEY! Hey guys! I need to go out! I need to go out right now or there is going to be a terrible accident! Hey! Heyyyy guys! Ooh, is that Kalin sleeping there? Ok, I'm just going to lie down beside the bed and sleep here instead. Hey, stop nudging me with your foot! STOP. I don't even need to go outside!" Then as Mom tried to wrangle him outside, he ran (waddled) into the back room to lie down. That Bradley, he's a card.

Anyway, back to my mom. She took me back to the dentist's office this morning, and after they'd dulled some of the sharp edges in my mouth, she sat across from me at breakfast. Unfortunately, this included listless conversation from my end of the table and having to watch me attempt to maneuver biscuits and gravy into my mouth without actually moving my jaw, proving the fact that yes, I can feed myself but just barely. I'm sure she considered it the highlight of her day.

I'm feeling downright normal now, which is surprisingly pleasant. The only risky side effect I noticed was a pre-sedation stupor, in which I agreed to do a 30 minute talk on equine photography at a local equine educational event in September. I'd actually called the person who'd contacted me about it in order to decline her offer, but that didn't quite work out how I'd planned it. There's some part of me that loves public speaking and has loved it ever since I won an FFA public speaking contest with an extemporaneous speech on yard waste. So somehow I got convinced to give an excessively long speech on a topic on which I'm not necessarily qualified to speak. Nice! I blame the sedation.

It Has Begun!

2007-08-01T20:47:00.000-05:00

It has officially begun!

I've taken my first pill to start the sedation process for tomorrow's root canal/fillingpalooza.

If I don't make it out alive, I leave everything to Bradley (not to Lil, no matter what she tells you).

The Moon

2007-07-30T23:36:00.000-05:00

The moon is so pretty and bright and clear tonight that I decided to flex my nonexistent photography muscles by taking some pictures.

"I'm going out to attempt to take pictures of the moon!" I heroically announced to my parents and my dogs.

It turns out that this particular feat is much more easily heroically announced than done.

So I tromped outside, with Bradley and Benvolio prancing around alongside me because they really like supporting the arts and they thought they were getting fed. I parked a lawn chair on our driveway, nearly put out my eye while struggling with my tripod, and attempted to set the focus on my camera.

I'll save you the gory details (which involve a mosquito bite on my head, a near face plant onto the large/pointy rocks that are impersonating the gravel on our driveway and my camera's brush with death as Bradley did his Angry Orca impression and slammed into the side of my ~~small fishing vessel~~ lawn chair) and get right to the pictures.

The first attempt, wherein the moon tries to trick me into believing that it is the sun. Nice try, Moony!

Getting closer...kind of...

Hey, this one actually resembles the moon!

Then I got about 12 more pictures pretty much exactly like the one above and my attention span officially disappeared. And so, I went back to doing what I do best: pushing buttons on my camera and blinding innocent animals in the process.

Olio is throwing up a gang sign in that last picture. He's so west coast.

Unfortunately, it was too dark to focus, but it gives the pictures an artsy flare. An awkward, artsy flare.

Bringing Home the Bacon

2007-07-29T23:48:00.000-05:00

My subject line is misleading, because by "bacon," I of course mean "cheese."

My parents returned from a successful mini-vacation up yonder, which involved a quick stop at our favorite cheese factory in Wisconsin. We used to attend the Wisconsin Shakespeare Festival every year and gorge ourselves with fresh, delicious cheese from this place. Now the Shakespeare Festival is gone, but we still find occasion to get cheese. Actually, a nuclear apocalypse could occur and we would not forfeit the cheese.

"Oh, you're headed up north to escape the radioactive cat armies? Please, take Gregor, our pack mule, and send him back with no less than 535 lbs of garlic cheddar." And that would probably last us about a month.

Besides consuming an awful lot of cheese, I'm looking forward to going to the eye doctor tomorrow. I went there last week, and he gave me some different contacts to try. I've got a very slight astigmatism in one eye, so usually I wear a toric lens in that eye. But since it's so slight, my doctor wanted me to try a regular lens at a slightly higher prescription. This has put an interesting, wobbly spin on my world, as my depth perception does not agree with my doctor's decision. I find myself yelling, confused, "What?! No, I'm not goose stepping! I'm walking uphill, I think!" quite often.

Artsy Fartsy

2007-07-28T23:35:00.000-05:00

I've been in an artsy mood lately, which makes sense. I seem to only get in the mood to draw when I've got school work I should be doing instead, or when I've forgotten my drawing tablet somewhere.

This weekend, though, I finally have the time, the will and the means to draw, so I've been spending lots of time doing that.

So can you expect art posts from me in the near future? Probably not. I'm super sketchy (no pun intended) on sharing my art with people I know, for some reason. It's weird, but I chalk it up to the fact that, due to my intermittent creative bursts, I draw like a blind kindergartener with no hands.

In other news, it's officially less than a month before I go back to school! I'm going to be a (pseudo) senior, which blows my mind. Soon enough I will have to face the world as a real, honest-to-God grown up.

For now, though, I'm going to watch the rest of a movie called "Boa vs. Python" on the SciFi channel, with its flame throwers and giant snakes, and doodle.

The Michael Jackson Generation

2007-07-27T23:12:00.000-05:00

I survived! My chemistry class is officially over, and I got a B. No more 5 hour long, 7:30AM class! I am DONE!

Amongst my wild celebration (which so far has mostly consisted of catching up on sleep), I did a little reminiscing on another time I survived.

During the sophomore year of high school in our town, there is a class offered called Workshop of Life. In this class we learned about a lot of things, like Native Americans and different religious sects (you can only imagine the puns involved when talking to a class of 15 year-olds about sects). We also covered an extensive chapter on The Lord of the Flies, in preparation for...dun dun dun!...THE SURVIVAL ENCOUNTER.

The Survival Encounter was the much-anticipated highlight of the class. We learned what plants were poisonous, how to build a lean-to shelter and how to avoid awkward "kill the beast" chants by not utilizing any conch shells.

We broke into groups, made our plans and anxiously awaited the big day. On the morning of, we had our bags checked to make sure we didn't have any contraband items (cell phones, cross bows, you know), loaded into the buses and headed out to the secret Survival Encounter location, which changed every year. In order to ensure that none of us knew where we were and to make things more realistic, we had fake bus malfunctions. These malfunctions consisted of the teachers walking down the bus aisles, telling us to cover our heads in case of flying glass while we sassed them about how we really just wanted to see out the windows. The buses pulled over, we got out and preceded to hike through the wood to our campsite.

The main thing we were graded on, besides coming out alive and signing a meaningless social contract, was a journal we had to keep. We were supposed to keep them as realistic as possible, so our first entries basically consisted of:

Dear Journal,
Today our bus crashed in the wilderness on the way to the museum. Thank goodness I'd packed several cans of stew, an ax and my sleeping bag!
I can't wait until we get rescued.
I wish I would have brought my conch.

Our groups all made fires and shoddy lean-tos. In an effort to get extra points, we had to go above and beyond the bare requirements by making a bunch of extra stuff. My group made a fake garden, a clothes line, spoons, and a hole in which we put water bottles in order to keep them cool and a specially-designated branch on which we hung our saw. I remember that two members or my group filled their water bottles in the nearby stream and drank the water without boiling it (I should mention that we were in a cow pasture and that the stream was very shallow and murky). I desperately wanted them to fail or at least go blind for that idiotic move, but alas, they did not.

It was a pretty fun time, all in all. I enjoyed chopping down saplings and avoiding the blame for digging the latrine way too shallowly (yes, it was my fault).

The next day, rescue came and we got bussed home. Everyone survived! We had a review of the whole ordeal the next class period.

"You guys worked together the best out of any class we've ever taken," said our teacher. We beamed, thinking to ourselves that the class of '04 was truly awesome. We remembered back to being out in the woods, hiking up steep slopes covered with loose dirt and how the first ones up held down a branch for those of us at the bottom to grab onto and use to pull ourselves up. We remembered working together on the shelters, sharing tools and food and having a grand time together. If it had been a movie, this would be the part where the jock and the nerd high five and the credits roll over a group laughing scene.

Alas, it was not a movie. "But," our teacher continued, "I don't know if it's because you guys are the Michael Jackson generation or what, but you guys not only worked together the best, you also cursed more than any other class we've ever taken out there! The teacher camp site was in an ideal location, where we could hear conversations from every student camp site. You were like a bunch of sailors!"

Our smiles fell. We sought out the troubled gazes of our group members, the look in our eyes clearly saying, "Ohhhh no, do you think they heard that?" My particular group was scrambling to remember what exactly we'd said when one of the chaperons, the handsome assistant football coach, had walked by in a form-fitting under shirt. Luckily, I seem to recall it only consisting of a lot of Ooh's and high-pitched giggling.

I still don't really understand the Michael Jackson reference.

An Uneasy Truce

2007-07-25T02:35:00.000-05:00

I've reconciled with Mr. Tum-Tumnus, my stomach. It's an uneasy truce, though, which was nearly ruined this afternoon by a delicious turkey sandwich.

I had an unfortunate night last night, after my fight with Mr. Tum-Tumnus. I was feeling much better and went up to bed with the plan of doing some last minute reviewing of chemistry and then getting a good night's sleep. I settled down in bed, cracked open some thrilling notes on acids and bases and then...it hit me. I leaped out of bed, hunted around on the floor before having an epiphany: the closet. I walking in (it's a big closet) slowly, holding my breath. Flicking on the light, I glanced into the corner and, yes, there it was. A dead mouse, which had decided it was appropriate to fill the entire closet and at least part of my room with the stench of its death. Thanks, little mouse. I hope you enjoyed the trap.

Mr. Tum-Tumnus communicated to me that we needed to get out of there, and get out of there now.

I stumbled out, stopping only to secure the closet door behind me before gasping for breath in the hall way. I went in again only to gather my notes and cell phone (which I use as an alarm clock) before closing the door and dragging myself into one of the spare rooms to sleep.

Luckily, my lovely father has accepted his role as Dead Mouse Remover, so I left a note this morning alerting him to the presence of my expired friend and he took its vengeful little corpse away.

It's rather late and I'm all tuckered out, but I'm avoiding going to bed for fear of repeating the whole unsettling incident.

Low Expectations

2007-07-24T00:05:00.000-05:00

This week I'm probably going to be pretty dead, blog-wise. And normal-wise, come to think of it...

This week is fraught with 2 chemistry tests (including the final) and 2 doctor's appointments. Also, for some reason, my stomach has suddenly decided to take on the role of the cruel British judge for "So You Think You Can Eat Crackers Without Throwing Up?" I just hope and pray I'm not coming down with something. That would be loads of fun what with those chemistry tests, let me tell you.

Please send Gatorade, a chemistry tutor (or a Kalin lookalike who's really good at chemistry) and about 5 extra hours for each day.

Wasting Time

2007-07-21T23:30:00.000-05:00

I've ventured out to the Wild West for the weekend. Bradley and I made the 5 hour drive from home to my apartment to make sure no raccoons or hobos had taken up residence over the summer. We haven't found any yet. I also wanted to weed my back yard, which took approximately 10 minutes.

So I've been sitting around, wasting time on the internet. It reminds me a lot of my normal school schedule.

Bradley has remained occupied by sleeping on the couch and the bed, which he doesn't get to do at home. I think he's spent about 2 hours total outside. And that's for the entire two years I've lived at this apartment, not including the time he ran away (I'll write about that, someday). He goes outside, attends to his business, and then stands at the doorway and demands to be let back inside. Basically, he spends about 90% of his time sleeping, 7% licking himself and the remaining 3% is spent trying to convince me to chauffeur him on his Bye-Bye car rides.

We did go out to the university farm to visit Big Red, who is still big but not red.

And I called my sister April, who was kind enough to tell me everything that happened in the latest Harry Potter book. For some reason I know quite a bit about the Harry Potter world, especially for never having read a book, so I was dying to know how it all ends.

Mostly, though, I've been sitting around, eating Chinese food and watching this over and over again.

It's been a good day.

I Said What Now?

2007-07-19T22:46:00.000-05:00

I've got this knack for saying things - off the cuff remarks - that some people find funny. Things that some people remember for a long time. Things that some people view as pivotal moments in our relationship. Things that some people want to discuss with me and/or have me reenact.

So what's the issue?

I'll tell you what the issue is! It's the fact that, ninety percent of the time, I have no freaking clue about what these people are talking. They bring up something I've allegedly said in the past and I sit there with a blank-yet-hopefully-not-confused look on my face, thinking, "I said what now?!"

And yes, they always want some type of reenactment or clarification as to how exactly I said whatever it is I said. At this point, I'm still bewildered but trying to play it off as modesty or hearing loss.

Do I ever figure out what the heck these people are talking about?

No, not really.

Am I secretly convinced that they have me confused with someone else or are making up the entire thing, but more than willing to take the credit?

Yes.

I'm Going to the Dentist

2007-07-18T00:00:00.000-05:00

We had a big storm last night. Big storm. This resulted in me laying awake at night, peering out my windows in an attempt to spot any tornadoes lurking around when the lightning flashed. I ended up stumbling downstairs, checking the weather, and waking my parents up.

This all was really rather unfortunate because I had to be at chemistry class at 7:30AM, which is way too early after a good night's sleep, let alone a night filled with tormented tornado paranoia. My chem professor was talking with someone about how his son (under the age of five) had been awakened by the storm and had awakened his parents. I wanted to point out that maybe his son had looked on the Weather Underground website and seen that there was tornadic activity not so far away and he was just trying to save his family, did you ever think of that? But I settled for recounting the whole "this one time there was a tornado and now I'm overly vigilant" story to my lab partner, who I'm sure found it charming and riveting.

Anyhoo, the whole point of that story was to say that I got way too little sleep, which weakened my resolve and I actually called and made an appointment with the dentist! I haven't been to the dentist for three or so years now, thanks to an unfortunate incident involving a lack of novocaine, a conversation about the lack of novocaine, and the continuation of drilling activities despite said lack of novocaine. This is not to say that I haven't needed to go to the dentist, because I have, desperately. I've had an exposed nerve or something for the past...well, it's not really important how long it's been. This has resulted in some stabbing jaw pain, bad enough for me to give up my mint mojito gum in order to avoid it (and I love me some mint mojito gum).

But I found a dentist who offers sedation dentistry, which is described in the following manner on their website:

When you arrive in our office, you will be escorted into the comfort room, covered with a thick, warm blanket and placed on a monitor to watch your vital signs.

Did I mention the part where I was greatly lacking sleep? I would have sold a kidney or two at this point just to be taken to a comfort room and covered with a thick, warm blanket.

So finally, I am going to the dentist. Tomorrow (technically today, I suppose) is my consultation, and I must say I'm looking forward to a time in my life with no stabbing jaw pain.

The moral of this story: traumatic experiences may lead to behavior on my part that may be just a teensy, itty bitty bit irrational, like avoiding the dentist in favor on intense pain for a long period of time or being on a constant look out for funnel clouds.

Also, I think I'm going to make a comfort room in our basement complete with a thick, warm blanket and heavy sedation. Look for me there during the tornadoes.

A Distinct Lack of Big News

2007-07-16T22:22:00.000-05:00

That's right, there isn't a whole lot of exciting stuff going on around here, which is fine by me. I prefer a low key life. I know what you're all thinking: "Whatever, Kalin, exciting stuff is exploding all around you and you are probably wasting all your time staring at soybean fields." Not true! Well, not entirely true!

Anyway, to compensate for my lack of riveting journalism, I present to you:

Cute Little Blazey Face

Cute Little Blazey Face is the baby at work. Cute Little Blazey Face is not his real name, just what I call him. I like to stand outside the stall and watch him, and he likes to ignore me. It reminds me a lot of the soybeans.

Attractive Nuisances

2007-07-15T11:56:00.000-05:00

I spent all day yesterday at a Tennessee Walking Horse show. This time I split my time between frying in the sun to take pictures and roasting in the office, doing entry sheets and all that jazz. It wasn't really that bad. It was a nice day out and the Walking Horse people are the best.

Did you know that horses are considered "attractive nuisances?" It basically means that children can climb into your pastures uninvited, leap aboard, say, your morally-impaired horse and get injured and you would be liable because horses are "attractive nuisances," and you should just be prepared for people to trespass on your land and mess with your animals because horses are asking for it. Obviously, it's a sore subject in the equestrian world. You can't protect your animals, because you'll be liable for injuries incurred from people touching electric fence, getting attacked by dogs or falling into cleverly-hidden trenches. And apparently watch towers with snipers are considered to be in poor taste these days. Prudes.

This is mainly an issue in areas where there's a lot of development around existing horse farms. In more rural or agricultural-oriented areas, courts would be more likely to find in favor of the horse owner.

I recently had an experience with a different attractive nuisance.

You see, I was trying to take pictures of this sunset:

See how pretty it was? So blue on top and so gold on the bottom, with dramatic clouds and rays of sunlight to boot.

But as I was snapping pictures, something caught my eye. I moved closer and it wiggled a little bit. I was mesmerized. It picked up the highlights of the sunset while providing a dark silhouette against the colorful sky.

It was...

Yes. Soybeans.

I waded into the field a little bit to get a better look. I was transfixed in particular with this little leaf, which stuck out above the rest:

So cute. I won't say that I watched it wave around in the breeze and then imitated it in the form of a dance, but I won't say that I didn't.

Obviously, there was a pretty nice sunset behind the field, but I couldn't tell you anything about it, other than it provided some nice back lighting for my little soy friends.

Row crops: an attractive nuisance.

"Wrassler" Is My Middle Name

2007-07-13T19:52:00.000-05:00

Today, Friday the 13th of July, marks the anniversary of a very lucky day indeed.

It was the summer before I left for my freshman year of college. I was young, bright-eyed and sure that my roommate for the upcoming year would not be an inconsiderate whiner (how wrong can you be?).

It was an ordinary day, a little dark out, but nothing dramatic. That is, until Mom went into the kitchen to make herself some lunch and happened to look out the window and see this bad boy:

It wasn't raining or windy at our house, there was nothing about tornado warnings or even watches on TV, no tornado sirens were blaring in our town or any of the others nearby. But there it was: an F4 tornado, chillin' under 4 miles away.

Miraculously, no one was killed, even though it levelled a few houses and a business with over 100 employees working in it. Everyone escaped with minor injuries.

I've heard stories of horses that see herd mates get struck my lightening and are terrified of thunderstorms for the rest of their lives. That's like me. Though, to be more realistic, I guess, I would be a horse who was hiding in the basement with its dog while its mom was up in the back porch taking pictures. Anyway, the fact remains: I'm spooked, permanently. Permaspooked.

So if you're ever with me in stormy weather, don't be alarmed when I start frantically looking into the distance in every direction. I'm just looking for giant, unannounced tornadoes lurking in the shadows. And please don't try to stop me when I start burrowing in order to hide. If you were smart, you'd help me dig.

Also, please don't tell my sister Lil that I hid in the basement. I told her I "wrassled the tornader" and chased it away.

Didn't Sting Sing a Song About This?

2007-07-13T00:32:00.000-05:00

Do you ever get that creepy feeling like someone is watching you? And then you try to nonchalantly see who it could be while subtly producing a knife from somewhere on your person, just in case there's a need because after all they make movies about monsters coming out of the cornfields for a reason and you really wish you hadn't watched that show on the History Channel about hauntings the other night and you get worried about bears maybe having decided to come back to this part of the country, because while you could easily beat a mountain lion in hand-to-hand combat, a bear is a different story....

Yeah, I get that way too sometimes.

Around here, though, there is a 90% chance that any creepy feeling you might be experiencing is a direct result of a domestic animal. Some of the most common reasons:

Benvolio parked at your feet, licking in between your toes.
Mauler staring at you with a forlorn look on his tilty face.
Bradley licking himself for awkwardly long periods of time.
The Masterpiece Stare.

You see, Masterpiece is a horse who could not mind his own business if his life depended on it. He likes to keep an eye on people, and he tries - and fails - to look casual doing so. I'll oftentimes be doing something around the property, minding my own business and thinking I'm alone, when I'll turn around to see Piecey about 10 yards away, grazing voraciously in such a way that he can see exactly what I'm doing (and judging me, I'm sure, but that's another rant for another day).

It's important to note that Piecey spends most of his time standing by the fence, visiting with the neighbor horses. He never eats enthusiastically unless he's trying to act like a normal horse, in which case you know that something's up.

Just the other day I was playing with my camera, which at that particular moment involved laying on the ground and trying to get a picture of some of Mom's lilies against the deep blue sky, like so:

I was liking my shots, when suddenly, out of nowhere, came some unwelcome clutter in the background.

"Oh, hey there, Kalin. I see that you're not dead after all. Oh well. Maybe next time."

Open Letters

2007-07-12T00:01:00.000-05:00

Dear Grammy and Gramps,

I just found a birthday card you gave me on my 12th birthday, complete with an uncashed check. I'm sorry that your checking account register was no doubt out of wack for at least a month. In my defense, I wasn't old enough to drive. All of my older sisters were, but, well, you know how they are.

Your favorite granddaughter with the name of Kalin,
Kalin

And on an entirely different note...

Dear Bird Who Insists on Pooping in the Bird Feeder,

You really know how to suck the joy out of obsessively filling the bird feeder.

Cease and desist, or I will pick out every last sunflower seed and tell Goldie the goldfinch that it's your fault and then you will be in for a world of pain.

No love,
Kalin

The Reunion Special

2007-07-11T00:29:00.000-05:00

Piecey and I are back on speaking terms lately. For a while there, I sensed a distinct awkwardness between us. I racked my brain to find possible causes, but this is all I could come up with:

I'd been feeding and cleaning up after a lot of different horses, including the neighbor horses. Naturally, I insisted on calling across the neighbors' pasture to Piecey just to make sure he knew I was over there and not in our own barn.
I discussed his deworming schedule and sheath cleaning in front of the neighbor horses and then blamed him for it, saying that he shouldn't rub his tail if he doesn't want to be under suspicion of a parasitic infestation.
I told him that if he didn't hurry up and go into his stall, I would take him to the Amish auction and sell him, but that the Amish would sell him again right away because he's just too prideful.
I told him that Mom only likes him because she gets confused and thinks he's Olio.

He's just an overly sensitive horse, I guess.

2007-07-09T21:39:00.000-05:00

Five Things I Was Doing Ten Years Ago...

Getting mauled by Bradley, who was a hellion of a two year old.
Getting semi-mauled by my first horse, Beam, who was a twenty-two year old but still a hellion.
Getting ready to enter the 6th grade and dreading getting mauled by the 6th grade math teacher, who was also a hellion.
Suffering through piano lessons (actually I'm pretty sure it was our poor teacher who suffered, God rest her soul...)
Making some delightfully awful websites on Geocities.

Five Snacks I Enjoy...

Leftover Chinese food
Pickled cauliflower
Melted gummy worms/bears
Chocolate-covered espresso beans
Red Vines

Five Songs I Know the Lyrics to...

Too many entirely unfortunate rap songs to name
"Pour Some Sugar on Me" by Def Leppard (This will be a staple at the rock shows where Marissa and I perform once we form our hair band.)
"Take the Money & Run" by The Steve Miller Band
"The Devil Went Down to Georgia" by The Charlie Daniels Band (Including an awesome vocal rendition of the fiddle duel.)
"Winchester Cathedral" by Frank Sinatra (OR The New Vaudeville Band)

Five Things I'd Do if I Were a Millionaire...

Buy some show horses, show tack and custom show apparel, truck and trailer, etc. And that would probably be the end of all the money...
Buy lots of land.
Build a large plantation-style house, complete with The Great Hall, which I've been wanting for a while now.
Buy a spare identity so that I could play speculator on the Chicago Board of Trade without completely ruining my real life when I inevitably crash and burn.
Buy off the government officials who would come after me for the whole dual identity thing.

Five Bad Habits...

Sometimes I work too hard.
I have a hard time leaving a project without finishing it.
I'm a little too tough-but-fair, compassionate-yet-firm, etc.
I can be too efficient.
Sometimes I pretend like I'm in a job interview and I make up "bad habits" which are actually positive traits.

Five Things I'd Never Wear Again...

This:

Or This:

Or these pants:

Also, ideally I would never have hair like in the above picture.
Or the very purple turtle neck.

Five Things I Like To Do...

Accuse my environmental scientist brother-in-law of being a tree hugger.
Spend large amounts of time staring at the crop fields that stretch as far as the eye can see.

Ahhh, it soothes my little aggie soul.
Hanging out with the family.
Torture Benvolio by making up alter egos for him. IE: Sister Oli Catherine, the nun or Olio Mordecai Yoder, the Amish terrier.
Eat sushi. Lots and lots of sushi. And then come home feeling a little ill, but only for a little bit, at which point I begin wishing for more sushi.

Five Favorite Toys...

Roger the Stunt Cat, my faithful stuffed cat from childhood.
Our lawnmower. Man, I love to mow.
Benvolio's ears.
My drawing tablet.
Olio's poor little webbed feet.

The Luck of the Irish...

2007-07-08T16:44:00.001-05:00

Man, I knew today would be unlucky. The last two weeks I've found a lot of four-leaf clovers, which is a stipulation of my Scotch-Irish heritage (I think the agreement is that I hunt down four-leaf clovers and get rewarded with astounding alcohol tolerance and an insatiable hunger for potatoes), but this week I found none.

I had a dream last night that today would be unlucky because yesterday, 7/7/07, was supposed to be so amazingly full of luck. I woke up, pondered the dream for a moment, scoffed at the notion, and went on my merry way. And what did I do then? Then I accidentally deleted 80% of the pictures of the horse show I'd taken yesterday from the memory card where they were staying, all cozy and ready to be printed at a moment's notice.

It was one of those moments where, right as I saw the files disappearing forever, my lungs collapsed from me yelling "Noooooooo!" so loudly.

But I shook it off and went back to the horse show today. I arrived in time to see a nice bay Morgan win his class and to hear the announcer say that it was the last class of the day. Apparently instead of doing the afternoon session in the afternoon, they had decided to do it in the morning. So I got a grand total of one usable picture for the day.

As I turned around to leave the show grounds, approximately 2.5 minutes after I'd arrived, some people to whom I'd given my business card yesterday called out to me that they were going to look at my website when they got home. I had a brief moment of joy, remembering that I'd gotten some great pictures of their horses. But wait, they don't exist any more.

Oh well. I'm chalking it up to a learning experience and making myself a baked potato for supper.

Summer in the City

2007-07-07T22:13:00.000-05:00

Today I spent the majority of my time at a horse show, shooting some candid pictures. They were utilizing the outdoor ring at this particular show so I spent all day in the sun, which resulted not only in some really weirdo, oval-shaped tanning patterns on my arm, but also in me spending most of my time rolling around on the ground, trying to escape the camera melting on my face.

Here are some of my favorite shots from the show:

I liked this one because the girl and horse both seemed lost in thought and look a little disappointed at their third place ribbon.
(Saddleseat Saddlebred.)

This one would have been a lot better if he wasn't trotting right in front of a giant camper. But I love greys and I liked the fact that I was at such a place that I got him with his far leg up but with the rider sitting. She was posting on the correct diagonal for the the first direction of the ring, but I caught them when they were going in the gate. Usually the far leg is the outside leg (the leg closer to the rail), which means the rider posts by rising and falling along with that leg. Blah blah horse show stuff blah.
(Saddleseat Saddlebred.)

This horse was cute. These people are regulars on the TWH circuit where I help at the shows, so I see them a lot. This guy's dad used to show Beam when Beamer was a youngster.
(Saddleseat Tennessee Walker.)

This horse's coloring and his slightly unfortunate tail reminded me of Piecey. It looks like I did some messing with the background in this one, but I didn't, my camera just made it look all weird.
(Saddleseat Arabian.)

This horse pleased me greatly by looking cute a lot.
(Hunt seat Morgan).

This horse was cute, but kind of ornery.
(Western Morgan.)

You may have noticed that I included a brief description of the horses' breeds and disciplines. I did this since I figure not all of you enjoy immersing yourselves in the boiling-hot world of horse shows. Or if you're like my sister April, you may not be entirely sure whether they are all cows or horses (note to April: they are all horses).

The BouKalin Will Rise Again

2007-07-06T19:37:00.000-05:00

The year was 2002...ish. My sister Lil was getting married and I was standing beside her as her best woman (or the maid of honor as some people insist on calling it). Things were progressing well until midway through the reception. Bedecked in my red dress and a top hat, I spent part of the reception dancing and eating chocolate-covered strawberries and the other part of the reception pumping iron and running sprints in the back in preparation of one thing: the bouquet toss.

My oldest sister, April, was also eagerly awaiting the bouquet toss, but she hadn't been preparing for it by slipping every single female in attendance minuscule amounts of arsenic over a period of severals weeks in order to weaken them. Errr, not that I did that...

When the time came and the bouquet came falling gently towards us, I soared above the crowd of women and snagged it. I think it looked a lot like watching a Nile Crocodile grab an unsuspecting antelope from the river bank. As both the bouquet and I fell back towards the ground, I hugged it close to me and stuck out my elbows, prepared to kick some butt and take some names if it came to that. Luckily, it didn't.

April, however, sensed some sort of injustice in the whole affair. She had some apprehension that I, the youngest, would get married before her. Actually, she had very specific apprehension that I would get married to someone name Raoul and live in a trailer and spend my days washing Raoul's undershirts, all based on a rather unfortunate dream she had.

I should mention that I was never very eager to settle down and get married (then or now). I mostly was just eager to win things. Even the slightest competition involving catching a bunch of flowers is enough to bring me to a competitive frenzy.

April does not like to lose, either. And so she dubbed me BouKalin (maybe Bouquetlin is the correct spelling, I never asked) and referred to the whole incident at "BouKalingate."

But April did get married before me, and at her bridal shower we all broke into groups and embroidered pillow cases for her. My other two sisters and I were in one group and I attempted to embroider a bouquet onto the pillowcase. My sisters, very artsy in nature, were doing other cute things and apparently understood a little more about embroidering than I did. I didn't quite get that you were supposed to tie little knots on the backside of the fabric on occasion, so my thread was bunching up like mad. It ended up being more of an unfortunate black hole of thread and fabric and good intentions than a realistic interpretation of a bouquet, but I just call it The Revenge of BouKalin.

Knee High by the Fourth of July

2007-07-05T13:24:00.001-05:00

I come from a land of corn and soybeans. There are fields everywhere, including bordering nearly all sides of our property. While this has caused a few minor inconveniences (including a severe avoidance of any movie dealing with scary things coming from crop fields), for the most part it's been great.

There's a tradition around here that involves keeping a close eye on the growth rates of corn. When it reaches about knee high (which is about 3 minutes after it's planted, thanks to advances in hybridization and genetic modification), we start saying, somewhat smugly, "They used to say 'Knee high by the fourth of July.'" or "So much for 'Knee high by the Fourth of July.'" It's important to say it in a way which implies that you are sharing a new piece of information instead of something you've been been saying and hearing multiple times every year of your life.

Olio is thinking, "Wow this corn must be gargantuan! It's even taller than me and I'm, like, huge!"

Speaking of the 4th of July, it was a day chock full o' activity. We started out with breakfast on the porch at my sister's house. Lil lives right on Main Street, which means we get easy access to the parade route and have to throw a minimum number of elbow jabs in order to save our seats.

Patriotism abounded during our festivities. Here Grammy is, surrounded by great-grandchildren.

The parade was awesome. We were perhaps a little excessively enthusiastic in our cheering, but we had to make up for all the people who just stand there silently and expect to get candy for it (and we especially had to make up for the guy across the street who stood with his arms crossed and scowled at us the entire time).

Another of my sisters, Marissa (aka the embodiment of "overenthusiastic") , was on high alert for the first strains of police siren which signifies the beginning of the parade. Please note the flared nostril.

My grandpa, as a former president of one of the banks, got to be in the lead of the parade since that bank was celebrating its 125th anniversary. We like to say he was grand marshaling the whole affair.

Dad, as the scoutmaster, drove the truck which pulled the boyscout trailer. This is the only picture I got of him because he gunned it past us. I was chagrined that I hadn't adjusted my camera correctly, but not as chagrined as the boy scouts, clad in their scout uniforms with hiking packs on their backs, who had to start running to catch up to the trailer.

Lil and Marissa, as sugar fiends, celebrate a good candy haul from this parade.

Posting slightly awkward pictures of family members has never been so patriotic!

The rest of the day was devoted to Mom's birthday lunch, taking a nap, waking up with terribly low blood sugar which kind of turns me into a gremlin, downing a chocolate chip cookie, a can of coke, a piece of blueberry muffin bread and a glass of iced coffee in a short period of time in a desperate attempt to raise the aforementioned low blood sugar (I should probably mention that low blood sugar makes me a tad irrational), coping with a slight stomach ache from poor choices, dinner on Lil's porch and then a spectacular fireworks show. All in all, I'd call it a good day.

The 4th of July

2007-07-03T13:54:00.001-05:00

The fourth is nearly upon us! This means a few things:
1) Mom's birthday is tomorrow. Happy birthday early, Mom!

2) April & Dennis's wedding anniversary is tomorrow, aka the anniversary of the day BouKalin was thwarted (maybe I shall write about that tomorrow).

3) I need to remember to put the dogs and Piecey in early tomorrow night, lest the fireworks cause another unfortunate chain of events like last year, where the hounds got scared and insisted on walking as physically close to me as possible while I attempted to catch the horses in the pasture, which ended up tripping me, which caused me to flail wildly, which spooked the horses, which gave me more pasture to walk across, which gave the dogs more opportunity to attempt to climb into my pockets and on and on it went.

4) There will be a parade.

When I was a youngster, my grandma, Grammy, used to make us clap as everyone in a parade went by. We were not overly enthusiastic about this, as we were more concerned with scanning the ground for anything brightly colored and/or sugary that we could stuff into our mouths. But we usually clapped dutifully, at least while Grammy was watching.

These days, though, we are all grown ups (practically) and we are really into clapping at parades. I mean we are really into it. We clap and cheer and yell things like "YEAH (insert name of group passing in front of us)! Woohooo!" This results in the parade-goers showering us in candy. I curb my gluttonous instincts and don't shove my nieces or nephew out of the way to scoop it off the ground and stuff it into my mouth, but only just barely.

At the Memorial Day parade, a car drove down the parade route and threw us candy out the driver's side window and out the passenger side window, over the car and to our waiting, clapping hands. The people across the street from us were probably distraught at the obvious favoritism, but I didn't hear them utter a single "Woo!" so they deserve it, in my book.

Unfortunately, our wild clapping and cheering worked a firefighter into such a frenzy that he nailed my nephew right in the eye with a piece of candy. They weren't even our firefighters; they were from another small town, seeking to bask in the glow of the applause they'd heard could be found at our town's parades.

Suddenly enraged, we avenged my cyclopsed nephew by shaking our fists and yelling "You'll never not work in this town again!"

Well, ok, we didn't. We wanted to, though. We were just distracted by all the candy.

Why I Love Home, part 1

2007-07-01T23:56:00.001-05:00

There are many reasons I love my childhood home, and I thought I'd share some with you.

An Unobstructed View to the West

(These photos are all from different nights, by the way.)
I'm always worried that the fields next to our house will be bought by developers and instead of parking lawn chairs out to look at gorgeous sunsets all summer, we'll be looking directly into the bathroom window of some unfortunate family, shouting things like "You move your house and we'll move our lawn chairs!"

Self-Sacrificing Animals

Sometimes Masterpiece takes time off from crushing the horsey dreams of young girls to look rather photogenic.

And sometimes, when we're really lucky, random deer come into our side yard to die on Easter sunday. This particular action was chock full o' symbolism which clearly translated to "If you spend hours painstakingly picking up twigs and mowing the yard the day before a large family gathering, wildlife will come commit suicide just to thwart you.

Awkward Moments and the People Who Love Them

2007-06-30T16:33:00.000-05:00

Recently I was having issues with my domain registrar service, which gave me a great opportunity to relive some of my teenage awkwardness. I've been a customer of theirs for a long time, since 2000 or 2001 or so when I registered my first domain. Before I go any further, I'd like to point out that that was a long time ago, in Kalin years. I was 14-15 years old. A youngster. A geeky youngster.

The issues with my domain registrar basically boiled down to them charging a credit card that wasn't even on my account and without permission from me. They incurred a fee for doing so and decided to pass it on to me, only without actually telling me that I was going to get this fee until my domain went down.

This, of course, required me to call the company, which led to me being able to revisit some unfortunate choices I'd made as a geeky youngster.

Semi-Helpful Customer Service Guy: And what's your account's name?
Me *hoping fervently*: You mean the account id number?
Semi-Helpful Customer Service Guy: No, the name you use to login.
Me: Oh. "CajunKitten," all one word.
Semi-Helpful Customer Service Guy: Ooookaaaay.

I had to call back later to get some clarification on some things ("So you want me to pay you money for your mistake?") and got to talk to someone different.

Slightly More Helpful Customer Service Girl: I'm confused. So you registered the domain in 2004, but the credit card expired in 2002?
Me: No, that credit card was used to register a different domain, a few years earlier.
Slightly More Helpful Customer Service Girl: Oh, ok. *frantic typing* You mean "I love... cowboys... dot... net?"
Me *belligerently*: Yes.
Slightly More Helpful Customer Service Girl: Ooookaaaay.

I feel like I should be traveling to schools, giving speeches on the consequences your actions can have later on in life. I'll stand at a podium, tears in my eyes as I passionately yell, "And then you'll threaten to get the Better Business Bureau involved and they'll say 'We should have expected as much from someone who owned ilovecowboys.net and chose CajunKitten as their login name!'" and all the students will gasp and writhe around uncomfortably in their seats, embarrassed for all involved.

Raising a Troubled Adolescent

2007-06-29T08:54:00.000-05:00

Trouble is brewing in our household. My dear little Benvolio is hitting his turbulent adolescent years. To add fuel to this raging inferno of angst and hellion-like behavior, he recently found out he was adopted. From a homeless shelter, no less. Also, I recently broke the news that he is a 22lb terrier to him. It blew his mind. He's sure he is at least Rottweiler-sized, if not an actual timber wolf.

Olio has always been slightly troubled, to say the least. This has manifested itself mostly in the form of chewing the faces off of random stuffed animals. A small sampling of his work:

They almost look like they'd be staring forlornly at you, pleading with you to help them. If only they had eyes.

The most troubling part of this story is that Olio has developed a new habit to numb himself. He stole Bradley's thyroid pill the other day, which sent him careening down the slippery path of addiction. Please look at this completely unstaged photo I happened to catch:

We'll be staging an intervention soon. Probably around the time he goes in for his rabies booster, just to kill two birds with one stone. Look for your invitation in the mail.

Excellence is Today's Middle Name

2007-06-26T23:12:00.000-05:00

Today has been an awestastic day. It started way too early, but that’s the way my Tuesdays and Thursdays go. Let’s start out with a simple math story problem to sharpen our minds before continuing.

Q: Kalin must be in chemistry class at 7:30 in the morning. It takes 25 minutes to get to class. She must also feed and turn out 5 horses and clean their stalls. This typical takes about an hour. Kalin must also attempt to make herself look presentable so that she doesn’t make her classmates think that she just arose from death in a ditch somewhere and crawled out in order to come to class. What time must Kalin wake up?

A: Too freakin’ early, any way you cut it.

But I made it. I still kind of looked like I had recently cheated death, but I was on time to class, dang it.

Also, I only had to spend 4 ½ hours in class as opposed to 5! It was one of those days where we went to lab early and the teacher said, “When you’re done with lab, you can go home.” This always creates excited murmurings rushing through the class, even though we know the horrible truth. That phrase is Chem teacher slang for, “You’ll probably spend the next 7 hours working on your lab, and only when your eyes are bleeding and you are gnashing your teeth will I come show you an extremely simple solution to the problem on which you’ve been slaving.”

All that torture did lead to a joyous drive home, though. They were playing some flashback lunch hour special on the radio, so I got to hear not only “Centerfold,” but that “Everybody Dance Now” song, too. This led to some pretty awesome car dancing, though in the midst of my joy I suddenly realized that my default car dance looks like the bastard child of the robot and the charleston. Awkward!

I came home to find out I’d won the photo naming contest over at Pioneer Woman’s blog. My prize is a gift card from B&H Photo and Video, about which I’m super stoked. I’m not sure what to spend it on. A new lens for my camera? Do I need a new lens? Am I a lens glutton?

As much as these questions deserve to be answered, it is time for me to work on some completely unfortunate online chemistry quizzes.

Of Ponies and The Trail of Death

2007-06-25T21:34:00.000-05:00

I promised to regale you all with stories of ponies and terror and all sorts of lovely stuff. This is longer than my usual post, but I’m nothing if not a girl of my word, so here we go:

So Mom and I headed a couple hours south to a pony auction in Amish country. We headed out somewhat bright and early. If you know my mom, you know that when she’s driving there’s no taking the direct route to a destination. There are, however, a lot of country roads and detours and the like. Somehow, though, we always get there in about the same amount of time as it would have taken on the interstate. This is no doubt due in no small part to the fact that Mom breaks many land speed records when she’s got somewhere to be.

We were traveling on the country roads and, long story short, we did not stay on the correct path (this might have been due to some shoddy navigation on my part, but that part of the story is both hazy and unimportant). Mom’s always pretty nonchalant about these things, in a “Well, as long as we’re headed the right direction, we’ll be ok.”

The road quickly turns into a narrow, uneven, winding pathway through corn and soybean fields. It was the kind of road that didn’t have street signs. Not even any stop signs at intersections. It was the kind of road that made me want to press a hand to the imaginary ascot¹ at my throat and say things like, “How quaint,” in a strained and disapproving tone.

As we wound our way along the road and around a particularly tight curve, Mom cried out a phrase that simultaneously brings both joy and fear to my heart whenever I hear it: “Historical markers!”

There were, indeed, historical markers on the side of the road. Mom put the car in reverse around the tight turn, pulled up next to them and had me read them. The one that drew my eye immediately said, in big bold letters at the top: “Trail of Death.” Talk about a tourist attraction! Turns out it was the Potawatomi Trail of Death and it did not actually involve the road on which we were driving, nor did it involve people backing up around tight turns in order to read historical markers.

We did eventually make it to the pony auction, where lots of cute ponies were being sold for minimal prices. I loved a little modern Shetland pony stallion who wasn’t sold due to the bidding stopping at under $200.

Before I go further I should mention that I rather recently had a revelation about my future. Now, I’m a pretty independent girl who gets annoyed and fed up when forced to live in close quarters with others. The very idea of getting married and having children kind of causes my throat to close up and my vision to become blurry. Luckily, it occurred to me after many years that I don’t have to do any of that stuff. I could be blissfully independent for my whole life, if I so choose!

Society has conditioned young women to fear growing old and being alone and (dun dun dun!) becoming the Crazy Cat Lady. However, this prospect does not worry me in the least. Why, you ask? Because, for the first nine or so (and this number is me being modest and/or deceitful) years of my life, I was a Crazy Cat Lady (Crazy Cat Girl? Crazy Cat Lady Lite?). We live in the country, so the kids I played with were my sisters. We had lots of cats and I loved them all and spent the grand majority of my time with them.

There’s a hilarious story about my interview with teachers before I entered kindergarten. I guess they have kind of a screening process or something to make sure the crazy kids don’t get in (actually, since this was a public school, they wanted to make sure the crazy kids got dispersed evenly and that they sat next to a nice quiet kid like, say, that Kalin girl, in order to balance things out). I ended up telling my interviewer lady that my friends were cats and that I’d never had a birthday party (for some reason I thought she was only referring birthday parties with friends instead of family, and of course I hadn’t had any of those. It’s not like cats make great party planners.). They worriedly called my mother, who had to explain that yes, the cats were my friends and that yes, I’d had birthday parties with family.

So you see, being the Crazy Cat Lady is old hat to me. I’m on to bigger and better things, which brings me back to my original story (the one before my tangent).

I’m thinking that I want to become the Crazy Pony Lady.

I wouldn’t call myself that, of course. I’d call myself a pony baron. And I would for sure upgrade to a real ascot instead of an imaginary one.

__________________________________________________

¹ In my mind’s eye, I am always wearing either an ascot and smoking jacket or a monocle and top hat (please see the picture to the left of this page).

One more day!

2007-06-25T13:15:00.000-05:00

Bradley's 2 week stint as a cone head is coming to an end (hopefully). Tomorrow we go to the vet's to get his ear check out and, barring any sort of infection, he gets to continue life without the cone.

To celebrate, we took a head shot in order to help get his acting career off the ground (We are anxiously awaiting the scandals that come with fame, such as "Was his surgery really for a hematoma on his ear, or did he get a face lift?").

Glossy 8x10's are available from his fan club for a nominal fee. Don't worry, it goes to a good cause: sending him to school to learn how to sign his name so that soon autographed copies will be available.

Long Time, No Type

2007-06-18T13:11:00.000-05:00

It's been forever since I updated!

Sometimes I would think about all the things that have happened and that I should be updating my blog, but then I'd think about all the stuff that had happened, and how it would take forever to type out, so I'd slack some more. Vicious Cycle, thy name is El Blog De Kalin.

Anyhoo, I also transferred web hosts because I was sick of not getting answered to help desk inquiries from Cyber Pixels. I'm on Start Logic now, which is way better so far. I also had problems with my domain registrar and am attempting to get that switch to Start Logic, too.

I turned 21 on May 21. We had a nice lunch here with the family and then my sisters took my out the next day for dinner and drinks (lots and lots of drinks) at Kelleher's, our favorite Irish pub.

I bought a new camera, an Olympus E-500, which I really like. I'm going to be doing some candid photography at horse shows this summer, so keep an eye out for links to proofs.

Lastly, Bradley had surgery on a hematoma on his ear. Which means that he has to wear a cone on his head for two weeks.

Awesomeness Abounds

2007-05-15T14:07:00.000-05:00

My last couple weeks have been fine and dandy.

The semester ended with a bang when our Equine Exercise Physiology Jeopardy team, The Destriers, won the game. We got $5 gift cards to Wal Mart for that triumph.

I also got my semester grades and got all A's except for a C in Trig, which is actually better than I was expecting. I was super excited about my A in Ag Entrepreneurship since I'd figured all semester that I'd get a B, so I wasn't going to strain myself for A-quality work or freak out if I happened to sleep in and miss class a couple times. Now if only my Equine Repro class had been more than 2 credit hours, my GPA would really be looking up.

I made an excellent return to the IWHA show scene last Saturday. I worked in the office and it was nice to see everyone again. I'm headed to work later today.

In less than a week I'll be 21, complete with a wild bash with my sisters. Which will probably involve us going to our favorite Irish pub at around 12:30pm so that Lil can be tucked into bed by 3:30 in the afternoon, but I think it will be fun.

The End Times are Near

2007-05-02T13:46:00.000-05:00

By "The End Times," of course I mean, "The freakin' end of the semester! Wooooo!"

Tomorrow is my last day. I've got a Trig final, which I'm not looking forward to, and Equine Exercise Physiology Jeopardy.

The last week had been fun. We had the year end Ag Picnic at the state park last Friday with some very good food provided by the ag faculty.

Last night we had our Sigma Alpha senior picnic. Bradley went to both events and has come to recognize picnics as "Everybody Feeds Dogs Party," so he gets out of the car and waddles right in to start mingling/conning people out of food. There are usually lots of dogs at any given Sigma Alpha for ag get-together, so he does have some competition.

I've also been going out almost every day to spend time with the broodmares and foals. There are three foals (Brody, Big Red and Titan) and they're a lot of fun to spend time with and pet.

Some other stuff that my family will be interested in:

1) In my Ag Entrepreneurship class, we did big business plans all semester and presentations for them where we got reviewed by everyone in the class. Our professor emailed out results from peer reviews and I got the 5th highest peer review marks for presentation quality, and 2nd highest on likelihood to succeed.

2) My paper for my JINS (junior interdisciplinary) class (The Horse in History, Science and Art), which overlayed Adam Smith's economic theory of the Invisible Hand onto behavior in horse herds, was nominated by my professor for the JINS Director Award, which is for the top interdisciplinary papers/projects. Two other people from my class were nominated, too, so that was pretty cool to see.

Still Awake!

2007-04-15T04:12:00.000-05:00

It's 4:12AM and I'm still wide awake. I've been working on a website all evening. It's for my friend Mary, who does equine photography. I just transferred all of her pictures from a Photobucket account to the gallery on her domain. That's more than 850 photos that I saved to my computer and then uploaded to her web space. And the only way to upload them is through the ol' one-at-a-time browse & select method. It was pretty awesome, lemme tell you.

Anyhoo, my eyes kind of feel like like they're going to be falling out soon.

The baby is here!

2007-04-05T21:16:00.000-05:00

Starr foaled on Monday morning at about 2:20AM.

We did a foal watch on Saturday night, too, which was a bust. It was super cool to see the baby born and to get to do all the stuff afterwards (treating the naval stump, examining the placenta, imprinting, etc).

The baby is HUGE. He's bigger than the other foal, who is a week older than him.

One cool thing: This baby is a big chestnut colt with a star like Beam. He was born on April 2nd, which would have been Beamer's 32nd birthday. We've been working with him everyday, doing imprinting stuff (catching him, getting him used to a halter, touching him all over, picking up his feet, etc.), which is really fun. Starr's a little protective, but she's not too bad.The other day I got to palpate and ultrasound a mare for the first time, too. That was pretty cool, even though I didn't actually find anything ultrasounding. I was pretty paranoid to drop the little probey part of the ultrasound thing, but I managed not to.

Working with some of the University horses has made me miss Piecey lots. But tomorrow I get to go home for the first time in a while, so I'll get to see him and spend some time with him. AND I've got 4 weeks of school left. 4 weeks! How awesome is that?

Plum tuckered out.

2007-04-01T17:47:00.000-05:00

Man, I am tuckered out.

My week was all kinds of busy, but it was a good one. I got to palpate and ultrasound a mare for the first time. I didn't actually find anything ultrasounding, but my prof said I'd get more opportunities.

We had a foal watch last night from 8:30PM to 7:30AM. No foal, though, because Starr is tricky and perhaps a little sadistic. 6 of us got to hang out in the office of the repro building all night. We watched a movie on someone's laptop, got pizza, watched the stall monitor a lot and played a pathetic game of Scrabble that consisted of mostly 3-and 4-letter words which really showed off the fruits of our college education (but hey, it was 3AM). There were also some other cards games and everyone slept for at least a little while (except for me, but I'd slept until 1PM in preparation of foal watch....and because that's pretty much what I do on the weekends).

I thought it would be fun to call our professor at around 2:30AM and tell him that Starr was foaling. And then when he got into the barn we'd jump out and yell, "APRIL FOOLS!" Luckily, this only seemed like a good idea for about 10 seconds.

But the fact that it's April 1st does mean that today is the day we celebrate Bradley's birthday! So he's officially 12 years old. He was kind and did not pee on my bed last night, even though I was gone for a long time.

Anyhoo, at 8:30 tonight I get to go back to the farm and repeat the whole foal watch process. Fun fun fun.

The Beaminator

2007-03-01T22:24:00.000-06:00

So everyone who reads this blog probably already knows it, but we had to have my 32 year old Tennessee Walker gelding, Beam, put down on February 21st.

So that made last week sad. This week has been weird since Bradley didn't come to school with me. He was sick and had to see the vet a couple times, so he stayed home. My apartment is lonely and boring without him. There's no one with whom I can constantly share my insightful comments on life.

But this week wasn't all bad. A couple of my classes have been canceled so I get to leave for home by noon tomorrow. And I get a whole week off for midterm break, which is awesome.

Uccckkkkk.

2006-08-25T00:49:00.000-05:00

I've been avoiding my blog because it reminds me that school is nearly in session. I'm moving back on Sunday because I like to prolong summer as long as possible.

I've been watching the World Championship Horse Show on the web (http://www.saddlebred.com).

There was a wicked 3 year old 5 gaited futurity class. There were two timeouts (each exhibitor can go to the ringmaster for a 5 minute timeout for each class in case something goes wrong like a thrown shoe, equipment breaking, etc.). I think both were for thrown shoes, so the show farrier ran out and reset the shoe real quick. At the end, 10 horses were chosen to do a workout. Meaning the rest of the class left and those ten horses did all five gaits again. The crowd was freaking out because they made the horses canter (cantering can be tough for a young horse to nail down just right, and the crowd didn't want a great horse to get a low ribbon just because it screwed up its canter from being tired). There was another time out. These horses are all high-powered three year olds, so they're young and green and I was suprised they weren't getting all pissy and rowdy.

The class lasted 55 minutes which is insanely long for a class.

The winner was an awesome gray filly, Callaway's Born For This.
http://dougshifletphotos.com/gallery/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=32343
http://dougshifletphotos.com/gallery/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=32423

So yeah, that's been my life as of late. I'm a little excited to get back to school but mostly I'm ready for next summer.

Undergraduate Research

2006-01-28T15:12:00.000-06:00

Well, it's settled. I have my undergraduate research topic decided upon. Kate and I are going to do research to see what happens after she gets super buff (body builder-style), wears several layers of shirts and then flexes her muscles. Inevitably, one shirt will rip into shreds. We aim to find out if it's the shirt on the outside or the one on the inside.

You'll be able to see our findings at the Undergraduate Research Conference. Kate will be the one with huge muscles and several shirts on. I'll be the one wearing a top hat and monacle.

2006-01-03T23:12:00.000-06:00

Gosh, I'm just really efficient @ updating this, eh?

Christmas was good, New Years was good, etc. Not really looking forward to going back to school.

Since I don't want to write about 5 bajillion pages worth of every little detail, I'll give you a quote from my sister Marissa. This happened at our vet's Christmas party (thrown for the best clients...aka the clients with the sickest/most-accident-prone animals) while talking to a farmer who was sitting across from us at the dinner table.

KALIN: So what kind of cattle do you have?
FARMER: Angus.
MARISSA: So are they meat cows?

Ha! I contained myself and did not tease her mercilessly and ask her how many Angus dairy cows she knew.