Vacation time!

February is a "barn closed" month. We go hard for the bulk of the year, and without an indoor winter lessons are cancelled more than they're taught, so closing down for a while is the easiest and most efficient way to deal with everything. Horses get some time to chill, and I get a month to have a life.

I will fully admit that I ALWAYS overschedule my time off. I seem to think that despite the fact that I am still working my other job, I will have time for multiple vacations, apartment painting and closet purging, as well as constant playtime with friends and a regular workout schedule.

Shockingly enough, I've managed most of that. I've picked out paint samples, hit the treadmill 2-3x a week, cleaned 2 out of 4 closets, and started the month with a quick run to NC to see Kirsten and Mehdi. I'm headed to my most favorite place on earth this coming weekend, have tickets to see Cinderella, and enough time open to see another show if I so choose.

When I get home on Monday, I have 3 horses to boot camp back into work (although to be fair, Dundy will probably take less time than the mares), manes to pull, and children to get tuned up (in addition to their horses/ponies, who have been on a light schedule as well), and about 7 weeks to do it in.

Let the need for Xanax begin in 5, 4, 3, 2.....

Family History

My mother has recently become obsessed with genealogy. Like, obsessed to the point where I'm pretty sure we're going to have to start only allowing her on the internet for a couple hours at a time before she makes herself blind staring at PDF files of the 1900 census. She's done an amazing amount of work at this point, but beyond the part where we're not as Irish as we thought, it's mostly raised a lot of questions about how we're related to various family members.

The most recent is a man by the name of Darius Bentley, who my mother was given a biography of, but no idea as to how he fits into the family.

I suggested perhaps someone thought he was a family member at some time, and never got around to figuring out if it was true or not.

Kate suggested that he was that generation's George Clooney and he'd been on the cover of Tiger Beat of the 1800s a bunch of times and that's why we had the biography of him.

I'm still waiting to figure out how I'm related to HER.