A Confession

Ok, I have a few confessions.

First, in case you've missed it...I'm rather obsessed with Twilight. Reading those books has been a life altering experience, as much as I tried to fight it, and I don't regret it one bit.

Second, I am beyond excited about the New Moon movie. I have tickets to the midnight showing tonight with a bunch of girlfriends and I cannot wait! I also now have tickets to go see it AGAIN tomorrow, during school hours, in hopes of actually getting to really watch the movie without all the screaming tweens, packed theater and general excitement and distractions from the movie that I expect at the midnight showing.

Third, and this is the big one...I'm a New Moon movie virgin. I have somehow managed to avoid all of the movie trailers that are out there. I have seen plenty of pictures and other good stuff from the movies, but I figure that's only 2nd or 3rd base. I have avoided most things that could be a spoiler for me. I ordered the soundtrack when it came out, but have only listened to the first couple songs on it because I decided I didn't even want to have that experience going into the movie.

Let me tell you, it was no small feat to avoid all that stuff either! There are spoilers, trailers and pictures every where! I've heard it said that if you piece together all of the trailers and pictures out there you could probably watch the whole dang movie. I have clicked away from temptations online, avoided searching them out and closed my eyes and hummed through ones that were unavoidable. It was really hard to continue to get my Twilight fix without accidentally seeing something I didn't want to. And I thank all the blogs and sites that had warnings when posts contained spoilers! That helped a lot.

As I've heard so many other Twihards express, I never expected to get this caught up in a book or a movie. I've never done the midnight show thing before. I've never bought shirts, sweatshirts, movie guides, magnets, puzzles, candies, stuck small pins in conspicuous places to "out" myself to others like me and spent countless hours browsing through merch to see if there is anything else I have to have. I've never "squee'd" and "eeeeee'd" and bounced around so much over a book or movie in my life. It's ridiculous. I feel like I'm 12 again and I alternate between laughing at myself and hanging my head in shame over it. I try to keep myself under control, but it doesn't always work. And the excitement building up to New Moon coming out has pretty much taken over my life lately. My friend, the one I blame for all of this, I'll call her The Enabler, has only encouraged my Twitardedness. Whenever I see her I pretty much involuntarily start bouncing up and down. I can't help it. If there are a lot of non-twihard people around I can atleast usually keep my SQUEEEEEEE down to a 6 inch voice. I've still gotten plenty of looks.

So here's to hoping this movie totally rocks! I'm pretty confident that even if it is bad I'll still love it just because it's Twilight related. I've heard very good things about it though and it looks like it's going to be amazing from the little that I have seen. I do have moments of panic that saving myself like I have will have the opposite effect that I was hoping and I will have put the movie on a pedastal (get it? 40 Year Old Virgin reference. Any one?), but I don't think that will be the case.

What are your feelings on the New Moon movie or the whole Twilight deal? Are you head over heels for it? Think it's the stupidest thing ever? Do you have a plan for seeing the movie? I want to know!

Lookie What I Got...

So I mentioned here that I ended up 2nd place in the cutting series that we did over the summer. We had our awards banquet this past weekend and I got a buckle for my second place finish in the Green/Green class.

Reserve Champion buckle...not too shabby!



It's a pretty buckle and bigger then my other buckle, though not quite as flashy. It's a little more simple and classic.

Do you know how excited I am that I even have buckles to compare right now? Oh my goodness, coolest thing ever! I'm pretty darn excited about it!

I also got 5th place out of quite a few teams in the team cutting they did for fun at the last show so I received one of these...

These hoof picks are so fun! I just love them.

It was a very fun banquet and great end to the year. The boyfriend has decided to concentrate on reining for now and doesn't plan to do cutting next year, but I would like to do another season of it. The shows are a lot of fun, every one is super duper nice and it's just a really good time.

Boot Camp, Shows and Mister

Midori and I have been working hard continuing with boot camp. Since the last post I have tried a few new things, one of them being switching bits to what I affectionately call my Miracle Bit. It's a gag bit and it's fabulous! Midori is almost soft in it! I'm not playing tug-o-war with her any more! She is way better and any time she thinks about hanging on the bit I can just bump her right off of it, though it does bother me wondering what made her so hard in the first place. I've always thought I had pretty soft/light hands. Regardless, it makes the lead changes so much easier! And of course as soon as we got her head under control other issues that were hindering our progress popped right out, which made it easier to understand why we were having so much trouble. Amazing how that works! Now that I know about those issues, we have been working on them and things are really coming along. Our lead changes still aren't pretty but atleast left to right they are consistant. Right to left, they are still a challenge, but she'll atleast DO them and even in a mostly collected manner (for us anyways).


So our lead changes are getting better. Still have a loooooong ways to go, but we are getting them. YAY! Our spins are looking more like very slow motion spins instead of watching and going, WTF are you trying to do?!? lol Our stops come and go, but I'm not sure that she'll ever slide. Our rating and circles are decent, we don't work on those much. She's spent the last 5 years rating and running in circles in drill, so that's not a concern for us at this point.

It's very exciting to feel that progress is being made! Unfortunately due to illnesses and scheduling conflicts we have ended up with a couple week break in lessons and riding for the most part. The ponies have all been a bit under the weather for the last week or so, recovering from a day or two of major runs, and with 2-3 shows coming up this month, I wanted to make sure they got a break and were 100% all better before we worked them too hard. Midori especially dropped a bunch of weight in a matter of days, but never got dehydrated or ran a fever and didn't look anything more then unhappy about her circumstances. I got them on Fasttrack and electrolytes to help their guts and make sure they didn't get dehydrated, but other then that I couldn't find much else that I could do for them. Sugar and Mister seem to have gotten over it just fine, but Midori is still not 100%. She was the only one that was ridden hard as she was getting sick and I wonder how much that has to do with it. I'm hoping she gets back to 100% this week! We've got our next show this coming weekend and I need to get a couple rides on her before then! We should still be able to take it pretty easy though, it's just one reining pattern and I don't think a lack of warm up time will be what hurts us. lol

There are two of the winter series shows this month and then we skip December. There is also another show at the arena that has a schooling reining pattern that we are thinking about going to. Practice is always good! They also have a trail class, which I really like so I might have to do that one too. Also happening this coming weekend is the awards/year end banquet for our cutting club. I'm looking forward to finding out if I get a buckle for my second place finish in that series!

In other news, I've gotten a few rides on Mister. We started with a new shoer who is aggressively correcting his club foot. The previous shoer was simply maintaining it and Mister had been pretty much chronically lame with abscess after abscess for most of the past 6-8 months. He's been mostly sound with this new shoer. Very exciting! From so much time off and so many issues though his shoulder was extremely atrophied so we spent a lot of time ponying him around or hand walking and light lunging to build his muscle back up. Other then some soreness, he's been just fine and in the last month or so I decided he looked ready to carry my butt around a bit. I've gotten 3 rides on him, even getting up to loping both directions. He is still, of course, very green, but seems much more confident packing a person around then he did last time I was riding him. He has been such a good boy! Last time I was on him the arena was pretty busy so I didn't want to push him with loping. He took everything going on around him in stride and stayed focused on what I was asking him to do, but instead of loping I decided to work on moving off my legs: sidepassing and pivoting on his haunches and forehand. He's very sticky with moving his shoulders or hips, though he seems to understand moving off my legs while I'm riding. He'll try to shape away from my leg or move over the direction I ask while he's going forward. It was a completely new concept for him when standing still, but after he got those wheels turning, he seemed to pick it up pretty quickly, I was pleased. I'm hoping to get some more time on him soon, but he was sick too and does still have some issues with lameness, so I don't want to push him too hard.

We had a wonderful day outside yesterday enjoying the sunshine and possibly the last of the nice weather. I only had one long sleeve thermal shirt on with my puffy vest! The ponies enjoyed some attention and a little TLC. I'm sure they appreciated having clean butts and tails, even though the water was cold. :) We got another paddock up for the boyfriends sister's horse that we are boarding and that freed up the arena-to-be area and got us motivated to have more sand brought in so we can atleast get the round pen up with some good footing. It would be really nice to have that available for turn out this winter and so that we have some where to atleast get the ponies some exercise on nice days, even if it's not great for getting any real work done with them.

Lots of work to be done, as always. And of course not enough hours in the day, but we'll get there! Atleast there is progress being made on many different fronts!

Hope you all are enjoying fall!

Sunday Stills Challenge - Halloween

This weeks SSC was anything having to do with Halloween so I've decided to showcase my mad pumpkin carvin' skillz. And the fact that I'm a 28 year old Twitard. Ya...



So I had some girlfriends over for the Great Pumpkin Carving Adventure 2009 a couple weeks ago and this is what we came up with.

All very cute and all totally different. Love it! Can you guess which one is mine?

Yep, I'm the twitard, complete with vampire fangy smile and all. In my defense, there was alcohol involved, but probably not enough to make this acceptable. I also may have been breaking in my Edward/Jacob tshirt that night, but there are no pictures to prove it.

So here I go, outing myself to the world with my Twitard pumpkin sitting on my porch. Only you can't see my porch from the road, so no one knows. Except you. And all the good people that read Twitarded, because I apparently made JJ and STY's day when I sent it to them so they posted it there as well. Eeks!

All righty then. I think that's enough embarrassing myself for one evening. Hope you all had a happy Halloween! And we're into the teens for the countdown to New Moon! YEEHAW!