Potpourri

... Like that Jeopardy category.

It was a truly lovely day. Kinda cold when I woke up, so I waited til about 11 to head out for my ride. I wanted to ride Dixie, but I was a good girl and rode Champ and thought dressage-y thoughts and tried to keep my elbows unlocked.

Champ was a dick. He wanted to laze about, thankyouvermuch, not trot around the woods. He expressed his displeasure by deciding that the imaginary wolves were out to get him, and got all perky and half-spooky on the trails. He actually tried to bolt at one point and I had to holler at him to slow his roll. After that, he was a fairly good horse and gaited back home for me.

We got near the gate and Bill, the husband barn owner, was headed out on foot. I turned Champ around and we walked with him. Champ's mood immediately soured, of course. I ignored him. Apparently Bill had found a full roll of barbed wire on the side of the road a while back and had stashed it in a rut along one of the trails, in the hopes that a four-wheeler would hit it and blow out a tire. (We are so classy - but the four-wheeler dudes aren't supposed to be back there, and they know it!) Now he wanted to use it to refence one of the back paddocks, so he was hiking out to pick it up.

We saw some deer tracks, and I updated Bill on where I'd seen the deer this week. We saw a huge flock of turkey, too!

After that, I drove up to the old barn and paid some more on Dixie and visited with everybody. And the big news:

James is coming riding with me tomorrow!

James is my best riding buddy from the old barn. I've ridden over a thousand miles with him, as often and as far as we rode at the old barn. I told him to bring a saddle and come ride with me tomorrow, and next weekend I'll come up and ride with him, and we'll swap up like that.

He has two horses now! He ended up buying SSB - she has a registered name, but her call name is SSB, short for Spotted Saddle Bitch. She deserves that name too! Makes Dixie look like a laidback plow mare. Anyway, she's black and white, not as well bred as Dixie apparently, tends to pace, and had a wee bit of a rearing problem when James started working with her a year ago. He'll ride the paceyness out of her, and he's already won the battle of wills that was causing the rearing.

I caught up on a bit of the drama at the old barn. Everybody wanted to know about how I'm doing, of course, and that made me realize a few things.

People are really impressed and really proud of me for becoming a lawyer (even though it's in name only at the moment!) And everybody who has a job is very grateful to have a job, and nobody is hiring for anything, and perhaps I'm not such a failure for not having a lawyer job. Sigh.

I think I'll end up doing this my own way, like I've done everything else. I always thought that at some point I'd magically get a Career, like after I graduated and passed the bar I'd get hired at a small firm and make a salary and get a 401k and stuff. It doesn't seem like it's gonna happen that way.

Very few people in my family, or their friends, have Careers with Salaries. I know, intellectually, that most Americans have stable jobs and get some fixed amount of money every month, but that's never how it's been in my life experience. I've been with Graham for almost 9 years now, and I'm still not entirely used to the fact that he makes the exact same amount of money every month. It's so odd to me.

Everybody I know, except Graham, just scraps along. That's what life is - sometimes there's money, sometimes there's not. You work when it's available. If you're sick you probably don't get paid, and you only go to the doctor for stitches. Some weeks you eat a lot of beans, some weeks you bring home steaks. :)

Anyway, it doesn't look like a Career is going to magically appear in this economy, no matter how many resumes I send out. I think I'll just get some business cards printed up, so I can hand them out when people ask, and I'll pick up clients as I can. C'est la vie!