Holy Crap!

Facebook can sometimes be a very odd experience. Today one of the friends who I am linked to offered a friend suggestion. Way back when (many years ago) at my old company in NYC, "P" was the head of our customer technical support division. He had a reputation at the company for being eccentric and unpredictable and for driving the president (and primary owner) of the company completely, bat-shit crazy. He was one of those loose cannon types, I think. Not so much in a scary way, but more in the way of, well, you just didn't know what was going to come out of his mouth next. In the very first department that I worked at for the company, P liked to torment my boss and everyone who worked for him. I think P found it great sport. Years after he left the company, P and my facebook friend, Carolina (my good friend from Queens) and I went out for a very drunken lunch somewhere on Third Avenue in NYC and gossiped for hours. Anyway, I hadn't heard much more about him since then.

Until today. My facebook friend made the friend suggestion and then sent me a note and said, "turns out P lives in your town". What??? I live in this little town in New Hampshire, how could he possibly live here? Well, it turns out that she was right. He lives no farther than four miles from me. 4 miles!

So the next thing that I know, suddenly I'm getting messages on facebook from P about the two of us being neighbors. We exchange some particulars and gossip and now he wants me to meet him at a bar in town tomorrow. What?! This is sort of freaking me out, it is just too bizarre. One of the ironies is, he doesn't even really work up here. He has a company that he mostly runs out of his home and he travels down to NYC during the week from time-to-time. How he actually ended up in my town, of all towns, is a complete mystery, but he's here.

Holy-freaking-crap. I am so not good at this going-and-meeting-people-I-don't-know-very-well-at-bars thing. I just don't know what to do. Ack.

Stuffed Beyond Belief

I just got back from Boston where I had been to a Chinese New Year celebration dinner thingie. And I am now completely stuffed beyond belief, but everything was so GOOD! I just couldn't resist any of the food. Most of it was seafood, so I don't think anything was really too terrible to eat, although I know that I ate more rice than I needed to. Anyway, the most remarkable thing is that I got through the entire scary social encounter without a single cocktail. Let me repeat this. Me. Social encounter. Conversation. Interacting with people. NO ALCOHOL. This is highly unusual, I'm rather surprised that I managed to pull it off, frankly. But I did manage and lived to tell the tale. Imagine.

The Power of Vitamins

I've been feeling rather ... puny the last couple of days. Not sick, really, but just kind of off. Really exhausted for no good reason, sort of heavy in the limbs, vague headache, very slight amount of nausea (just kind of a "blech" stomach feeling) all around I just don't feel 100%. Also, I have this small pain in my left leg. Not really an injury, hardly even really pain, but just this slightly weird feeling starting at the hip and running most of the way down (and not in the ITB) with the leg feeling slightly weak, like it could give out beneath me maybe, it's sort of hard to describe. I tend to be a little paranoid about running injuries though, so it's very possible that I'm just being a little sensitive. It's just so easy to go over-board with running and not back off soon enough when you need to (I've been there, trust me) that I tend to over-analyze any little twinge -- better a couple of days off from running than living with something that turns into a chronic issue for months or even years.

Anyway, I had a training appointment scheduled for today and I'm glad that I did because I probably would have talked myself out of working out, due to malaise. I arrived to the gym early so that I could run and quickly felt the issue with my leg (I had been feeling it while walking too, but it was more pronounced while running). I switched from my usual 3-5 minute running intervals to alternating 1 minute running with 1 minute walking, after one initial 2-minute running interval. The leg thing felt much better with the shorter intervals, so I decided to stick with that for this session. I kept the pace at a 10 min-mile to a 9:13 min-mile pace and did 2.25 miles. The leg didn't feel any worse after that and might even have felt a little bit better, so I think it probably is nothing.

I then started my training session. Today is the harder day at the moment (until he switches up what we're doing again) and includes these step-up repeats (with weights, of course) onto this very high stool. I really didn't know how that was going to go with the leg issue and the general feeling of ickiness. But I did okay and managed the entire training session without any real problem. So, maybe it's just me, maybe I'm just a little tired and/or fighting off something. The leg thing is probably just a little twinge that I was being really paranoid about. To shake it all off, I ran another mile on the treadmill at home for an even 3.25 for the day and I feel pretty good now.

On the way home from work, I decided to stop in at GNC and buy some vitamins -- Women's Ultra Mega Active. And I decided to also buy some fish oil capsules. (Can someone tell me what the Hell is the difference between fish oil and fish body??? So damn confusing!) I figure that since I'm watching the calories and am living a pretty active life that some vitamins could only help somewhat. Especially this time of year when I'm probably eating less fresh produce. I don't know if my feeling crappy at the moment could be helped by vitamins, but it probably couldn't hurt at least.

Stoopid Dog!

So I'm working from home today because we're in the middle of a major snow storm. And Tig is whining at me because he wants to go out. Okay, fine. So I let him out the back slider and he just stands there in a snow drift looking at me. So then I wave my arms and chase him over to the stairs leading down to the yard where he stands peering down on the snow drifts that have obliterated the steps, creating just a snow mountain. He looks back at me waving my arms and back at the stairs just frozen in place. I'm standing there in pajama bottoms and slippers trying to shoo him on to no avail. Finally (after a huge sigh) I have to wade through the big drifts of snow in my pajama bottoms and slippers and literally push him down the mountain of snow into the yard. SHEESH! So now here I sit soaked with melting snow while he sleeps all curled up and warm on a blanket on the couch. Must be nice to be a dog.

The Many Mishaps of Sorrell over Cross-Country

I find the best videos from the posters on The Chronicle of the Horse forums. I had first seen this one a couple of weeks ago, but it continues to crack me up!




That naughty, naughty pony!

Tuesday Dressage Session

This is a dressage week. One might think that the non-jumping weeks would be the easier weeks, but not so, or at least in my opinion. I actually find the flat weeks to be more difficult. In dressage we’re usually working constantly on all those subtle nuances to get the correct carriage, the right stride length, the “perfect” cadence, the bending, the rounding, the list just goes on & on. So usually you’re really working every single step and every single moment of the session. At least if you’re working the way you should be anyway. Tonight Ann had me working very, very hard on getting Lulu round. Really hard. So hard that I think my arms and abs and back and even my hands and fingers are going to be sore tomorrow. A lot of it was very much almost a tug-of-war between Lulu & me. My holding her front end back, heavily restricting the movement, while constantly driving her forward and onto the bit, through her back and hind-quarters with my seat & legs. Every single step we had this push & pull going, with my pushing her on the bit, while holding the momentum in and also resisting her inclination to get heavy on the forehand. It was truly exhausting, but also deeply satisfying. It was about 15 degrees tonight and both of us were drenched in sweat when we were done. I think I sweated as much had I been out running in this temperature. And I was dressed with about the same amount of clothes and layers that I would have been had I been running too, turtleneck and light-weight half-zip fleece & breeches that are about the same fabric weight my running pants would be.

At one point during the session Ann mentioned something about Lulu always having a variety of riders (being a school horse) so that she can have some bad habits to overcome, or at the very least, stuff that some riders let her get away with. Anyway, she mentioned something about “some bad riders and some good riders” and I had to wonder if I was of the bad or the good variety. I guess I don’t want to think too hard about that.

So, it was very good lesson, very effective. I learned some stuff and maybe even remembered some stuff from my former riding life. And it also turned out to be a pretty good workout too, which is always a good bonus. I spent an extra half an hour at the barn walking Lulu in the ring to cool her out and dry her sweaty self. It was a pleasure really as I love to spend any kind of time with this horse, she’s such a sweetie and deserved all the carrots and apples and peppermints that I had in my pockets.

I'm Hungry!

I HATE being hungry! ARGH!!!

Stoopid #@%&*$! diet thingie. Sheesh.

Jenny Craig is Pissing Me OFF!

Back in November I started to get into a funk because the scale no longer seemed to be trending down, no matter how well I watched what I ate and how much I exercised. My weight loss had been stalled since sometime in September. It didn’t seem to matter if I was spinning or running or riding, eating approximately 1200 calories a day on Jenny Craig or whatever, somehow my body had decided that it really, really liked being at the weight it was at, thank you very much. After months & months of non-stop weigh-loss the effort was stagnated there, still so far away from any kind of reasonable goal. I think I just became exhausted, overwhelmed and demoralized at that point. Added to that was my annual birthday/holiday depression, a dip in morale because of the dismal economy (and all the dire predictions), company layoffs and a heavy end-of-the-year work-load and I just needed a bit of a break. I never stopped Jenny Craig, and I never stopped working out. I just relaxed it all a bit. Had a few non-JC meals here & there, wasn’t so restrictive with alcohol and didn’t work out as much.

I got back on the program starting on January 5th. Became more regimented about the food, more consistent with the exercise, went back to the trainer (I had taken two weeks off from the strength training) and completely eliminated alcohol. I hoped that maybe my body had just needed a break back in the Fall. But so far this year my efforts have been pretty much unrewarded. I initially lost a couple of pounds and then I gained back a couple of pounds and now have lost one pound again. According to my scale. According to the JC scale apparently last week I had gained a pound and now this week I held steady. It is so unbelievably frustrating! I know it’s only a couple of weeks into my new resolve and that I really have to try and be patient, but it just seems like more of the same of what I was experiencing back in the Fall and I’m beginning to feel somewhat upset and worried.

Now, I like my Jenny Craig counselor. But I take everything she says with a grain of salt. I certainly know more about exercise than she does and I would guess that I even know more about general nutrition than she does too. She knows the JC diet plan specifically and can answer questions about that, but otherwise, it’s all kind of a lot of bullshit. I know this, and my expectations are low in that regard. She is great for weigh-ins and encouragement, but when she starts wanting to brain storm into reasons why my weight-loss is stalled, I want to scream. It just IS. I don’t want to analyze it with her or I’ll go crazy (if I get to the point where I need to start analyzing things, I’ll go to my DR). Anyway, she means well, so I try to be patient, but then she’ll pull out the old stock questions because she really doesn't know what else to say:

• What is motivating you to lose weight?
• How are you rewarding yourself?

I mean, I know it’s all Jenny Craig rhetoric, but could they be more trite? Again, I try to be patient and respond without being too caustic, but it sure is an effort, especially when I’m completely pissed off and frustrated.

So, I don’t know what the answer is yet. I’m not completely panicking yet, but I’m getting a little closer to that. I might have to go back to eating JC for lunch too or something. Not sure how I’m going to handle that since I got very sick of JC lunches very quickly (I think I stopped eating them about two months into my program). I’m still fine with the breakfasts & dinners though, go figure. Maybe I’m going to have to find some early morning spinning classes or perhaps I need to workout twice a day or something. I just don’t want this non-progress to affect my attitude like it finally did back in November. That’s the attitude that would cause me to give up the effort completely. ARGH! Just … argh.

Happy, Happy
(as Julia would say)

My painter is at my house as we speak starting the job that will transform my dreadful, battleship gray bathroom into a lovely (well, at the very least tolerable) warm, buttery space. It will be nice to be able to walk into my bathroom and not immediately be pissed off and horrified by the ugliness. Oh, and I did remember to take "before" pictures (they're still in my camera though) so once everything is finished, I may do the before-and-after thing.

Another Note on Running

For most of last year I felt really, really self-conscious about running on the treadmills at the company gym. I think I probably would have felt self-conscious on any gym treadmill, but the fact that it is a gym at my company makes me feel slightly more exposed and so even more self-conscious. But for some reason I now no longer seem to care. At all. I'm not quite sure when this happened but apparently I'm totally over it, which is a very good thing.

The Plan: 3 Weeks In

I feel like I'm doing a little bit better, am a little more solid in my health/fitness/weight-loss plan now that I'm three weeks in. Frankly, the scale isn't budging all that much, but I'm not panicking about that yet. In the meantime, this past week I did manage to run three times, worked out with the trainer twice and stuck closely to my eating plan. Jenny Craig for breakfast & dinner, and have not gone crazy at lunch. I've also been pretty good about not nibbling in any way and have not had any alcohol at all since I started my 2009 plan. Most importantly, I feel more solid about everything. The workouts feel like more a part of my routine than something special that I am making myself do. I am also trying to push myself a little more with the running. What I mean is, I only allow myself walk breaks of one minute and for the most part make myself run a 10 minute-mile or faster -- running intervals are usually no shorter than 2 minutes (and are usually longer than that). This is one good thing about running on the treadmill, it's easier to be regimented. Still, I'm really only running 2-2.5 miles at a time, so I'm hoping that I'm going to be able to bump that up to at least 3 miles per session soon.

So, all-in-all I think I'm doing pretty well. More important to the actual activity is my attitude, I think. I am feeling very positive and very committed right now, and so I am pretty encouraged, at least at the moment (despite what the scale says).

Another Cluster

Ugh. So, I had a production install that I had to do on Thursday night. This is always a bit stressful as there are a lot of moving parts and steps in the process and there are a lot of people invested in this application. Thus it is a very visible project, which adds to my stress and worry when updating production. Anyway, I like to do the migration from the office because it’s a little bit easier from there and I worry about losing connections and whatever from home. It makes for a pretty long day (since the work has to happen after 5 PM) but my worry ends up being slightly less, so it’s worth the little bit of inconvenience.

Anyway, so I did all that I had to do after 5 PM as scheduled and it seemed to go relatively smoothly. Finally I was ready to start the services again by about 6 PM. I did so and then tried to get into the app online through the admin tool (to perform my very last step). Only the tool hung and I couldn’t get in. Repeated the process a couple of times with the same result. Tried to recycle the services but that didn’t work. Finally I did a hard kill and re-start and even THAT didn’t work. In a panic I noticed that one of my team members was online, so I pinged him and told him that I’m having some trouble. He said, oh no worries that he’s doing some work with the data warehouse with an engineer (Jim) on a partner team. Okay fine, but since he KNEW that I was going to be doing an installation during this time period, wouldn’t it have been nice if he had thought to contact me and say something like, “hey, I’m going to be working on some stuff, so don’t try to start services until I shoot you an email”. I mean, would that have been too much to ask?

So anyway, in the meantime the other guy (Jim) pings me and asks me how the migration went. I tell him that it was okay and that I’m just waiting on Team Member. Jim says that Team Member has been driving him crazy (they’ve been on IM and the phone for a while, I gather). Jim starts a chat with the three of us and then we’re just waiting, waiting, waiting. It’s going on 7 PM at this stage so finally I ask if anyone has an idea how long it’s going to take because I want to know whether I should run home (at this point I’m going on 11 hours in this cube). Team Member says that he doesn’t like to throw out time predictions as these things can be unpredictable (now THAT is helpful). And then he says, “If you have to go home, then GO”. Well, GEEZ, that’s easy for him to say, he's already sitting at home! (And has been all day).

So I run home, boot back up, log back in and ping both Team Member and Jim to let them know that I’m back online. Apparently nothing has happened yet so I’m pretty glad I made the decision to go home. About this time Jim starts telling me more about how Team Member is making him crazy, talking to him on speaker phone with all hell breaking loose and complete chaos going on in the background at his house so much so that Jim literally has to yell and neither can hear each other. He also says that Team Member was really weird, like, “loopy”. I ask him, “In what way? Do you mean like having cocktails or something?” and he says, yes seriously, it does seem like that, or something like that. So. Freaking. Weird.

Finally Team Member tells me that he’s done and that the services are running. I try the admin tool again and Jim the front-end, but neither of us can get in (still). I ping Team Member back, but by now he’s just completely MIA, must have just walked away without waiting to see that everything was okay. He was so cryptic and vague the whole time that this doesn’t surprise me – it makes me crazy when people don’t communicate clearly! Anyway, luckily once I do a hard kill and restart, everything seems to sort itself out, uh about three hours after I started this whole thing. What a nightmare. But at least I was able to close the loop and Jim ended up happy in the end.

Oh and the last part was that the customer told me that they wouldn’t be validating the install until after 10:30 PM that night. I had involved the off-shore team just in case but, worried, I monitored email until midnight and then woke up throughout the night to check, finally getting up around 5:30 AM to send an email out looking for status. Well. I never got the final validation from them until 3 PM or so on Friday! By then I was a wreck.

Was I ever happy to see the end to this work week. It must have been the longest short week ever.

Jumping Night: Wednesday

I wanted to write about this before too much time went by because I want to remember. I think it’s helpful for me to write about my riding lessons sometimes as it helps me to remember the details and helps me absorb some of what I've learned. Might not be too interesting for people to read about, but it does help me.

So I wrote about Tuesday night with Ann. Wednesday night was riding with Kelly. I had never met Kelly before, so I really didn’t know what to expect from her at all. Well, like Ann, I found her session very effective and insightful. Her style was to really zero in and individualize the lesson, spending blocks of time on each person in the class, particularly after each jump course. Her style was to talk you through somewhat while jumping, but then to do a very thorough debriefing once your course was finished. First she would ask what you thought about it, what you felt had worked and hadn’t worked. And then she would follow with what she felt worked and didn’t work. A jump course always seems to go by in such a blur that I found this deconstruction pretty helpful. She was also very complimentary of me and of Lulu and I together, so I was pretty encouraged after all that.

A comment on Lulu too … I felt like we came together very, very nicely on Wednesday. We managed to ride very steady, no mad rushing, a few big spots here and there, but nothing crazy. Even her pacing through the combination (two fences that were set up as an in-and-out – jump in, and then it’s two or three strides and you jump out) was almost perfect by the time we were done. Combinations have been tricky for us most times, so I was very happy with that. Kelly was also very complimentary about my position over all, felt that I was pretty much always correct, never got in Lulu’s way and even the couple of times Lulu jumped big (and early) that I never let it get me flustered or that my position suffered much because of it. She was very excited because I (apparently) managed a perfect automatic release a couple of times. So I ended the lesson on a pretty great note and very happy with Lulu and our continued progress. Of course all this individual attention for each student in class made for a long lesson, but I didn’t mind because I felt like I got a lot out of it.

One last note: there is an older teenager (Alex) who has been in some of my lessons from time to time since September. She was riding with me again on Wednesday. She is a very super bubbly and enthusiastic kid and it’s very hard not to catch onto her mood. Anyway, so after our lesson she told me that Lulu and I are her new very favorite “couple” (horse & rider combo). Too funny – cracked me up!

So, overall it was a great week of riding. I was supposed to ride (free ride) tonight, but I was just so damn tired after very little sleep for most of the week and then practically NO sleep last night that I felt so lousy and just couldn’t do it. One of these days I vow that I’m going to get myself down to the barn on a Friday night!

A Little Bit Excited

I had my painter by the other day to take a look at my two upstairs bathrooms so that he could do an estimate for me. I had been putting off doing anything about these rooms because I really want to renovate. But that would requite tile work and new cabinetry and counter-tops and fixtures and whatever. Which means a bunch of money. So I've been putting off the bathrooms until I had the money to do all that. Yet, this year I had said that I wasn't going to do any unnecessary home improvement projects. However, I think I just finally got really sick of looking at these horrible bathrooms, particularly my personal one, so I decided to compromise and at least paint. So, I gave the painter the green light and he's going to start on Monday! They'll look like completely different rooms after he gets done with them -- especially the master bath that is currently covered from ceiling to floor in battleship gray paint, with two walls in silver-gray wallpaper (you just gotta wonder what the people who did this were thinking). Anyway, If I remember, I'll take some before and after pictures. It's amazing how a small home facelift can also lift one's spirits a bit.

Nicker

Oh I forgot to add: Last night when I arrived at the barn and was walking down the aisle, Lulu actually nickered at me! She recognized me and was happy to see me. This had happened once before out in the pasture, but at the time I thought it might have been because she was alone out there, was a little lonely and missing her pasture buddies and was looking for some company. Anyway, it warmed my little heart -- it's the simple things in life.

Another Jumping Night

Last night was my first (riding) training session since Alison left for her hiatus. Ann is basically Alison’s 2nd in command and I’ve known her pretty much since the day I started at Apple Tree, however she had never trained me before. In the early Fall when I was still riding late Friday afternoons, I had a couple (Steve & Jennifer) in my lesson. Over the course of the months I’ve become pretty friendly with them. Since the schedule has been changed up for Winter, Steve has ended up in my Tuesday night lesson, but Jennifer rides on another day. Anyway, last night before our session I was asking Steve what Ann is like to ride with and he said, “She’s tough. She made Jennifer cry once.” ACCCCCCKKKKKKKK! Of course you have to understand that this is coming from the guy who once told me that he imagined my life is much like a “Mary Tyler Moore” episode, so there it is.

Anyway, the reality of the lesson was that I found Ann very insightful and very effective. I also have the added benefit with her that she knows Lulu really, REALLY well as she did a lot of the initial schooling and training on her when she was first acquired by the barn. So it was a jumping night. The last jumping night I had had, I had almost fallen off. Seriously, I was hanging by a thread, but managed to stay on by sheer will mostly. Luckily Lulu had stood still enough that I was able to hoist myself back into the saddle somehow, the alternative would have been falling on top of a jump, which probably would have hurt somewhat. Anyway so, even though that night I had continued on to jump a bunch, I was slightly nervous last night. Not scared really, just a little edgy. So, last night ended up going very well. Lulu has this thing of getting very speedy and strung-out while jumping, we’ve had many a jumping round that I have felt was slightly out of control. I mean, not flat-out, bit-in-the-teeth out of control, but much faster than necessary and fast enough where I have become a little bit more of a passenger than anyone ever should be on a horse around a jump course. So I’ve been working on keeping Lulu slow and balanced and quiet over fences. Sometimes I am successful and sometimes not so much, but it’s always in my mind while jumping her and is something very specific that I’m trying to improve.

So Ann was pretty committed last night to working on this with me. Constantly reminding me to balance Lulu, slow her down, quiet my body, lift her up and get her off her forehand (as she tends to get very heavy on the forehand, particularly in corners and on landing over fences). She was very active in keeping a conversation with me as I performed each jump course, and with immediate feedback directly after and I found it pretty helpful. By the end of the session I really felt that we were getting somewhere. And now tonight I have another lesson (with a different trainer) so I’ll get to try it all out again and see if some of the stuff Ann helped me with has stuck with me. If not, there will always be more lessons, it’s always going to be a work in progress, after all. Still, I feel pretty good about our experience overall, I feel like I am making progress. Sometimes pretty slow progress, but progress nonetheless.

"What a Cluster!!!"

ARGH! This is so frustrating. So, I have a really, really common name. It really has become the bane of my existence, I swear. So there was another person at my company who shared my exact, same name. So, from the very beginning, and I'm talking before I was even actually hired, this has been a huge pain in the ASS. In order to submit my application so that I could be hired, I had to open an online account with the company career center. Only the application wouldn't allow me to open the account because it said that I already worked there. Only I didn't, SHE did. ARGH! So I knew from the very beginning that this was going to be a problem. My email address had to be qualified with my middle initial, which meant that I was forever getting her emails, IMs, meeting invites, mail, BlackBerry invoices, phone calls, you name it (and she was forever receiving mine).

This was all enough of a big pain in the ass, but then she left the company in November. Well. Three days after that, my BlackBerry was turned off. After calling tech support the following week and sorting it out, turns out that they thought MY BlackBerry was HERS. So mine got shut off. Got that turned back on. And then over the months I've received emails and demands with spreadsheets asking for information about applications or databases I had never heard of, with my name designated as the application "expert". Each time I've been like, "WTF???" And of course most of these applications sounded just familiar enough that I wasn't 100% sure at first that it wasn't something of mine, which meant each time it was something that I had to spend time investigating a bit. But each and every time it was something for the former employee. Someone searching for info on something and looking for someone with my name (who also used to work for IT) and just assuming I must be the right person.

And now the latest kicker was this past Thursday. Suddenly my BlackBerry stopped loading email. Again. Dead all weekend, I tested the IM service and the phone this morning and everything was gone. W. T. F. So I called tech support again and they told me that I seemed to no longer have a BB account and that I was going to have to call the service provider. Called Sprint/Nextel and ended up on the phone with them for about an hour with the end result that they couldn't help me either. Although, they WERE able to tell me the "new" account name associated with my phone number (someone in Retirement and Investment Services, not even remotely related to my group). So, finally I found an internal "Mobile Support Group", called them and it turns out they WERE the right people to talk to. Even still, they had me on the phone for a half an hour or so while they unsnarled the problem. And of course they also had to go back to Sprint/Nextel to get the account sorted out. So basically, what they figured happened is that the old account got deleted, the other person's BB was even with a different service provider (Verizon), but then someone eye-balling the list of people who should have been cut off, saw my name and deleted it in a panic. Or something. SHEESH!!! As Julia would say, "WHAT A CLUSTER!!!" GAH! What next?

ACK ACK ACK

So, I was at my Jenny Craig appointment this afternoon and my phone started ringing. I went running for it, managed to get it in time and it was Rowena from the other barn I was riding at back in the Fall. Yikes! I told her that I would have to call her back and so I started to freak out about what I was going to say. In case you didn't read about it, or don't remember my posts, I had started with Rowena's barn when I first started riding again back in September. I rode with her for a couple of weeks and then decided to give another barn a try. For a while I rode at both places. Typically I would ride with Ro on Saturdays where, more often than not, we would do something fun like a trail ride and I rode with Alison on Fridays where we would do real dressage or jumping work. Then I decided to do the half lease on Lulu with the second barn, I started getting more serious about my riding goals and so I pretty much committed myself to Apple Tree (the second barn). In the meantime, I kind of fell off the face of the Earth for Ro. I never told her that I was riding at the other barn (I had told Alison about the first barn however) I just stopped coming by without saying anything, which was kind of crappy on my part really.

Anyway, so I really felt terrible about it, but chicken too. Ro and her husband Elliot were so wonderfully nice to me. I mean, Ro even let me ride a time or two without my having to pay her anything. She was very complementary about my supposed skills and felt that I was going to be very good for their barn. So I called her back once I was back on the road. She was so sweet, wanted to know how I was, if I was okay, did I still have my job (she had heard about the layoffs, I'm sure). She didn't ask if I was riding anywhere else or question me about why I had disappeared (which I was grateful for) but just went on to say that I should come by sometime, that I should come see the "girls" (her other adult riders who are a very friendly and social group). She also said that the next party they have, that I should think about coming. She is so freaking NICE!

I made the decision about where I was going to ride because I truly think that Apple Tree is going to make me a much better rider. They are immersed in the discipline of riding that I most want to follow and they have horses that are appropriate for my abilities and my goals. Ro's place was a blast. More casual, there is the opportunity for fun and for lots of trail riding, but I didn't feel in the end that I was going to be able to pursue my goals nearly as well there. I think if I wanted to have a horse and go out on a trail and just screw around on the weekends, it would be the perfect place. But I'm right now a little more ambitious than that, even if I never, ever end up competing. So I made my decision and I feel good about it, haven't regretted it for a second. Apple Tree has turned out to be everything I had hoped that it would be and then some, but I still do feel badly about blowing off Ro. I wish I had unlimited time and funds so that I could ride at both places, but that, of course, really isn't very realistic in real life (at least in my real life). Still, I am very glad that she reached out and called me. I feel a little better (although still guilty and a little shitty) about everything.

I Feel MUCH Better Now

I just had a really lazy weekend that I spent mostly lying around doing a whole lot of nothing (which is sometimes the nicest break you can give yourself) but I was feeling like quite a slug and mad at myself for ignoring some of my more important and immediate goals. So, I just ran on the treadmill for about thirty minutes. It was nothing very impressive, in fact, for some reason I found it harder on my treadmill than I've been finding similar runs on the treadmill at the gym at work. I wonder why that is? Anyway, at least I got something done, so I really do feel much better now. I always know that I'm going to feel this way after a workout, one would think I would be more motivated to actually feel it (and thus more motivated to work out), but it just doesn't seem to work out that way. Unfortunately.

3-Year Anniversary

This weekend represents the anniversary of my move up to New Hampshire. Three years ago I left my office at my former company, where I had worked for 16 years. I said goodbye to NYC and moved into a corporate apartment up here in New Hampshire. I started work at New Company on Tuesday, just three days after leaving NYC and Old Company. January is a rough time of year to transition to living here and my transition was made even tougher because I didn't have a car, or even a license at the time! I was also right away thrown into a high-pressure project for a difficult customer at New Company, where a lot of responsibility and weight of the work was immediately on my shoulders. The first half year here was pretty stressful and tough, but I came through it all okay and never, even for a second, regretted my decision.

I'd say that my first two years here were really transitional for me. In many ways I felt pretty settled in immediately, and in others, well, I think sub-consciously it was a little harder on me than I was willing to admit. It translated to my gaining a bunch of weight during the first two years, weight that I really couldn't afford to gain. But after those two transitional years, I really felt like things started to settle more comfortably for me. I finally came off that first, high-pressure project and my job has been allowed to move forward. I took control and lost the weight that I had gained, and then some and started putting down roots that make me truly feel like this is where I belong.

In many ways these past three years have flown by, but I also sort of feel like I've been here forever. I look back on my NYC years very fondly, and sometimes a little wistfully. I'll never, ever regret living there, that experience is so much a part of who I am now. But I can never see myself going back to live there either. I am so happy that I was able to have that experience and now I have been so, SO happy that I was given such an excellent opportunity to move on whole-heartedly to a place that I love.