There are two types of “country.” One is your typical rolling hills, old tobacco fields, rustic barn with beams and a warm cozy hay loft. Think old Virginia plantations, Kentucky bluegrass or even parts of my home state in North Carolina. This country is pronounced con-tree. Then we have the sticks, the outskirts of a major city that aren’t quite rural but not quite metropolitan either. Some questionable trailers, one or multiple broken down cars in the yard… Even the…
Today we reach the final oh so exciting conclusion of how my dorky horse hobby is almost exclusively responsible for my career. In Part 1, Sim Horse Chat I developed strong typing and descriptive skills, and in Part 2, Automated Sim Games I discovered Photoshop in a major way… but the real reason that simming helped me get my career is learning web design. Even though sim chat and automated sim games were fun, my favorite sim games to play…
In Part 1, Sim Horse Chat I fessed up to my secret horse sim addiction that’s been around since I was a kid. While Sim Horse Chat helped my typing and descriptive skills, discovering automated Sim Horse games really opened up a new world to me. Hello Photoshop! Automated Sim Horse Games are sites that have a sign-up, usually a fee to play, and run in a similar fashion: you buy/sell/breed virtual horses that have stats, train them to improve…
I am a closet sim horse game player. There, I said it. The weight of years of hiding behind my fake cyber ponies has been unlifted! Really I should say I’m a former sim horse game player, because I don’t exactly have time for such things at the moment but I will tell you one thing: I owe my career to these games. That may sound drastic, but it’s true. I went to college for English Education (high school teaching), and I…
And now for the long awaited epic conclusion of my first major horse show as well as the show that made me scared of showing (almost) forever. As the record states, after doing remarkably well in mare halter I had managed to make poor riding decisions in hunter hack and gone off course in hunter over fences. All that were left were Hunter GAYP (Go as You Please) and Hunter Under Saddle. Easy peasy…. not really. If you have not…
The story so far: little Lauren and Lydia get a 3rd in Mare halter because they copied showmanship skills from another girl in the class. Little Lauren and Lydia then get called back in the hunter hack class, but Lauren makes an ass of herself by riding poorly… a trend that will continue. Now let me tell you a little bit about myself: I was probably at least 20-21 years old before I made it through a horse show without…
When we last left 14 y/o me, I was high on horse show success from copying a girl from a lesson factory barn and thus winning a yellow ribbon in mare halter – rock on me! This taught me a valuable terrible lesson early on in my show career – you should change your tactic at the horse show right before or in the middle of your class. New skills and horse training can be done in the middle of…
I started taking riding lessons in someone’s back yard when I was 10 years old. For a backyard barn, it was a great one with a grass ring and good horses. My trainer’s main focus was fox hunting, and while I learned so much about good horsemanship in general – equitation and the finer points of showing hunter/jumpers were not on the radar for my early equine education. I don’t remember anything about my first horse show except that it…