I'm not actually a farmer, I swear.

"Miss Ellen, you have a funny tan line!"

Two things: 1. My Wednesday night barn kids are hilarious and far too precocious for their own good. 2. I have a farmer's tan and it's not even June.

By August, when the farmer's tan is in full effect, I will have a tan line from the polo shirts I wear at horse shows, the wide-strap tank tops I wear at the farm, and one where my gloves stop (and in really bad summers, where my wrist brace ends). The pièce de résistance, however, are my legs. Legs that wear jeans and breeches all summer long and therefore never actually see the sun. Legs that are pasty white reflections of my Irish heritage.

This never bothered me before, but now I'm at an age where summers mean at least one wedding to attend, along with the prerequisite showers/parties involved with a wedding. Which means dresses that show said tan lines to their best advantage.

The best example of the farmer's tan. Note polo shirt AND glove lines.

Thankfully I have not actually ruined anyone's wedding photos with these tan lines - the weddings I've been in at this point were for friends who either had equally hilarious lines (yay horsey friends)or didn't do a lot of posed photos.

Every year I swear up and down that this will be the year that I'll even the tan out or not get one at all. And by Memorial Day, I'm off shopping for aloe, SPF 9000 (not a typo), and sunless tanner to try to cover the damages.

How I got here

I never thought about doing anything other than horses professionally. I knew at 18 that I could ride and teach lessons, so I skipped over the whole concept that college is where you find yourself and what you want to be when you grow up. (It turned out well in that regard seeing as how college was the low point of my life and quite easily could have killed my love of horses entirely. We'll save those stories for another time.)

However there is one thing that teenage Ellen didn't really understand: the horse industry will not make you rich. Starting a program from scratch will in fact qualify you for welfare for many years, unless you have amazing parents (thankfully I do). However, unless you're a trust fund baby or something of that nature, becoming a financially responsible adult eventually has to become a priority. So about this time 2 years ago, I realized that it was time to grow up, move out of my parents' house, and get a job that would pay the bills.

It's hard to convince someone that you're qualified to do anything when your resume pretty much says "been mucking stalls and riding since college" especially in a crappy job market. So after much stress on my part, a friend called and said she was leaving her job and she'd told her boss (her uncle) that he needed to hire me. So here I am, 18 months later, reasonably fluent in lawyer and marveling daily at how much fun I think it is to sit in an office. I mean, a flush toilet AND air conditioning/heat? Plus great bosses and an amazing new collection of stories. Dealing with the public can be so very entertaining.

We won't get into exactly how I make everything work schedule-wise and still have time to have a life.

Just refer to the title of this blog to understand how I get it all done.

Starting Up

Over the last few months, more than a few of my Facebook friends have started spamming my NewsFeed with blog posts. Of course, by "spamming" I actually mean "giving me something to do at work that's not actually work."

This of course got me thinking about starting my own blog. See, once upon a time I used to write A LOT. Like, binders and notebooks full of stories since I was about 10 years old. Then I got out of college, started hanging out in the barn 60 hours a week, and the writing brain slowly fizzled out. Last year, at the age of 29, I decided it was time to become an adult, which meant less* time at the farm and an office that pays me really well to write letters and answer the phone. So I'm thinking that means that it's also time to pick the writing back up. It's probably not too late to pick up that idea of writing the Great American Novel and being able to go back to playing in the barn all day...




*by less, I of course mean the same amount of work crammed into 3 days instead of 7.