I had big plans for this week: finish the rest of my business set up to-do list, renew my gym membership, record some videos for Minute Marketing, wash my car…
And then I got sick and then none of that gone done.
Le Sigh.
This week I’m very grateful for Trello and my systems I have in place to keep myself on track…I definitely didn’t have any extra brain power to waste on figuring out what I should be doing.
Saturday was Day One of the horse show with Pia. Man was it hot. And man, did I work hard before I even rode. I got there around ten and somehow barely sat down all day. Both of my ride times were after 5pm which I was not stoked about.
I got some pictures of those cows though, in between the many circuits I made between the barn and the show ring. Some of them at least were longhorns, though I’m not sure what that big one was. A few of the cows were pretty friendly and came up to the fence. Pretty much all of our horses got over the cow anxiety by show’s end except for Pia.
But Pia wasn’t really herself this show. We think she may have gone into heat. She’s still growing up (though almost done) and we haven’t been together that long. It wasn’t a problem last spring, but things can change.
We ended up scoring decent in our two classes on Saturday though she didn’t feel her best. Not sick or sore, just…different.
I went to Starbucks on the way home as I was certain I needed some caffeine so I could drive an hour without falling asleep. I planned to get my standard soy chai latte, but I saw they had these new iced tea drinks. I asked the cashier about caffeine content and then stared at the board forever, debating whether I should go with my old standby or try something new. Being that it was after 7pm, the cashier helpfully told me that the passion tea one had no caffeine.
Lol. No ma’am, I am here for that caffeine!
I ended up getting the Strawberry Green Tea which was…not good. Too fake strawberry tasting. I was instantly sad I didn’t get the chai.
I was so tired when I woke up on Sunday, I fully convinced myself it was Monday. And not just in that way where you’re only confused for thirty seconds what day it is. No, I believed this for a good five minutes until I went out to the kitchen and saw the cooler I’d left by the fridge to remind myself that I needed to take stuff from the fridge back to the show.
Despite the couple cups of tea I had before I left the house, I was still the kind of tired where your eyes don’t work properly. So I swung by Starbucks and got that Soy Chai I missed out on the night before. Heaven.
On Saturday, I spent the drive up catching up with my friend K in England. That time change is brutal and with me being so busy, it’s been hard to make time for any of my friends. It was great to catch up and the time went by super quickly.
On Sunday, I listened to my podcasts. I was going to talk about my favorites on this week’s Week in Review blog, but I’ll save that for next week.
Sunday wasn’t quite so crazy busy. I was supposed to ride after 5pm again, but I was able to find an opening and move up my ride by several hours. For those of you don’t understand horse shows or just don’t know Dressage, because every test is pre-written in an official book at the start of the year, each test is also tagged with the approximate time it will take to complete. That means the show organizers can plan out the day down to the minute because they know how long it will take to do each test based on how many pairs there are and who entered what. This is very useful for spectators!
I braided Pia and Escobar both days at the show. There’s a picture below of Pia with her mane braided. I learned how to do this a long time ago and now I have a useful skill that’s actually increasingly rare. Most people don’t sew their braids in anymore. Everyone uses rubber bands with mixed results. But there ain’t no braid like a yarn braid – those puppies are stable.
Sewing in braids is exactly what it sounds like only instead of thread, I use yarn. You sew the little braids back onto themselves and the horses usually wear a stretchy hood at night to cover their braids. If I have time, I like to redo the braids each day. If the horse is good, it usually only takes me about thirty minutes and then the horse isn’t trying to scratch their braids out all day.
Pia had a fantastic warm-up, but things kind of fell apart when we went in the ring. The first half of the test was okay, but the second half was all bad. Like, really bad. Luckily, because I thought I was going to have a better ride, I paid the videographer to tape me. So that means I have video footage of what exactly went wrong in the second half of that test AND I have a video I can share with the vet and farrier (horseshoer) as we make some changes.
Escobar was a STAR though. I am so proud of that little man. He looked pleased as punch to be trotting and cantering around doing a couple easy tests. He was not spooky at all (yes, really!) and was about the most uncomplicated horse we took to the show.
I was so tired when I got home on Sunday, again. Everything hurt and I felt like I’d been walking through the desert for days. I did hardly any work throughout the weekend because I didn’t have the energy for it. I looked at Trello on Sunday and decided that, though I would probably regret it in the morning, bed was calling my name.
Well, Monday I woke up and figured out why I was so freakin’ tired all weekend…I had a sore throat.
I’m grateful to now be self-employed. While I didn’t get to take the day off, at least I didn’t have to put on makeup or talk to anyone. I didn’t even leave the house. I worked all day as I had planned though things felt twice as overwhelming because I also didn’t feel good.
Monday night I had writer’s group again and I had some chapters in the hopper. My writer’s group has now officially read several chapters beyond where anyone else has gotten in Shadow of the Magician and all hope is not lost so there’s that.
I think it’s invaluable to be part of a writer’s group. I felt like I improved so much from being in the last group. I really missed having that community and feedback so I was happy when I got an invite to join a new one. Joining a group is very scary and nerve-wracking, but if you can get past all that, it’s really a wonderful experience. I have a great group, I’m super grateful for all of them and their feedback.
Tuesday morning I felt better and went to a meeting in Pacific Beach in the morning. I had an appointment in the late afternoon in UTC so I didn’t feel like driving home after. I dropped off my ballot (yay, civic responsibilities!) at the library in PB. I’ve never been to that side of PB, weirdly. It’s actually really nice. I might go visit that library again though I guess it’s closed for repairs currently.
Instead of going home, I went to the UTC mall to get lunch at Tender Greens. I was happy to discover that they DO have wifi…the internet lied to me. I spent a couple hours working there after lunch before heading to my appointment. There were a surprising number of people at the mall on a Tuesday. It took me awhile to find parking which was irritating because that was the original problem with the UTC mall before they remodeled it and built an extensive parking garage. But, that’ll probably get better when they start charging people to park there.
It is annoying that they’re doing that because it penalizes people who stay for a long time to shop or who go to dinner and a movie. But on the other hand, people do leave their cars there and catch the bus to UCSD. When the trolley line is completed, I’m sure the problem will be even worse if they don’t do something about it now. However, I feel like there has to be a better way to control it than what they’ve chosen to do.
Tuesday night I felt much worse so that was a bummer.
Also on Tuesday we got ants in the house again. I really hate ants. Like, really, really hate them. I also hate that they tend to show up when I feel stressed or just generally don’t have the energy to deal with them. Ugh. It’s like they freakin’ know.
Wednesday I skipped my lesson and rescheduled pretty much everything I had on the calendar for the day. I worked all day, but actually stopped around 7pm. I spent some time in my garage office sorting and organizing. It was mostly papers that needed to be looked through and discarded. I’m now about 95% finished with organizing that space, hallelujah!
On Thursday, I felt a bit better, but I started coughing. Felt like I coughed all day. Did some work and took Elliot for a walk in the afternoon. I ran into an older lady a few streets over who randomly decided to mention to me that the spiders were killing her roses. That stopped me in my tracks and I asked her more about that. My succulents have been struggling outside. I figure they need to be repotted into new soil, but my gut was there was something more wrong that that. I looked it up later and it turns out spider mites (not spiders) can infest your plants and kill them. So now I have to figure out if that’s the problem with my plants.
It finally felt like summer this week, which means my house has been getting pretty warm in the afternoons. In all the years I’ve lived in Mira Mesa, I’ve never set foot in the public library. I know, crazy talk for someone who loves books. But I have trouble reading books on a schedule so I do prefer to buy books or borrow them from other people so I don’t feel confined to a deadline. Anyway. Went to the library and renewed my library card on Thursday. I also brought my computer. Not having air conditioning at home will be a problem this summer so I’m working out alternate solutions. The library seems fine. It smells funny, but it’s cool in there and they have little private work stations with outlets. Some of them even have windows. The windows look out to the parking lot, but hey, at least there is sunlight. Don’t love the chairs though. They have these hard wooden things with no arms. I’m going to check out some of the other branches, too. This one is convenient because it’s only about two miles from our house. But I can tell this library is a little long in the tooth so one of the newer ones might have a better set-up for me. Anyone in San Diego have a favorite branch library?
I spent a couple hours working at the library before they closed. Internet speed is okay, it’s about the same as we have at our house. But we’re getting new internet on Tuesday that is literally about twenty times faster that what we have right now. Woohoo!
Thursday night I had a call with my friend A. We haven’t talked on the phone in a long time so it was nice to catch up.
Friday I had grand plans of going to the barn, but I woke up and felt terrible. So no riding again. Working was so hard. I was foggy, unfocused, making mistakes, and because I wasn’t feeling well, feeling anxious about the business and the future again. It’s amazing how when we have bad days or when we struggle, we regress significantly and the old demons come back to haunt us.
I told myself since I couldn’t take the day off, I had to at least get everything done that absolutely had to be done that day and then I could stop. I ended up finishing around four pm though I nursed a video that needed to be uploaded through the evening. It takes forever to upload videos with our current internet situation. I really, really hope upgrading our service will improve things dramatically.
Friday night, the boyfriend came home a bit earlier and went to Target. We have been planning a whole house deep cleaning and had earmarked Friday as the night we were going to clean the kitchen. I have been wanting to do this cleaning for months and months so I didn’t really want to cancel our plans, plus I was feeling better again. During one of my unfocused periods earlier in the day, I went down a rabbit hole of reading articles about the best ways to thoroughly clean a kitchen so we went to get some new products at Target.
We did tackle the kitchen! We did almost everything on the list I’d written out that I wanted to do. It took the two of us several hours to do it all. Sadly, only the stove and windows really look different, but I guess we have the satisfaction now of knowing we put significant time into the cleaning.
As we were cleaning the kitchen, I was struck by the dates on some things I was throwing out. I was throwing out spices from 2014 and 2015 and random food items from 2016. When I organized papers in my office earlier in the week, I found a lot of papers from 2014 and 2015 that weren’t really filed or organized properly.
2013 up until now feels like one big blur. After we moved out to Mira Mesa, I don’t have a lot of markers to differentiate one year from another. Same job, same boyfriend, same house, same stage in life. Going through this purging and looking at the dates on things makes me think the blurring of years isn’t just a memory failure. It’s seeped over into the rest of my life. I clean, but somehow I guess I haven’t done a major purge since maybe early in 2016.
I do know that I was writing a lot more seriously in 2016 and 2017. And also working on my blog. But I guess I was going through the motions of life in other ways.
One thing I’ve been enjoying about the entrepreneur journey is that I feel a lot more present in my life. I’m a lot more in tune with my body and I can actually hear my gut speaking to me. It’s not that I’m not busy because I am, but I guess I just don’t have pressure in the same way. I feel anxious more than I’d like to and worry about the future, but the work itself is not overwhelming and is very doable.
What I’m Reading:
Tribe of Mentors by Tim Ferris (been reading this off and on since January)
The Book That Matters Most by Ann Hood
Give and Take by Adam Grant
What I’m Listening To:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDnfCuakV64?rel=0]
What I’m Watching:
Nothing this week.
What I’m Loving:
That it’s been sunny almost every day this week!
