Lyme Titer Results, the Honest Scrap Award, and the AECs

Three cheers to just having fun with your horse. Gogo and I are getting ready to ramp up our work schedule in preparation for one final redemption at Huntington Farm H.T. near the end of August, and then the long-awaited AEC in September, but for right now? We're just playing around for a couple of days, mixed in with real work. We had our 2-hour conditioning hack yesterday, and after our 25 minutes of trot, we walk hacked to see Adrian at Dunkin Donuts (and she of course got her Plain Old Fashioned Donut when she got there), and today I had originally planned to jump school as I normally do on Mondays, but you know what? She jumped her little guts out for an hour and a half at 3'6" last Thursday, so I felt no need to pound on her legs any more. A better idea, I felt, was just to grab her bridle and hop on her bareback, and go for a cruise around the orchard. And that's exactly what we did :) She was so quiet and so happy and so chilled out, and at one point I found myself with both my legs off her sides and holding my arms up over my head yelling "NO ARMS!" It was just silly, and so much fun. I really have the best mare in the entire world. We can go one weekend and win an event by a landslide, and the next day go swimming in the pond. That to me is what makes her an amazing horse.

I also got a call today with the Lyme titer and Western blot results. I am struggling to make sense of the numbers (Lyme is a brand-new phenomenon to lil' ol' Midwestern me), but basically the titer was 1;1280, and the Western blot showed a mildly positive response. Meaning basically, she's on the borderline of treatable and we could go either way. Is there an active infection? No way to say really. Are the titer results this way just because she's had previous exposure? No idea. What we are going to do, just for the poops and the giggles, is put her on a 10-day course of Doxycycline, just to see if there's any change. If there is, then awesome! If there's not, then we need to address this as a confidence issue. I wish the results had been more difinitive, but, well, there you are.



And also, I was twice awarded with the Honest Scrap award! Thank you to wolfandterriers and Cathryn!




"When you receive The Honest Scrap award you must stick to some rules:
Recognize your award presenter and link back to their blog in your post.
List 10 honest things about yourself that others might not now.
Present this award to 10 admirable bloggers and link to their blogs.
Leave a comment on your recipients' blogs to let them know to visit your post to retrieve their award."


10 honest scraps about me that you may not know:

1. I have secret fantasies about life suddenly becoming a musical, and being able to step outside into a huge dance number where everybody I meet falls into line behind me. I also want life to be like a movie where everybody’s shopping bag has a huge loaf of frenh bread sticking out of it.

2. I LOVE Turkish delight. And RJ’s Natural Soft Eating Black Licorice. And Watties. And baked beans on toast, the good kind. And Cadbury, the real Cadbury, the Triple Decker especially.

3. If there is a fountain anywhere near me and it is of a relatively agreeable temperature out, I WILL get into it. I even had sex in a fountain once. IN it. Beat that.

3. The fight scenes between Cato and Inspector Clousea in the original Pink Panther movies CRACK ME UP every single time I see them. The slow-mo NEVER gets old!

4. It’s a life goal of mine to see every national park in the US, and I’m well on my way. I also want to see every national park in every country I ever visit, but that would mean a lot of starting over because places like Canada have an awful lot of them.

5. II am deathly, deathly, deathly, deathly, deathly afraid of needles coming anywhere near me. I can give injections to horses all the live long day though. But needles near ME? Dear god, I’d rather go to jail for killing the doctor coming at me with a needle than actually get the shot. I’d rather gouge out my own eyes with my own fingernails than get a shot. I’d rather die painfully from whatever horrible disease I had than get the shot that would save my life from said horrible disease. It’s that bad.

6. I’ve had a LOT of interesting haircolors. Bleach blonde with red highlights, black with red highlights, black with purple highlights, regular purple, black and bleach blonde, black blonde and red, bright red… and once upon a time I had the sweetest faux hawk ever. I WANT IT BACK.

7. In a 12-hour period, I decapitated a deer AND t-boned a school bus right off the road with my old Jeep, which was bright orange and named Taco, although it also earned the nickname the Murder Machine after this. In honor of the deer, I chained antlers to the front of it. I also rocketed off a cliff, rear-ended another Jeep the same make, model, and color of mine, and did an over rotated 180 on the freeway into an overpass with my sister in the car.

8. I always want to make wishes when the clock turns to 11:11, but sometimes I can’t make myself because of my love/hate relationship with it. I was actually born at 11:11AM; my dad thought they were announcing my weight and length and reportedly said, “Holy crap that’s a big baby!” The day Quincy colicked, I saw that the clock in my car said 11:11 on my way to the barn, and I wished he would be all right. Less than three hours later he was dead. When Metro was lame, every time I saw 11:11 I would wish that he would get better. He did not.

9. I'm disgustingly morbid. I love dead, rotty things, and I like cutting them up and looking inside even more. I love anatomy and the study of how things work, and I like to see it in action even better. Bonus points if there’s lots of blood. At the same time, I can NOT see blood or guts in movies. Only in real life.

10. Life is all right by me.



And, well, since I love ALL your blogs I am going to award this to EVERYBODY. So just take it and run with it! :D



Today is the opening date for the AECs! Unfortunately for me, I will not be sending my entry in on opening day, mostly because I need to secure my entry fee in full before I actually can. It's over $500, and, well, that's a whole butt ton of money. I have plans though, many plans. More on this later!