Looking at the old entries of me talking about Val just makes me laugh. Valerius is no longer (and really never was) a teddy bear. He’s a very fit horse who’s affection toleration level is pathetically low, but I love him just the same. He’s got a stubborn streak, and the ability to undulate his body with mini-canter “strides”/rears/bucks, which is actually pretty silly looking and feeling.

Honestly, he’s the farthest thing from what I’d thought I’d get when I bought a horse. I wanted something fairly tall, probably some kind of warmblood, and bay, or, if the universe was with me, a beautiful dapple gray.

And really, sometimes life just likes to let you know exactly how poor a judge we are of our own wants and needs. Val’s essentially got “perfect first horse” branded on his attractive, blue-eyed noggin.

He was kind and forgiving when we first got him, mostly because he was fat, out of shape, and not really trained. His enjoyment of life and spark has increased, making him a slightly more challenging horse to ride, but still Valerius, and still mostly kind and forgiving. And he enjoys jumping.

And the PFH quality my mother likes the most? He has a good set of brakes.

Anywho, Val’s a 15.2 hand bay paint gelding. He’s got the sweetest disposition, but he can truly act like his namesake- Valerius Magnus, a pretentious vampire from some of Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Dark Hunter books—from times to time. For the most part, he’s just a big teddy bear ;P

Next time around, I’ll be able to ride Val in a show. Sure, we won’t place as well, but we’ll try our best and have a good time. I might be doing a schooling show at Long View horse park, an eventing one. That would be so exciting! It’s in late August… it all depends on if my jumping would be solid enough by then.

I can hardly believe that school starts in about a month. I’m really ready for this year, though. I’ve got lots of interesting, challenging classes on my schedule. It should be rather interesting having a horse with the increased work load, and then adding a job on top of all that when I turn 16 in November!

That’s all I’ve got to say for now

Anyhow, I installed the newest version of FanUpdate, and updated the about me page. I’ll be coming out with a new layout soon, but I don’t want to start messing with anything until I get my PSG review. I think I’m about 15 people away… So a month or so.

Let’s see… things have been going well-ish with Val. He really needs a serious lesson in ground manners. I’ve managed to make him a girth sour “Gonna bite you now” pony, in only 2 months! So, he’s gotten a little spoiled, and I’ve gotta be more firm with him.

My actual riding’s also going okay. I haven’t had a lesson in a long time due to being out of town and other things, and I finally have one today, so I’m excited!

Think that’s about all for now.

1. I have pretty nails. At least, that’s what people tell me. They don’t break easily, grow fast, and have a nice shape. When they’re actually polished, they’re quite nice, I think. Seeing as none of you’ve seen my nails, thought I’d mention it.

2. I read like a demon when I really get into things. I’m reading the Dark-Hunter series by Sherrilyn Kenyon now, and I’ve finished one book a day for the past 4 days or so. They’re all slightly-longer-than-average paperbacks. I read HP7 in a day, too.

3. I’m a completely self-taught typer. Typist? I started messing with computers real young, so I just kinda figured it out for myself. I’m just as fast as the average typer, though, although there are times where I don’t have as good of accuracy as everyone else, because I don’t return to the “home” keys.

4. I have rather bleh handwriting. It’s… well, when I try my best for it to be neat, it’s not messy. Just unattractive. The rest of the time, it’s both messy and ugly. ): I try to make it prettier, but it never gets any better.

5. I’m usually kind of anti-outside and bugs, but things like that never bother me when I’m around horses. I also really hate to be hot, and even that doesn’t bother me when I’m riding.

6. I get really attached to objects. Right now, I’m in love with my key chain, ’cause it’s so pretty. <3

7. I’m pretty open musically. I start to like most anything once I listen to it long enough, but my first loves are definitely country and soft pop/rock. The only exception are “songs” that offend me.

8. Continuing that up there, I’m extremely difficult to offend or make angry. I can’t remember the last time I’ve been truly, honest-to-God pissed at someone. Annoyed, sure. But not really upset.

9. I’ve got a really good relationship with my Mom. She’s pretty awesome.

10. I’m running out of things to say! Ah, hmm. I’m not really religious. I’d say I go to church 3 or 4 times a year, maybe.

I’m not tagging anyone, guys. Feel free to do it if you want

As a side note, Rolex was great! I loved every minute of it. Had the time of my life. Want to go back. ): Wish I got some signatures on my snazzy Rolex shirts and hat.

That’s about it.

Also, added a few pictures of my pets to the gallery while I was at it, and got rid of the double categories. I think I’m beginning to see the point of having a Flickr- you don’t have to make thumbnails. Anyhow, to anyone thinking about buying a digital camera- don’t get an Easy Share. Just… don’t.

We’re going to go see Atlas tomorrow (and now I’ll be able to show you pictures)! My mantra is something like this: I don’t like this horse. I don’t think I’m ready for a horse. I don’t like this horse. I don’t think I’m ready for a horse. I just hope I don’t overdo it and make the sellers think Atlas would be unhappy with me! Any horse I get will most likely be spoiled, make no mistake!

So, it’s about 6 months later. And apparently I’ve changed.

<3 His name is Albus. Hehe. Gotta love the tiger part, though! I agree with all the adjectives they used to describe me, too. Woo!

I pronounce daemon wrong D: I say day-mon, instead of demon. *shrug* It sounds much nicer that way, I think.

I personally think that it has more fantasy elements that it does science fiction. When I think of science fiction, my mind jumps straight to talking, malevolent machines, ray guns, and space ships. None of these are present in the popular trilogy. In fact, it has several elements I’d consider fantasy- talking animals, magic, enchanted items. The definition for science fiction is as follows:

n.

A literary or cinematic genre in which fantasy, typically based on speculative scientific discoveries or developments, environmental changes, space travel, or life on other planets, forms part of the plot or background.

And, sure, I suppose His Dark Materials minimally satisfies those requirements; but a trilogy that only loosely fits into the genre probably shouldn’t be stuck there. I suppose it isn’t that big of an issue, but I wonder where the line is really drawn between fantasy and sci-fi. What do you guys think?

Also, I’m completely in love with the series. It’s awesome. I’m in the middle of the third book… *reads*

I have some pretty big news, aside from my mini-rant up there. We’re going to go look at a horse this Sunday! His name is Atlas and he’s a 6 year old bay gelding. He’s about 2 hours away from me, so the car ride there and back will take a while, but I’m extremely excited. My instructor Cassie’s coming with mom and I to look at him, so the car ride won’t be completely boring. She has such interesting stories!

If things go well, we might buy him. He sounds great- and there’s a few pictures of him on the seller’s website, here. He’s the first mentioned on that page. If he’s half as good as she makes him out to be, Atlas may just be the right horse for me I love his name, too. I could call him Atty-boy when he does a good job 8D

That’s all for now!

Their reach is far, but necessary, I suppose. Else we’d all be heathens, or perhaps something less dramatic. Which reminds me, one of my friends from the barn finally revealed her horses full name. Gus, a sweet little gelding, is technically know as Flaming Heathen. Oohh, that’s chuckle-worthy indeed!

I have no idea how, but it draw you in like a spider draws a fly to its web. It’s crazy. It’s insane. But, it’s also a heck of a lot of fun. Want to join? Click here! My name on there is Neets, and I’d love it if you said I referred you if join ^__^

Recently, though, I’ve started making my own.
NEETS- Needs eventing expertise; terrible seat.
That’d be me right up thar.
LAURA- Lacking Artistic Undulations; Recently Afflicted.
A friend who hasn’t update her webcomic in a while
ALLY- Always Loyal, Loving, Yes!
My puppy.
LOVE LACE- Lately Original, Very Effortless. Loves Assisting Citizens Expertly.
Yeah, some of these are shaky! Anyhow, thought I’d put these in here before I forgot them.

They’re also pretty useful study tools. If I need to remember something for a test, I just make it into an acronym and then find a tune for it that fits well. Usually, if I can remember the first letter of each word I’m fine. Just one of quite a few study tricks I use (:

In other news, I have no sense of rhythm. Seriously, I can’t even snap my fingers at the same time during a song consistently. I haven’t done much dancing in my time, but I’m going to take a guess and say that I’d fail epically. How is it possible for me to be this bad at rhythm? I have no idea.

My mom finds it kind of amusing. She was the first to notice my deficiency, and ever since I always try to keep the beat of a song when she’s around. I can’t. We laugh. It’s a pleasant cycle, to ease the pain of PHAILURE /melodramatic. (:

Finally, I’m done talking bad about StumbleUpon. I joined, and I really love it. I’ve had some great discoveries so far! My favorite is definitely Pandora, a music website that allows you to give examples of the music you like- artists and songs- and then it picks more songs you’re likely to enjoy based on the properties of the music.

Before I praise it too much, I ought to mention that it apparently restricts access to people outside the US, which I know is a lot people from Snark ): Maybe some day it’ll open its doors to international traffic.

It’s pretty amazing, though. All the songs I gave it happened to have piano, but they were all ’soft’ pop-ish songs. So, Pandora guessed that I’d like Boston by Augustana and it was very, very right. I’ve liked the song for a long time, and I guess I never knew why, seeing as I’m usually a country person.

I’m figuring out that I have a thing for pianos. A lot of the music I like has some piano in it. Very strange, seeing as there’s so little Country with piano in it and that’s what I grew up listening to…

I got a bit of a shock when Apple updates ran this morning. It asked me for permission to download Safari- as you may have guessed, for Windows. At first, I wanted to X-out of the updater. I was a bit mad it was asking me to download something that was definitely not for iTunes, but then the rational side of my brain clicked in. I said yes.

I must say, I’m fairly happy I did. I’ve only been using it for a few minutes, and I have yet to decide if I’ll switch from FireFox to this or not. On one hand, I love FireFox. But, for many strange reasons- because it was the first browser I had with tabs, because its logo features a shiny fox, because the words FireFox just sound cool together.

So far, I’m liking Safari for a whole lot more practical reasons. It maximizes the actual space in the browser used for displaying web pages. The tabbed browsing doesn’t show up until you actually have two or more tabs open. The bottom doesn’t really have a ‘bar’, per se. And all the scroll bars and tick boxes are pretty neat. Also, scroll bars don’t appear unless there is something to scroll; no useless wasted space.

Safari comes with several useful bookmarks already in it- Google Maps, You Tube, Wikipedia. It also appears to have and RSS-Reader built in, which would be useful if I did that kind of thing. Sadly, I always forget to read RSS feeds and just go to the site instead; but I know some people do use it.

So far, I’d definitely say Safari is more visually appealing to me than FF was. The cool grey is nice; and all the book marks look like they’ve been etched into your browser. The only thing I dislike about it so far is the anti-aliased text :/ I’m hoping there’s a way to turn it off…

Another plus: when I tried to refresh the browser after adding the “opinionated” blog category to FanUpdate, it asked me the following:

Which could be a time saver, given the circumstances. Finally, the search function looks amazingly neat. I’d give you a picture, but I’m a bit tired of taking’m for this post by now. Take my word for it- you might be interested in checking Safari out. I’m not sure if this is entirely new or if I’ve just now gotten wind of it, but either way, I like what I see.

Edit: Whoa, now. Is it too late to revoke my good review? I’ve been using it most of the day, and I’ve gotta tell ya, while it may look pretty, it doesn’t have a brain. The close button for the tabs is near the left side, instead of the right. I’ve accidentally closed tabs about 5 times now. When you right-click an image, there’s no way to view it’s properties. When you right-click a background image, there is no option to view it on its own. And it’s frozen on me twice now. Using the s tag for this entire entry, and thus invalidating my front page, is totally worth it.

First of all, I stumbled upon several blogs. And in this case, I literally mean stumbled, as in:

stum-ble (stmbl)
v. stum-bled, stum-bling, stum-bles
4. To come upon accidentally or unexpectedly Definition

Those blogs aforementioned can be found here and here. I learned of this “new” concept of the Google PR, and I’m busy exploring that right about now. Mine is a 3, apparently, as shown by this handy little widget:

Apparently I missed the huge PR Debacle she mentioned, where Google went around and reset several blog’s PR to 0? I can’t even seen the purpose of that. If anyone knows of a blog post where I can read up on this, I’d be grateful for a link (:

I also recently decided to join Technorati. I’m a bit unsure of what it actually is at this point, but I’ll figure it out once I finish signing up, I’m sure. The link I need to “release the spiders”: Technorati Profile.

Basically, I’m becoming more of a nerd every day! Huzzah to that

I think people can get a little overly obsessed with cleanliness. Sure, washing your hands is a good thing, but do we really need to eradicate every germ from the ‘S’ bend of every toilet and the ‘U’ bend of every sink? That’s as pointless as moving your bed so that you can vacuum underneath it!

If it takes extra effort to even come into contact with what you’re trying to clean, then maybe it just isn’t worth it, hmm?

I recently learned about Illustration Friday and the idea for this bunny came to mind. He’s not really a full ‘illustration’, so I won’t submit him, but I think he’s kinda cute (:

Anyhow, that recipe section has actually been sitting around in a folder for a long time, but I forgot about putting it up after one of my many hiatuses. Whoops.

Also, a new layout is in the works! Crazy, I know. My main idea was “spring”, but it kinda morphed into “GIRAFFE!!!11!!” along the way, somehow. A sneak peak of what’s to come: Click to see! The lime green won’t be in the final version; it’s just to show me where the content and side bar go. No worries, I haven’t gone color blind! If there’s anything any of you really can’t stand about it, now’s the time to mention it to me before I code it!

That’s all for now. :3

Sure, I do operate this as a primarily personal site. However, when a visitor loads my site, they probably aren’t thinking, “Gee, what can I learn about this person?”. It’s probably more along the lines of, “I hope there’s something interesting here.”. And what, exactly, is more interesting to a visitor than visitor content?

And on top of that argument, the whole thing is quite trivial. I don’t prohibit visitors from accessing the about me page until they see the visitor content. I don’t think the order in which the links go really matters at all.

What do you guys think? Does it matter? Should I change? Or am I wrong, and do visitors come to my site to learn everything they can about me?

Edit: Hmm. Apparently, it is important. So, I’ll switch’em around.

What you have to do is the following:

1. List five vices you have, with a description if you want to.
2. Tag five bloggers for this meme.
3. Link back to the blogger who tagged you, and this post if you want to be nice!

So, here goes!

This was fun to do I’d tag some people like it says, but I think everyone’s been tagged already. So, I’ll stick with the unoriginal “I tag YOU!”.

Aaah, shopping! But not of the normal kind. My instructor finally convinced me to go get some breeches. I’m not totally into their spandex-esque nature yet, but they are pretty cozy. See? Sorry for the huge .png, but my PS V6 finally decided to mess up on me, and it’s not letting me save right. So, I had to fall back on Paint. Paint, of all things! Who knew Paint saved decent .pngs? That isn’t rhetorical; I’d like to know!

I got some new English boots, too, and half-chaps. I’m pretty excited about the boots and chaps part! We saw some really cute spurs with colored rhinestones, too. I don’t think I’ll be ready for any of those anytime soon, though! Their was also a huge variety of lead ropes. Everything comes in every color you can imagine, and combinations thereof, from whips in hot pink to half-chaps in bright purple!

The place also had two dogs running around inside! A nice black lab, that followed one of the sales people around, and a chocolate colored cocker spaniel that dozed behind the counter. We’ll definitely be going back. ^__^

That’s all for now (:

I dubbed him, quite fondly, Squirrel Rigor Mortis, and he stuck around ’til this afternoon. Then, a few minutes ago, I went outside. I checked to see if he was still around, but no such luck. Seems something grabbed my little squirrel friend ):

Poor little thing. I can’t help but come up with explanations for his sudden “departure”. Perhaps this squirrel was just playing possum?

/random

Well, I ended up not getting the For Dummies book ( they didn’t have it in stock ): ) but I did get Jodi Picoult’s “My Sister’s Keeper”. I read it in about 3 days It was absolutely wonderful. I couldn’t set it down from the time I read the first two paragraphs!

I had horseback riding today, and yesterday. Yesterday was a bit on the sad, bittersweet side, with a dash of being scared shitless. It was supposed to be my last lesson with my instructor Joanna, because I’m switching to Cassie, a different instructor. They both have different strengths, and Cassie just has more experience in Eventing than Joanna does.

However, Joanna wasn’t there last night- I’m not sure if that was good or bad. On one hand, it would’ve been tough to ride with her one more time, but on the other, I still really wanted to- she’s been my instructor for the past two years. Even worse, though, is that I learned this morning that she’s newly pregnant, and has been having trouble. My mom says she’s probably going to miscarry, and I can’t imagine that happening to her

Anyhow, last night I had a two hour lesson. The first hour was great, but Jack was real tired and wanted to go in to his stall after everyone left when the first hour was over, and he started acting up. Once my lesson partner was ready, we started the second hour and Jack wouldn’t trot no matter how hard I kicked.

Renee decided to put her Western spurs on me. I’d never worn spurs before, so I was a little nervous. When she asked me to trot him, I did- but, unfortunately, I ride with my heels pointing too close to the horse, so even when I wasn’t trying to jab him with the spurs to make him go faster, I was, and he was accelerating crazily. We were almost completely out of control, and no matter how hard I tried to not hit him with the spurs, I kept doing it on accident. It took a lot of luck to finally get him down to a walk, and I was completely freaked out by then.

Renee had worked with me on getting my heels to lay right the previous hour, so she knew that the spurs might work a little too well with me. She thought it’d be a little extra encouragement for me to get my heels out of him. So, she had me try to trot him again, and the same thing happened.

It was so much worse than being bucked by a horse, or even just being ran away with. At least when they’re bucking, or when they’re running away, you know you can do something to stop them- you can hit them with a crop when they’re bucking, and you can steer them into a tight circle when they’re running away. But when something you’re doing is making them run hell for leather, and you can’t stop, you feel so completely out of control.

Anyhow, suffice to say it was one of the best lessons I’ve ever had followed by my worst. I kept together fairly well after the second run-away incident, but when she took the spurs off me and we cantered, Jack decided to buck. I stayed on, but that was the straw the broke the camel’s back. I fell apart, and we pretty much walked the rest of the time, with a little trotting near the end.

As an aside to this, it’s kind of amazing that the only time I’ve fallen off before was when I simply slid off because the girth wasn’t tight enough I’ve been bucked with Bubba and now Jack, and I didn’t fall either time.

Today I was making up a lesson I’d missed with Cassie. I rode Bubba with an English spur, and we did great We walked, trotted, and cantered without a single incident, and I got my confidence back. She had me get off for a bit and learn to longe Bubba, then she did a longeline lesson with me on Bubba. We were sitting a trot, which is difficult on Bubba, and stretching different ways. One of the stretches required me to reach back and touch his tail!

All in all, I had a really good day today, and I’m completely recovered from the Jack Ordeal I usually try not to write such long entries…

That’s all for now!