Oregon, Hawaii, California

After living in Oregon for more than 40 years I can vouch for this:

THIS IS WHAT JEFF FOXWORTHY HAS TO SAY ABOUT ‘LIVING IN OREGON’…

• If you know all 4 seasons: almost winter, winter, still winter, and road construction, you live in Oregon.

• If you consider that if it has no snow or has not recently erupted, it is not a real mountain, you live in Oregon.

• If you know several people who have hit a deer more than once, you live in Oregon.

• If you have switched from ‘heat’ to ‘A/C’ and back again in the same day, you live in Oregon.

• If you install security lights on your house and garage but leave both doors unlocked, you live in Oregon.

• If you can drive 75 mph through 2 feet of snow during a raging blizzard without flinching, you live in Central, Southern or Eastern Oregon.

• If you design your kid’s Halloween costume to fit over a 2 layers of clothes or under a raincoat, you live in Oregon.

• If driving is better in the winter because the potholes are filled with snow and ice, you live in Oregon.

• If you feel guilty throwing aluminum cans or paper in the trash, you live in Oregon.

• If you know more than 10 ways to order coffee, you live in Oregon.

• If you can taste the difference between Starbucks, Seattle’s Best, and Dutch Bros, you live in Oregon.

• If you know more people who own boats than air conditioners, you live in Oregon.

• If you stand on a deserted corner in the rain waiting for the “Walk” signal, you live in Oregon.

• If you know the difference between Chinook, Coho and Sockeye salmon, you live in Oregon.

• If you know how to pronounce Sequim, Puyallup, Clatskanie, Issaquah, Oregon, Umpqua, Yakima and Willamette, you live in Oregon.

• If you consider swimming an indoor sport, you live in Oregon.

• If you know that Boring is a city and not just a feeling, you live in Oregon.

• If you can tell the difference between Japanese, Chinese and Thai food, you live in Oregon.

• If you never go camping without waterproof matches and a poncho, you live in Oregon.

• If you have actually used your mountain bike on a mountain, you live in Oregon.

• If you think people who use umbrellas are either wimps or tourists, you live in Oregon.

• If you buy new sunglasses every year, because you cannot find the old ones after such a long time, you live in Oregon.

• If you’ve had a lengthy telephone conversation with someone who dialed the wrong number, you live in Oregon.


• If you measure distance in hours, you live in Oregon. (I still do that, but I no longer live in Oregon, rather makes me nostalgic though.)

[Published February 12, 2010 Celebrities , Humor, Jeff Foxworthy]

From Hawaii, "Walking with Goats"

And from California, "Artist at Work"

Oregon, Hawaii, California, all will be featured in my upcoming book of changing titles. Three weeks ago it was, Screw It! A metaphysical journal--no, I didn't want to live with that. Next, Choose Again! Now it is Life Beyond the Horizon. Any votes?

jewelld97454@yahoo.com

A Blue Horse?

First, a white horse. Look at this beauty to wish upon.

                                           
                          Horse at the Pomona Horse 2012 Expo last Saturday.

In the year 2000, on my birthday, I found my Arabian mare Duchess. She was twenty-four at the time of purchase, and lived for another 5 years, a wonderful horse who eased me back into riding after a 40 year hiatus, and raised my two fillies. I bet she could out-walk any horse in the Willamette Valley, and coming down the steep incline above our house, with its Oregon rain slippy-slide, she would dance on nimble feet, head up, a smile on her face, and together, avoiding the tree branches, we would sail down that path as though on a roller coaster.


I rode Duchess until she became arthritic, and then she played with the other two horses and served as the great grand dame until she moved on to the great pastures in the sky.

                                                                Duchess


Today for my birthday Daughter Darling gave me a FICTIONAL $20,000 and told me to buy something spectacular. So I am buying a FICTIONAL Gypsy Vanner horse. (See why I am into horses today.) Gypsy Vanners were bred to pull Gypsy wagons, they are sturdy, gorgeous horses known for their gentle disposition and beauty with white feathers on their ankles and manes that flow past their shoulders. Often they are a paint, and most commonly black and white, but they come in virtually all colors, I found a gorgeous buckskin on line. (Did you notice I said FICTIONAL?)


http://lakeridgegypsy.com/
Gypsy Vanner Cherakee Princess--shown with her foal.) A Dream Horse.

The Horse Expo this past Saturday spurred me into horse-nostalgia. It took me back to the first time I saw a demonstration in Salem Oregon by Pat and Linda Parelli that knocked my socks off, plus my cowboy boots, and my jacket as well.  Horses by the droves raced into the arena, jumping picnic tables, running, and trailer loading themselves complete with a rider. There were horses circling, lying down for their rider to mount, and being ridden with no bridles.  I signed up for the Parelli method, and used it in gentling my two fillies Velvet and Sierra.


For my non-horsey friends, forgive me my trip into nostalgia. For my horsey friends—Life’s a ride, come on…but first, a horse of a different color...

                                                     A blue Gypsy Vanner.

The blue color on the horse is its natural born color, the only blue Gypse Vanner in the US. The blur behind the girl is her wings.

P.S. Horse Husbands

My own Husband Dear was one of the best, supportive, encouraging, going to events with me, feeding horses when I was gone, and even driving the 5 hour drive to Burns Oregon, first to view mustangs, then to pick up 12 x 20 foot run-in barn kit I lusted after. On top of that with his partner, they smoothed the ground and assembled that barn from the ground up.  Two physicists, lifting steel supports, screwing in metal siding, cutting boards for the interior.   I would often hear such phrases as, "We have cumulative error. It's a parallelogram now."

Velvet and Sierra in the run-in barn that physicists built. The goats, Orville and Wilbur, can be seen behind the horses

Horses & Husbands: A Conversation With Jamie Greenebaum

by Jolene McDowell on January 25, 2012
 

Have you noticed most of the people on Parelli Connect are women? So where are all the men?


Jamie: My husband is not a rider. I started to say “not a horse lover,” but that is not quite true. While he is not comfortable around them himself, he totally supports my horse addiction, even enabling it.  Read more...

http://parelli.com/

Snake Cake

I had to share this, Baby Darling's--now Little Boy Darling's--3rd birthday cake. He asked for it, a snake cake. We delivered.

In the middle of assembledge, however, we decided that cake decorating was not our chosen profession. Daughter Darling was fitting fontant over pink icing, I was up to my usual tactics, paint once, don't like it, paint again. It was rather like Darling Daughter's and my Flip house where we shingled the entire back of a house and decided we didn't like it, so we ripped off all the shingles, filled the holes and painted the house.

I have to say, though, we keep at it until we get'er done.

More truth in the telling...

Sifting sugar

Bare cake being frosted pink.

Rolling out snake skin, uugh.

Blowing out candles.

We have enough cake for a thrashing crew...be glad to share it if we could.

Totally Nude in Las Vegas

Sharks, I’m talking about nude sharks, the real swimming-in-the-ocean kind. A surprise to find a stupendous shark reef in Las Vegas—I figure those sharks were either slapping their heads in wonderment on how they ended up in tinsel town, or else they are hooche sharks who volunteered to be caught hoping to become show girls.


The movie Jaws came out when Daughter Darling was oh, maybe three years old, and it totally freaked her. She would ask me to clear the swimming pool of any sharks before swimming. Well, now with her fear behind her, she is fascinated by sharks, and here to celebrate her birthday we end up at a shark tank—amazing how life works.

February 2 will be Baby Darling’s (now called Little Boy Darling) 3rd birthday, and he says he wants a snake cake. There is something weird going on in this family.

There are things to do in Las Vegas even with an almost three-year-old. We stumbled upon a free Dragon show at the Mirage Hotel. The show featured men in dragon suits—this being the year of the Dragon and all, Las Vegas is celebrating it. There were two men to a suit, like a horse suit where one man is standing straight while the other is hunched over being the tail end. These dragons were not ground crawling dragons or flying dragons, but pole dragons.

Those men in dragon suits hopped atop poles standing straight up to four feet high. Then to the beat of a drum those dragons hopped pole to pole. There were a dozen or so poles placed about one foot and a half from each other, and the dragons leapt from one tip top to the other, their feather-like hair flopping, and with the dragons rearing and wiggling their behinds, they looked like big floppy puppies. How the man in the back portion of the suit ever landed atop a 4 inch by 4 inch pole top is beyond me. Well, I can’t even imagine how the one in front did it either.

And then there was the Mirage Volcano updated recently so if you have ever seen it before, it is now bigger, better, more outrageous than ever. It is created in the bluffs and lake outside the Mirage and it erupts on the hour beginning at 5 pm. It was an astounding—fire blazing, monstrous rumbling, orange lights on water spraying zillions of feet into the air, lights under the water as though lava is flowing into it. Even from about 100 feet away we almost got out eyebrows singed. As a former resident of Hawaii who wouldn’t go near the lava flows, this is my idea of watching a volcanic eruption.

I bet the whole sum of one dollar and got back $1.18—better than the bank gives me. The trouble is I don’t know where my money voucher is…

P.S. I upped my website again with my new title to my book yet to be revealed...to read an excerpt check out www.wishonawhitehorse.com

Mahalo,