Current Horse Status: Quota Filled

When first moving to Arkansas, I had no access to any horses whatsoever (other than peering mournfully at them while driving past--then remembering to watch the road and trying not to hit anybody). Within two months I was about to go crazy.

 

I know that to be obsessed with horses is something of a stereotype for girls. (Just look at the hugely disproportionate ratio of girls to guys in any equine sport. Except maybe steer wrestling. Or team roping. But I digress.) I also know that it's a terrible thing to be horse-crazed and horse-less. It's like being homesick, or being hungry for a food that you can't find, or missing a friend who lives a thousand miles away.

 

In other words, it's a terrible feeling.

 

Around December, I took it upon myself to fix this quandary, and turned to the first thing that I could think of: Google.

 

(Before you hate on Google: through it I found the ranch, the salon where I chopped my hair off last summer, and it has assisted me in countless measure in the past. But I digress again.)

 

I Googled horse barns in northwest Arkansas, put together a list that seemed likely, and made a few phone calls. For brevity, let's just say that the first place was all right, but too far away. The second place wasn't quite as far, but still a fair distance (especially since I wanted to avoid having to drive much). The lady there, Diane, was super nice--I had called and asked a few questions, and she invited me out on a Saturday to help feed and get the feel of the place.

 

After a couple of hours opening gates and meeting horses and traveling hither and yon on the back of a 4-wheeler, Diane mentioned that one of her students might appreciate having a riding buddy. She gave me the name and the address for where she worked, and the next week I made a little side trip to meet Sabrina.

 

Again, for brevity: I met Sabrina and her husband Danny, we chatted for a while about what I was looking for in a place to ride, and I went out the next day to meet the horses. She and her husband had just gotten a few young horses back from the trainer, and that first evening I rode a colt named Peanut. (He only bucked twice. XD) The next time I rode an older horse, then a younger one, then the older one again...and before I knew it, Sabrina,  Danny, and I were riding horses several times a week. In addition, the second time I was over Sabrina invited me to supper. The third time I was invited to Danny's mother's for supper (she lives on the same property, in a different house). The fourth time, it was assumed that I would join them for supper.

 

Now I'm over there a few times a week and usually end up eating there at least twice a week. It blows my mind to see famous Southern hospitality in action, in addition to their generosity in allowing me to come whenever I want to play with their horses.

 

Speaking of which, it's time to introduce the four-legged characters that I see regularly. (Most of them, anyway.)

 

Socks

 

Socks is 15, mostly quarter horse, and while he's probably had the most training out of all of the horses, he's more reactive and twitchy than the others. By 'reactive' I mean that if I'm using leg pressure to get him to move faster, and thump him harder than he's expecting, he'll dart off to the side rather than just speed up. He also has this thing about zig-zagging, especially when one is trying to slow him down.

 

These quirks aside, he's actually pretty fun to ride. Even though sometimes he's a twerp. XD

Peanut

Peanut is the kind of horse who seems to think he's a dog. He's gregarious, loves people, is tremendously curious about EVERYTHING, and loves to run and play. The first few times I rode him he like to throw in a little buck here and there, with the occasional attempt to bolt, but lately he's calmed down a lot. The only issue now is that he has two levels of activity: "go as fast as possible" or "dead stop and don't move". But we're working on it.

 



Eve (or Sugah)

Then there's Eve. (Or Sugah, depending on how sweet she is that day.) She really is sweet--though extremely lazy. I used to ride her with a lead rope tied around the horn, so I could whack her with the end when her flanks of steel refused to acknowledge my heels pounding her sides. She's started waking up, though, and is usually ridden by Sabrina's friend Carla. Carla is getting older and doesn't want to ride anything that would buck her off or give her trouble...so Eve is perfect for her.

 

Biscuit

This is Sabrina's personal horse. And he has a topline to die for. (Even if he can have a bit of an attitude. XD)

 



Louie

Louie was gorgeous, athletic, and dangerous. (Sounds like a description from a bad romance. O.e) But seriously: they think that the trainer had done something to him, and the result was a horse that couldn't be touched, much less caught, and he had a disconcerting tendency to rear up and strike at anyone who tried to work with him. He would also rush at said person working with him, and kicked the new trainer in the hip after seeming perfectly calm and quiet.

 

Needless to say, Louie is no longer there.

 

(Honestly, though, I felt bad for the poor guy: he'd been put through the wringer, then brought to a strange place, ran in circles with a makeshift lasso halter on his head, made to do things that he wasn't comfortable with, and responded in the only way he knew how. I'm not saying that it was a good way, but I also think that his 'training' could have been handled in a much better way.)

 



Grace

This is one of the blue roan mares on property--they arrived with Louie, and are equally skittish with less violence.

 



Brix

The second blue roan mare. They have nice eyes, but as I said earlier: they're quite skittish and it's difficult to do anything with them.

I didn't get any pictures of the two new geldings either--they're older and untrained, but have awesome, quiet, mature personalities. I can't wait until they get back and we're able to actually do something with them.

And that's the herd so far...the only issue I've run into is the fact that there's so many horses to choose from. Terrible problem, right? But that means that each horse has something specific that needs work. By switching around from day to day or week to week, each issue is never fully addressed because I'm not spending enough time with each one. And then instead of being enjoyable it becomes something of a job because I have goals that aren't being met, and artificial stress is created due to the lack of goal-meeting....sigh.

In other words, I need to get my act together. This seems to be my mantra for life anymore, except for when it comes to work.


Twenty-Fourteen: A Recap (part 2)

May-October: The Ranch

This next bit is probably going to be incredibly long…so please bear with me.

After staying with Kas for a night, she asked me if I could pick up an espresso machine on my way to the ranch. I agreed to this scheme. That morning I had also gotten wind that one of the girls I had worked with last year was flying in to Denver that morning, but she didn't have a ride. So I volunteered to pick her up. At the time that seemed like an innocent bit of good-will. It turned into a fiasco of driving to the wrong terminal, having to leave the airport and come all the way back around the get to the right terminal, trying to find her, finally managing to pick her up, and THEN going to get the espresso machine.

The good part was that we stopped for late breakfast/early lunch with Josiah, the videographer from last year. He had driven up from Texas about a week before. Once he heard that I was driving my own car, he looked out the window from Chick-fil-A and asked which one was mine. Cue the following exchange:

Me: See that dirty green car? Mine's the silver one right next to it.

J: Oh. *pause* See that dirty green car? That one's mine.

Apparently he had been caught in a dust storm on the way from Texas, and what with the snow and rain and mud on the ranch his car was looking a little worse for wear.

But anyway….moving on to the ranch! We arrived sometime in the early afternoon, and all the way up the mountain I could feel myself getting more and more excited to see the ranch. After all, the last time I had seen it, the place was half-buried under a mudslide. But I knew that people had been working on it all winter. Surely the place was looking better than it did.

When we finally pulled in the front gate…I almost felt like crying. The place looked better, it really did. But I knew that they needed to have the place open in a week, and all I could see was mud and heavy equipment and patches of melting snow. It looked like a construction zone. (The place was cleaned up in time for opening, but the very first impression was a little depressing.)

As a wrangler, the vast majority of the first week was spent on trail maintenance. One memorable moment of walking all over the mudslide, and then walking up a steep trail trying to keep up with Nick (the head wrangler) and nearly dying in the process sticks out very vividly in my memory. The rest of the time we were picking rocks from the new arena—that is, the new arena area, since the arena hadn't been built yet and we wranglers were going to build it over the summer—and getting horses from the lower pastures and helping the farriers and basically spending a great deal of time doing a lot of hard, manual labor. It was during this time that our wrangler group had to get to know each other and decide whether or not we would work well together.

Here are the wranglers, by the way!

L-R, back row: Andrew, Terry (honorary), Austin, Casey, Derek, EB, me, Larry (honorary)
L-R, front row: Claire (honorary), Gabrielle, Tori, Sara (women's work crew boss), Levi (ranch kid)

Can you tell that we have a hard time taking pictures of just wranglers? XD

The one face that I sorely missed was that of EB. 

EB and Copper

 

Me, Gabrielle, EB, Tori (otherwise known as 'EB and the triplets')

She's a few months younger than me, but for some reason it seems like she's much older and wiser (To be fair: though we're the same age, she's spent her years at a much higher RPM than me). I spent a lot of time in 2013 sitting quietly in her workshop and watching her work with leather and talking about people and life…so we became rather good friends. I still count her as a very dear, close friend. So when I heard that she wasn't coming back in 2014 I was pretty devastated. The first reaction, if I'm very honest, was 'if EB isn't there, then I don't want to go'. Thankfully I quickly came to my senses and decided that it would still be good if she wasn't there.

The summer wouldn't be complete without a description of the horses on my string, so here goes.

Chester-pony

Chase (part Bashkir Curly, a horse that has kinky/wavy hair)

Grace (aka Brunhilde, as I affectionately called her)

There was a bay gelding without a name, but I called him 'Patchy' due to some hairless spots on his face and neck. He started off as a major thorn in my side, but by the end of the summer I was starting to like him. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of him. :/

There's so much that I can say about the summer…to keep everything from dragging out too terribly long I'll try to condense it into the general impression left on me.

I started off feeling very optimistic: I was doing something I loved (that is, working with horses), with people that I liked, and was having a great time doing it. I really fell in love with the horses on my string, which probably wasn't the greatest idea but there you have it. I also came to know the horses in the guest string so well that I could tell who was who at just a glance; I knew their temperaments and little quirks and what set them off and what calmed them down. I was learning an immense amount about riding and training and absolutely reveled in it.

I had also become friends with everyone in our wrangler group—some better than others, of course—and had struck up what seemed to be a great friendship with one of the guys. And that, so I thought, would be that.

About a month into all this, I realized that I was developing slightly more than friendly feelings towards this guy. And I hated it, because (a) there's a 'no-purple' rule (i.e., no dating) and (b) I really wasn't sure if this guy was a good person to feel that way towards. So I tried not to worry too much about it.

A couple of weeks later—well, a long story short, we had something of a falling out. I recovered from the incident and thought it was all okay. But one thing led to another and my interactions with this guy for the rest of the summer turned into one misunderstanding after another. I let it affect how I felt, and spent several weeks feeling like a dark cloud was hanging over me. I tried not to let it affect how I interacted with guests, but I started withdrawing more and more from staff: when work was done I would retreat to make phone calls or write in my journal or draw, and end up not going to supper or to the extra-curricular events most nights.

In short, I allowed the summer to become rather isolated and hellish. There's no other way to put it. I found out slowly that it wasn't just me feeling that way—some of the other girls, who I had withdrawn from partly because we weren't around each other much and partly because I didn't try to see them in my time off, said that the tendency to isolate was same for a lot of people. By the middle to the latter half of the summer, most of the people who were staying all the way through were feeling burnt out and beaten down, like they couldn't wait to go home. This was a huge change from last year, where I felt like I didn't want to leave.

There was a lot of good stuff that happened, a lot of funny things, a lot of sad things, and a lot of bad stuff. Last summer was simultaneously the best, most difficult, most stretching, most strengthening time of my life. I made some great friends, and turned down some potentially great friendships. I made a lot of mistakes, and learned a lot about how people work. I learned a LOT about horses and discovered how badly I miss them when I can't be around them for twelve hours a day. All these lessons were dearly bought.

But at the end of the summer, it was easy to leave. I don't say that like it's a good thing—but I was so ready to move on and have my own space again and to not be living out of the contents of a suitcase.

Oh yes, and before I forget: in September, I cut all of my hair off.

I had been thinking about it for a long time, so it wasn't exactly a spur-of-the-moment thing. I used to say that I would never cut all my hair off, and then I started thinking about it, and mused, and made a secret Pinterest board, and thought some more, for well over a year. In retrospect, considering how the summer had gone, there was something a little symbolic about getting rid of the hair. It was almost as if I was tossing away all of the issues and stupidity of the year with it.

I've ended up LOVING it. Ease of management aside, I think it makes me look older. It seemed that the majority of the time people assumed that I was 18 or 19, and when one is almost 23 that's a little depressing. Now people ask if I'm still in college, so I guess that's an improvement. 

Tada.....

For most of the summer, I had been working out negotiations with my aunt for deciding whether or not I would be moving to northern Arkansas to work with her. That brings us to the month of October…

(stay tuned for part 3!)

One's True Place (and projects)

"How, then, does one find one's true place?
It does not need finding. One's place is wherever one happens naturally to be. And only gnawing resentment can make it dishonorable." 

-- C.W. Gusewelle

 Charles Gusewelle, succinct as always. There's a reason that he's one of my favorite writers.

I've been somewhat down in the dumps lately for a variety of reasons. There's some other minor stuff, but it boils down to feeling like I'm stuck, waiting for something to happen, and not knowing how to get out of it. Or I have so many ideas and options creating- and business-wise that I freeze up and do none of them.

This, my friends, is a distinct problem. It's worse than procrastinating, because with procrastination there's a guilty pleasure in letting things slide with the intent of 'getting to it later'. With freezing up there is no pleasure; just a vague sensation of doom and wasted time.

Add feeling stuck to a sensation of doom, and what you have is a downward spiral of non-productive angsting about the future. That's why I was rather inspired after coming across the above quote this morning.

Last night, I wasn't inspired at all and spent most of my time flaking around on the internet, but not before forcing myself to start a project that I've been meaning to do for ages: make a Kindle cover.

While in Colorado I started making a leather one, but what with all the flooding and evacuation nonsense I kinda had to set it aside. My Kindle has been cover-less since I got it in July, and I'm always worried that it'll get hurt somehow. This, then, is the finished product (made using this tutorial):

  

It's not as solid as leather would be, but it serves its purpose well. I also couldn't figure out how to make it stand up for a good 10 minutes.

I did eventually figure it out though. XD

 

The original pattern didn't call for any kind of padding, so I cut some quilt batting for a little extra protection against the chipboard. Some of the measurements seemed to be off, too, because the chipboard was WAY too big and the section under the kindle seems a little narrow, but it still worked.

I'm also continuing my kefir soda experiments. Last week I ordered some glass soda bottles after an attempt to make ginger ale in mason jars turned syrupy and nasty. The bottles have a rubber sealed cap attached with a wire clamp, so I'm hoping that the lack of air will help it to stay fizzy and not change consistency again.

I've already done the above with a cream soda (a teaspoon or so of vanilla extract in kefir water) and it turned out pretty delicious. I've gotten a taste for kefir like I didn't have earlier this year, and I can't get enough of the stuff. :3 (Everyone else, on the other hand, thinks that it's nasty. More for me!)

Horse-wise....well, I'm not going to take up blog-space by blubbering or complaining about the current stage of horse-less-ness. Our farrier (and my best friend's dad) has offered to let me ride one of their mares whenever I'd like. She's a paint, about 10-12 years old, and blind. Her real name is Nina (or Grace, depending on who you ask) but I've always just referred to her as 'the blind mare'.

If you look closely you can see the film over her pupil--the eye on the other side is atrophied.

She's a real sweetheart, and SO incredibly trusting--if I point her in a direction and tell her to go, she'll go in that direction until I tell her to stop (or she trips on something ^^;). She knows that when I check her, that means to go slow and feel out the terrain because something has changed. I would never take her on a trail ride or any other place where the terrain changes constantly, but she can walk along roads or across a bean field with no trouble and as long as I keep an eye out she does superbly. Several times I've come across a ditch or dip and, after a check, she'll take little careful steps until we're past it. It's pretty amazing.

I've ridden her twice in the last week, and have come to the realization that I really don't miss the riding as much as I do just taking care of a horse. It's strange to me to get her out, ride, and put her back without fussing or feeding. She also has some stall quirks such as pawing the ground and turning in circles, so she has to be hobbled in her stall. She doesn't mind the hobbles, and it keeps her from being destructive, but....meh.

Anyway. Life is slow and I usually wildly oscillate between being depressed and/or uninspired to bucking up and making myself quit having pity parties. XD

Week 12 Recap

 This was all written weeks ago--there's only a couple more week recaps to do, so I figured I'd better get those up and out of the way before I continue on with life in general. (Life in general has grown to include getting my own car--I paid for it with cash, so it's *completely* mine, and I kinda wubs it.)

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Week 12! Only two weeks to the end of family camps.....this was the week that I officially started working in the kitchen (or rather, worked in there for a week while Annie was gone) and took the family pictures on Sunday, etc etc.

It was a good week, but....somewhat stressful. Being in the kitchen was an interesting experience, but I didn't know where anything was, when to get things ready...plus I was running back and forth to take pictures and felt somewhat stretched. But overall it was a good experience. If I had been in there another week or so I probably would have gotten to know my way around better, but as it was, one week wasn't quiiiite enough.

More after the break!

10/10/13

Yesterday we had to put down my best friend and teacher of 12 years.

I can't even describe how heartbroken I've been for the past two days...I've finally gotten to the point where I can talk/think about it without immediately bursting out into tears, but I've been fighting routine all day(going out morning/evening to feed, going on rides, brushing/fussing over her in the afternoons, etc). Argh.

Yesterday when I went out to feed around 8:15 in the morning I noticed that Colletta was lying down in the paddock. That's not particularly unusual, because she's often sleeping or dozing at that time. The unusual part was where she didn't get up when I walked out to her, and I noticed that her eyes were so swollen and mud-caked that she couldn't see. So I ran back to the house, told Mom something was wrong, and ran back out to halter her up and get her to her feet.

When the vet arrived, he looked at her eyes and watched her general demeanor before saying that he thought that she seemed colicky, and that her eyes were swollen from rubbing dirt in them. By this point it was obvious that he was correct because she kept pawing the ground, trying to lay down, and looked very uncomfortable. So he pumped a gallon of mineral oil through a tube down her nose (made her nose bleed, poor thing), did a rectal exam, and gave her some pain meds to try to make her more comfortable. He also tried to do a saline drip, but couldn't get the needle to stay in the vein. (He was a young guy, and had only been working at the vet service for a few months, and was the only one on duty--I felt badly for him that he had to do it all alone especially when I don't think horses were his strong suit)

After he left we kept walking her and trying to keep her up--I had a chiropractic appointment at noon, so while I raced down to get that out of the way Mom kept her walking for me. As I was riding my bike home about 45 minutes later Mom called to tell me that Colletta had just gone down, and she couldn't get her back up.

When I came back into the yard she was lying down on her side in the yard, not even offering to pick her head up while Mom was pulling on the lead rope. I helped to roll her onto her chest (do you know how heavy a horse is that doesn't want to get up? Pretty dang heavy), and we called the vet again. He tried to put a saline drip in her vein, but from all the poking and prying he had done earlier the veins on both sides were pretty shot and he couldn't keep the needle in. So after some more poking and prying he gave up, and said that it was probably okay to let her lie down for a while but to not let her roll.

From 1 PM to 4:30 it was a constant battle: she would get up for a few minutes, walk slowly around, and stagger back down to lie on her side. Every time she went down her breathing would change to taking a breath, holding it, and then letting it out with a grunt. So I would sit down next to her head, try to keep her quiet, and whenever she rolled onto her chest to get momentum to roll over her back I would jump up and pull on the lead rope to try to keep her from rolling. This didn't always succeed, but it helped a little bit.

The time between the minutes on her feet grew longer and longer, and each time she got up she seemed weaker and weaker--to the point that after a few steps she would start staggering and drop to her knees. She would strain as well, like she was attempting to pass something but just couldn't. The whole time this all was happening the dog was circling and whining/barking with concern.

When Dad got home around 4:30 we all tried to get her up, and for a moment she seemed to rally: she got up and started walking, and seemed more purposeful for a few minutes. Dad was praying that she would 'have the biggest bowel movement in Illinois right now', and it really seemed like something would happen. The vet had already said that he would come out after his last appointments of the day, and a couple of minutes before he arrived she went down again onto her right side.

Before this point Mom and I had been talking, and we knew that we had to come to a decision sooner or later. The thing with colic is that one is never quite sure what causes it, and as a general term it can mean anything from 'gas' to 'blockage' to 'twisted bowel'. We have a feeling that it was a blockage (if it hadn't been, the mineral oil should have worked within a few hours, not taken over 9), and the only way to treat that is surgery. In order to have surgery, she would have had to have been taken to a university animal hospital, and I don't even know where the nearest one is to this area.

Anyway. Suffice to say, her groanings were getting worse, and she was trying more and more to roll the longer she would lie on the ground. The vet gave some faint offerings of hope in the form of surgery, but we already knew that that wasn't an option. She was in so much pain anyway that we couldn't get her to her feet at all, and we told him to do what he had to do.

He put her to sleep first (actual sleep) before the actual injection, and I held her head on my lap and stroked her face while he did it. Her eyes, after being swollen all day with no watery discharge, started tearing up and it looked like she was crying while he did it. (Lord knows we all were at this point) Even the dog was lying down about 20 feet away with his head on his paws and watching quietly.

We buried her out in the back pasture under a group of cottonwood trees--I'm eternally grateful to the excavator because he came out within 15 minutes of our calling and dug the hole well and quickly. I don't know if I could have slept with her lying out in the yard all alone.

I miss her terribly, as is to be expected, and to my consternation I actually spent some time tonight looking up 'horses for sale' ads online. Obviously I don't expect to get a horse again for some time, but gosh it's hard. I've been through more ups and downs, more friendships and teaching moments and lonely spots than I have with anyone else in my life. I can honestly say that she wasn't like any other horse I've ever known.

I'm just so glad that she didn't go alone, and that I was home from Colorado to see her for the last 10 days.

Week 9 Recap

Week 9! We had a lot of people leave this week, so I'm probably going to be sniffling and reminiscing my way through this post. Sigh. Here goes!

Awesome picture of the sun--I was just about to go to fireside in the upper meadow when I saw the cloud cover. Cue one very quick dash back to staff housing to snatch my camera and run back down...it was well worth the near asphyxiation.

This reminds me of the Ozarks...

I entrusted Moriah with my camera, and came back to find this. XD

EB, looking like the boss she is. XD

Let's just say that I like to hang out at the barn a lot. For some reason I find it relaxing to see/chat with the wranglers and watch them work with their horses.

It was this week that I decided to try to get my lungs into shape, so I started doing a morning property loop walk. On this particular morning, I was harassed by a murder of crows. O.o

This is the view from the upper meadow after huffing and puffing my way to the top--I'm very glad to report that now I can walk to the upper meadow without stopping or feeling like I want to die. :P

Jordyn was cutting fruit and decided to get creative with the platter one morning. In her words, she doesn't get to be very creative and it was driving her crazy...

EB may or may not have purchased a sign to edit the existing caution signs in the kitchen. 

And someone went crazy with the labeler, hence there's a lot of labels saying random things all over the kitchen.

Doughnuts! It was Cambell's last day, and she actually made some doughnuts from scratch after we ran out of the other kind. I miss that girl...

Oh yes--for wrangler breakfast that morning I wandered in the back way and witnessed an impromptu wrestling match between Lij and Luke. Guess who won?

All I gotta say is that Lij is like a bulldog in his wrestling technique where if he gets a hold, he does NOT let go. O.o

NOT THE HAT!!!

Yeah....Lij won. Basically he laid across Luke's ribcage and pinned him down so he couldn't move. It was pretty freakin' hysterical. 

EB and Brooke! We're helping the latter's family move this weekend, and I cannot WAIT.

Kara and I--she was one of the Texas Babies (i.e. the girls from Texas, aged 18, who spent a lot of time together) and I realized at wrangler breakfast that I hadn't gotten a single picture with her the entire month she had been here. O.o

All the Texas Babies! They left us the next day... :C

ANNA! She left me too. *sniff*

And Jordyn....man, now I'm missing everyone.

One stayed, two left...

Kay had this little thing where she would talk for the horses, so we had to get one more picture (and maybe even a video :P) of her talking for Rip. It was awesome.

Claire...

Yeah...not sure what's going on here. XD

Emily P took a frolicking picture for me...it's not hard to be in high spirits at random times out here. XD

Oh, my burn! Storytime: a few days before this picture was taken Moriah and I had been vacuuming the library. At one point I could smell the belt on the vacuum starting to burn, so we turned it off and I took the bottom off to see the damage. At one point I was manhandling it around and touched my arm on the round thing that held the belt in place--needless to say it was like touching molten magma. (only a *slight* exaggeration) At the time it didn't look like anything had happened, but over the course of a few days it got darker and darker, until by the end of a couple of weeks it had turned a dark brown, the dead skin was sloughing off, and I had TONS of people ask me 'what did you do to your arm?'. It made for some interesting explanation times.

 

I hate the picture formatting on this website. -.- So top picture: some of us went into town on Saturday to shop and whatnot--I went to a little coffee shop with Melanie and we read/sketched the whole time; I'm working on a picture of my old roommate Claire. It was a marvelous time--the coffee shop is also a Christian used book store, and Melanie insisted on buying me Passion and Purity by Elisabeth Elliot. Let me just say that that book has helped me IMMENSELY with some problems I was having with one of the guys here. I read the book in one 3-hour sitting because I couldn't put it down, and have loaned it out to a couple of girls already. :P

Second picture was the other girls coming to join us and zonking out on the couch. Basically...any opportunity to sleep is jumped upon out here. It's kind of hilarious, actually, especially when it happens in a public place (or in my case, whenever we go to Bible study *cough*).

And the third picture...I had been wearing my favorite ratty jeans that day. They're full of holes, threadbare, you name it, but they're SO comfortable and I love them to death. But, as I was entering the backseat of the suburban to ride back to the ranch, they ripped right below the pocket. At that point it was just a little hole, and I thought it wouldn't be a big deal to get back and run into staff housing without people noticing. After we got back, though, I stood up to crawl over the seat and as soon as I lifted my leg I heard and felt the fabric give until there was an 8-inch slit below my right cheek. I may or may not have been clutching my backside until I got into the safety of staff housing to change...but I was laughing the entire time, so it really wasn't too scarring. XD

Next up: either a week 10 recap or the Twin Sisters sunrise hike from Saturday!