This Times It's Eight Things You Don't Know About Me

I was tagged with another meme by smells horsey Eight things you don't know about me. If I keep getting tagged with these "things you don't know about me" I'm going to run out of things. My life is an open book and boring, I think but here goes, I guess. Sorry it's not about Arabian horses.

1. I went to Catholic school. Those habits the nuns wear scared me to death for about the first four years. I really had trouble seeing that there were human beings under all those robes. Maybe that's because few of the nuns I met really acted like humans.

2. I play the piano. I took lessons for 8 years. I used to give piano lessons until the car accident that caused by double vision. Currently my piano is bured under a mound of books and I can't even get close enough to play it. But it has a couple of sticking keys right now so I probably wouldn't play it anyway until I could get those fixed. But I do miss it.

3. I played golf once in my life. Then had an appendicitis attack later that day. I didn't go to the doctor until the following day and they didn't do surgery until twelve hours later. I ended up with peritinitis and nearly died. I was in the hospital for 45 days with my temperature averaging 107° (yes, I know how high that it!) and given experimental antibiotics. It cost me my student loans so I was unable to continue college. To this day I hate golf!

4. My favorite horse in the rental string I rode as a teenager was around a 14.2 hand former bucking horse. She had a reputation as a killer, Couldn't be ridden with a saddle or a bridle (mechanical hacamore was ok) and me mounting bareback was NOT pretty.
But we were fast friends and no one but me usually rode her. My step-father liked to take pictures of me flopping over her back to get on, of course, with the focus on my butt. Even that didn't stop me from wanting to ride.

5. I used to be a crack water skier. I've taken more than my share of falls by laying over on the slalom ski and sticking my shoulder into the water. But it never slowed me down, I wanted to be as good as the boys. Although I didn't ever think I achieved that, the neighbors used to pass the word up and down the beach that I was going to ski so that no one would miss me ski. I guess they must have been impressed. I didn't learn that until is was nearly 40.

6. One afternoon when I was working as a groom at Feature Farm, the trainers took two of us grooms water skiing with them. I don't think I'd been on a ski in 15 years and I'd hardly ridden on anything but my custom Wally Burr slalom ski let alone the new style skis.
The newer slaloms are much harder to get up on but grip the water better once you're on top. But I took the plunge anyway. I had a bunch of trouble getting up. The water was going over the top of my head like I had never experienced before and I really thought I wasn't going to get that darn ski to plane, but just about the time I thought I was going to have to let go, I popped up on top of the water. Then it felt just like old times.

I didn't really think about who was in the boat, I was just glad to have the feel of that ski underneath me. I took to cutting and spraying and was having a ball until I hooked a shoulder. The spin darn near killed me knocking the breath right out of me.

I didn't even have the strength to fight getting back up again but both trainers begged me to try because they wanted to "watch" me some more. AND the one of them that could ski on a slalom spent the rest of the afternoon asking me for pointers.

The point of this rambling is it was the best day I spent with them. When we were at the barn I was just the dumb old broad who knew nothing about horses. Do you know how darn cool it was to FINALLY know more about something than the two horse trainers?

7. I used to be 100 pounds over weight. That was when I lived in southern California. My former husband was a beer drinker and beer went straight to, well, it went about everywhere on me. I think it took me about a year to put it on and it was two to three years to take it off.

8. I took two years of Latin in highschool. During the second year, we were supposed to do a literal translation of Ceasar. So I had him putting around the harbor in a PT boat. Sister Emanuela was NOT amused. It was the only F I ever got in school. OOps. that might not be true, I may have gotten an F in my Opera class in college, or maybe an incomplete. I don't know if it was the opera or the teacher but that class was sooooooooo boring.

In keeping with the tradition on such things, I'm going to tag Journey Mama because I adore her blog and don't get to visit it as often as I would like. Tiggerish Tails so we can all get better acquainted with our friends in the United Kingdom

QQ, the Quinella Queen, from Turf Luck my favorite horse racing blog, Donna from A Velvet Cage I never know what she's going to post about for sure, the pot belly pigs pics followed by the foal pics were great. And Simply Marvelous
so maybe we can learn something about Marvel since mostly she tells other people's stories like mine with the twins. lol Oh yes, and Callie at Midwest Horse wasn't tagged officially but did the post anyway so check out her eight things.

I have one more meme to do that I am currently working on so equinespirit at grazing in the meadow of creativity!! I haven't forgotten, your's is coming next.

Arabian horse arabian+horses horses horse Arabian stallion meme