It turns out that it’s a good thing I did.

The doctor said I had a sinus infection, an ear infection, and possibly strep throat.  He called today and told me that I do have strep.  He said that the medicine should be helping me to feel better, but that I will likely continue to be extremely tired. I’m so thankful for the cough medicine he gave me; it completely stops my cough and also has the added benefit of making me sleep like the dead.

I slept almost all day today, and I’m still tired.  I still have a fever, despite the medicine.  It was at 101 a little while ago.  I’ll wait until I get up in the morning to decide if I’m going to work or not.  I hate that I got so sick and have had to miss all this work.  Monday and Tuesday I had sick days to cover, but today is a lost day.  Tomorrow will be too unless I can manage to drag myself in.  I just have to realize that this is what my body needed right now.  Sometimes you have to listen to your body.

I stayed home from work yesterday, hoping a full day of rest would have me back on my feet.  I tossed and turned all night again last night, coughing and trying to breathe, and woke up this morning feeling worse than I did yesterday.  I slept all morning and am now watching my favorite sick day movie, ‘Hook’.

I feel dreadful.

-A silver claddagh ring
-A silver chain that holds a glass teardrop with a blue mushroom inside
-A diamond tennis bracelet that was a gift from my parents
-My high school class ring
-A necklace my friend Anita made me for Christmas two years ago

That’s about it.  So you’ll understand that I’m pretty picky about jewelry, and I don’t really get psyched about things too easily.  I found this on line today though:

I am in lurve.  If you click on the picture it will take you to the website.  They make it in silver and gold, but I’m partial to silver.  It’s so pretty.  Love love.

*edit*
I woke up this morning to a message with someone asking me if they could get this for me for my birthday!  I’m incredibly excited and feel so very lucky (haha) to have someone in my life that would be so kind and generous.

I’m really diggin’ it.

Hey, how ya’ doing?  I hope well.  I know I shouldn’t look at websites that have horses for sale, but sometimes I really cannot help myself.  And most of the time I don’t even find anything that looks good!  So that has to count for something.

However, today I was looking at a site and I found a horse that is gorgeous and would really work well for me, and looks like a good mover.  This one, unlike Remy (second horse down!), is even close enough that I could go try him out!  And my riding instructor knows his owner.  How perfect is that??  He’s also even less expensive than Remy, at $7500!  BARGAIN.

GFGs, you should go look at Granite Ghost, or Deuce HERE.  Go to the “For Sale” page.  He’s the second horse on the page, black with a gorgeous white blaze on his face.  He’s 16.2 hands tall!  That’s exactly what I need.  Don’t let the western saddle fool you, because to me it looks like he’d be a great hunter prospect.  Also, I’ve been thinking about trying my hand running barrels, and this guy would be a great way to start.

This is how I look at it GFGs: Eventually I’m going to run out of lesson money.  I can’t, in good conscience, keep accepting money from friends to pay for it.  If I had a horse of my own I wouldn’t need to pay for lessons!  I could just go ride.  So I’d need enough to buy Deuce, as well as enough to pay for his board until I could get a second job.  I’m not even asking you to send 100% good fortune my way… just enough to get me through until I can pay to feed him with money from a second job.

Reasonable, right?

Think about it.

Love,
Kate

Best of all?  Someone is actually buying one!  Granted, it’s a friend.  It’s also important to consider the fact that this friend is an artist, and she told me it’s one of the best photographs she has ever seen.  I was astonished by that feedback!

I’m hoping that I’m able to turn this into something.  If I could sell just 10 4×6 prints, or 4 CDs of pictures I would get nearly enough for one riding lesson.  I would really love it if I could turn this in to something that helped me out and made it so I didn’t have to worry every month about how I was going to afford groceries.

It’s been a good week, because I’ve seen potential and hope.

I can’t post a link to that one, as the gallery is password protected and I only asked Bre if I could use the photos in a portfolio.  I can say that I am incredibly proud of how all of the photos turned out.

After I finished at Bre’s, I went to a barrel show that was hosted at the barn I ride at.  It was my first time photographing any sort of equestrian event, and when I got home I was so proud of the images I had captured.  I used all manual settings, and did no post processing other than cropping.

You can see all the photos from this HERE.  I was really upset yesterday because I got to the farm and realized that my memory card was still in my laptop at the house.  I had to leave, go to CVS, and get a new one.  I ended up missing Elizabeth, my instructor, riding.

Then today there was a second day of barrel showing at the farm.  Today I managed to remember everything I needed, and saw Elizabeth ride Missy!

You can see all the photos from today HERE.

I’m really proud of how the barrel show pictures turned out.  I did a lot of research about what settings I would need to use, because I knew I couldn’t just put it on an automatic mode and get crisp pictures.  I really think I did well at achieving crisp, clear images of something that is very hard to capture.  A good barrel horse can get ’round in 15-18 seconds, so you can imagine what that means for snapping a clear photo!

One day, maybe, I will be able to work events like this and get paid a little bit.  At least that’s the goal, once I’ve practiced and feel comfortable.

I won’t lie and say that my parents and Aunt haven’t bailed me out of trouble financially in my adult life.  I went to school for 6 years, have a masters degree, and still make barely enough to pay my bills.  When I lived with Jake, obviously finances were better because the bills were split.  I can also admit that I was pretty financially irresponsible during that time, because I didn’t save when I should have been.  So when I moved out, I was in a really rough position.  I still am in a really rough position.  I live paycheck to paycheck.  If I want to go out and do something with friends, or buy a dvd, I need to plan that far in advance.  The only reason I am able to horseback ride is the continued charity and kindness of my friends.  My family has helped me out financially now and in the past, but it’s because they know that I work incredibly hard so I don’t have to rely on them that way.  I’m a grown up and I don’t expect that from my family.

My brother came home from training the day before yesterday.  When I talked to my Dad yesterday, and to my brother, it sounded like he had taken some advice I gave him to re-enlist and go back through the process.  I believe in my heart that the service is the best option for him.  He has never been what I would call a school person; some people aren’t.  It’s not because they are unintelligent, it’s because they just don’t function well in that environment.  That is my brother.  He’s very smart, but he’s not a school person.  I was so relieved when he said he was thinking of going back in, because I knew that he had made some comments that he was considering going back to school.

I love my brother, but I will go on record as saying he has spent the last 8 years of his life living as if he was a 12 year old.  Before he went to training, he was still getting up every morning and watching cartoons and playing video games.  When he wanted to go to the movies, he went to my parents and asked for money.  It’s something that I somewhat resented.  I don’t say that to make my Mom or Dad feel guilty, but in the back of my head I always felt a little put out that he wasn’t expected to go get a job to pay for the things he wanted.  I never went without, but it was an expectation that I would be trying to earn money in my summers.  Sean has had two jobs in his entire life.  He hasn’t had that expectation.  He also has no idea how lucky he is and shows no real gratitude for it.  Example: he went to Disney this summer free of charge.  And I bet he never thought twice about the fact that my parents paid for his plane ticket and his admission into the parks, and his hotel room, and pretty much everything else he wanted while he was there.  He has never been forced to think like a grown up.  He’s never had any real consequences.  And his way of showing thanks for that has been to be incredibly defiant and disrespectful toward our father, and then play the victim when Dad attempts to remind him that he is the child.  This of course has put my Mom in the middle of a completely screwed up situation.  She has been stressed to the point of making herself sick, my father has been stressed to the max.  And I have sat in North Carolina getting emails and phone calls and my only recourse was to email or call Sean and try to talk some sense into him.  You can imagine how well that went.

We all had hoped that his getting into the military would help.  When they sent him home it was instantaneous stress for all of us, because we knew what the repercussions of that could be.  Sean has always had a hard enough time sticking with things when they got hard, so we worried that he would completely give up on this.  When I heard him say that he was going to give it another shot, I was so incredibly relieved.

My Mom emailed me today and told me that Sean said he was going to go back to school and that the Navy will pay for it.  She begged me to email Sean and try to convince him to understand that the Navy won’t pay for school, and that school is not the path for him anyway.  She told me that Dad was already beyond frustration, and that if something didn’t change soon it would kill either her or Dad.

It’s hard to explain how I’m feeling right now.  On one hand, I love my brother very very much.  On the other, I want to strangle him.  I want to shake him and yell at him.  My parents have given up everything to help him have a good life.  They have put up with his immaturity and his lack of respect and his absolute lack of gratitude.  They were ready to kill someone when the Navy said they were sending him home.  His only reason for saying that he’s going to go back to school is that “school is easy” and that he thinks he will be able to live on Mom and Dad’s dime for a couple more years.

So while I love my brother, and while I believe he is absolutely capable of going back and finishing basic training and being an awesome member of the Navy?  Right now I just want to tell him to grow up.  I want to tell him to think of other people besides himself.  I want to tell him that if he’s not going to start acting like a man, instead of a 12 year old?  Then he should get a job and find an apartment and leave my parents out of it.  I want to tell him to open his eyes to the fact that his actions now and before he left had both of my parents so incredibly unhappy that they were sick with it.

A month ago I wrote a post about how proud of my brother I was.  He read it and told me that he’d cried.  I hope he’s reading this, and I hope he cries again.  He needs to.  Sometimes life isn’t about taking the easy way out.  Sometimes it’s about manning up and getting through a hard thing, because that’s what’s best for you and the people around you.  Life isn’t easy.  Not for anyone.  So I hope he reads this and realizes that the things he does have an impact on everyone around him.  I’m not holding my breath though; if I’ve learned one thing about my brother it’s that his immaturity makes him incredibly selfish.

I’ve never baked for someone like that, and I’m unsure what would even be a fair price to give someone.

*edit*

In my research so far, I’ve found that most places charge about .50 cents each for buckeyes.  It’s about the same for cake balls.  Cookies go anywhere from .75 cents to $1.50.  That would put the cost $180-$210.  I’m not sure if I should factor in the time it will take to do all of this into the cost.  Hrm.

Red Velvet Cake Balls
1 box red velvet cake mix (cook as directed on box for 13 X 9 cake)
1 can cream cheese frosting (16 oz.)
1 package chocolate bark (regular or white chocolate)
wax paper

1. After cake is cooked and cooled completely, crumble into large bowl.  (pretend there is a picture of this!)

2. Mix thoroughly with 1 can cream cheese frosting. (I used my kitchenaid stand mixer for this, but you could use your fingers.  It’s very messy… this is the bowl after I’d made quite a few balls).

3. Roll mixture into quarter size balls and lay on cookie sheet. (Should make 45-50. You can get even more if you use a mini ice cream scooper, but I rolled mine by hand.)

4. Chill for several hours. (You can speed this up by putting in the freezer.)  **Truly adhere to this.  If they are not fully set they will fall apart in the chocolate.

5. Melt chocolate in microwave per directions on package.

6. Roll balls in chocolate and lay on wax paper until firm. (Use a spoon to dip and roll in chocolate and then tap off extra.)

I do not like the toothpick holes in mine, and will have to come up with a better dipping system next time, or turn them in to lollipops.

I also made buckeyes!

1lb peanut butter
1 and 1/2 pound confectioner sugar
1 and a 1/2 teaspoons of milk
2 sticks butter (Softened)
1 bag chocolate chips
1 tablespoon shortening

1. Cream together peanut butter and butter until smooth.
2. Add milk and confectioner sugar.  Mix until fully combined.  (consistency should be like play dough)
3. Roll into balls (whatever size you like), and insert toothpicks.
4. Melt chocolate and shortening together either in a double boiler or in the microwave.
5.  Dip balls in chocolate, leaving about 1/3 uncovered.
6. Let set in refrigerator.

It took me 3 different recipes to find one that actually came out right with these.  Everyone who has had them has loved them.  I’ve even been hired to make them for a friend’s son’s wedding!