Real talk, some days I feel like horse blogs and blogging, in general, may be on an unstoppable downward trajectory. Even though I came back to my blog gung ho, keyboard swinging… I’ve had a hard time motivating myself to update. But—this isn’t a post about that. This is a post about blog friends. The best side effects from the glory days of horse blogging when I went through my entire feed daily and wrote all the comments are the…
It has been a really stressful few weeks here. Eventually I’ll blog about it all, but let’s talk about one of the busy but fun parts… my trip to Oregon! Back in April I was feeling a little blue, and texted a friend who moved to Oregon a few years ago. Because she is such a fun, kind and positive person, I essentially invited myself over. That trip happened last weekend (sorry y’all, I think I brought the Texas heat…
I’m not a hunter. This makes me a bit of a hypocrite, because I do eat meat. While I think I could raise a farm animal to for production, I doubt I could actually pull the trigger. I’m not against hunting. Some groups animals (looking at you white tail deer) need population control–just not from me. But I love taxidermy. That’s the simple version of why I currently have a tab open in my browser of day one of a…
Hello undergraduate students of UCR! It’s me, that old person on campus who you tend to ask for directions because she appears to have been to college for a long time. Unfortunately, I’m just as clueless as you are when it comes to finding the rooms in the Humanities & Social Sciences building… but I do have a few tips for you in other areas. You see, because I am a mature student (read: old) and have successfully completed an undergraduate…
My apartment is finally to the point that I’m not walking around piles of boxes. The counters aren’t covered in stacks of mementos. All my art is hung on the walls. But I’m still a little out of sorts. Don’t get me wrong – things are better than they were one or two weeks ago. When I first got here, I didn’t predict how much the lack of structure would unnerve me. For the first time since I was sixteen,…
The place I was most excited to go in all of Japan was the Fushimi Inari shrine outside of Kyoto. It’s a Shinto shrine dedicated to foxes, which the Japanese believe are messengers that connect people to the world of spirits. Fushimini Inari is one of the most popular tourist attractions in Kyoto. Its path up the mountain is lined with red Tori gates, making for probably the prettiest hike you’ll ever go on when it comes to architecture. Since…
It’s been a pretty whirlwind week over here in SMTT land. Between getting my house ready to put on the market for lease, writing some posts for Jumper Nation, riding nerd horse, looking for apartments in California and smattering in some social activities between all of that… my blogging power is fairly zapped at the moment. Because I need a bit of a zen break, I’m going to share some photos from my Japan trip today. These were all taken…
For the first half of my Japan trip, Kyoto was burning a hole in the back of my head. Each time we saw a temple in Tokyo or any of the other towns we visited I couldn’t help but think, I wonder how much more awesome they’re going to be in Kyoto. Once I got there, I realized that it wasn’t so much that the temples were better in Kyoto… it’s that they are everywhere. You can’t throw a stick in Kyoto…