Coffee With Tiki

This is a little less about Tiki and a little more about what I am learning from her. This morning, I did something I have never done for the entire 8 years we've lived here. I went out on the deck to have coffee.

For those who don't know the backstory, let me just summarize by catching you up--for the last 15+ years, I've worked two jobs, usually 7 days a week, usually averaging 14-16 hours. I would work my day job M-F, then zoom to the barn to train or teach. Weekends were spent training/teaching/doing manual labor to improve the barn, ring, or run errands for supplies for the horses. As you can see, I, myself, or Joe were really not in this picture. Just horses and work--and horses BECAME work. Occassionally (like what happened yesterday, actually) my body forces me to rest by hitting the "reset" button. I get sick. Stress tends to have a very psychosomatic affect on my body and makes me physically ill. One thing that I've learned about myself--and many others have seen--is that I will work,work,work,work until it's "sit down or fall down". I was brought up that you ALWAYS finish your work before you play. Unfortunately, I always have an insurmountable mountain of work at any given time. I feel guilty playing with so much work to do that I cannot ever really let go and just ENJOY life. This is hardwired into me. There really is no getting past this.

The past two years, having bought the farm (hahahaha! I really almost DID thanks to the purchase of a large training facility!) the workload that was already at maximum capacity DOUBLED. In the middle of this, Joe and I changed jobs to something more demanding, but something we really, really enjoy (most days, LOL!). So, in the interest of sanity, Joe and I decided to sell the big farm :-). In a better economy, it would have worked well. We would have had the capital to make the improvements we wanted to make, pay the salaries we wanted to pay, etc etc but we bought the farm in the fall of 2008 just as the entire country was taking the largest economical nosedive since the Great Depression. The profit just wasn't there to be able to run the facility the way we wanted, and horse people were doing everything possible to keep their horses. This usually meant moving to the cheapest facility they could find, and that was not us. Not because we didn't want to charge less, but because we physically couldn't. The mom-and-pop stables down the street that had no mortgage and had been in the family for oodles of years could drop their board to $200/mo, but we could not possibly pay our fixed operating costs while competing with them. We were throwing our own personal money, to the tune of $3k+ a month, into the business while barely able to survive ourselves. No one was sending their horses out for training, hardly anyone could afford lessons and board, and then our 4 y.o. andalusian stallion ended up not being able to be a viable breeding stallion for AI, and then suddenly died. We're a victim of horrible timing and terrible luck, and while we're still paying for it financially, we're very glad that due to the economic hard times our house didn't sell so we had something to come back to.

So, we sold the farm, moved back to our farmette in Aberdeen, had a party, and Joe and I looked at each other and collectively sighed. Time to relax! We're HOME again, and back close to all our friends!! Since moving back, our friends stop by often, we have LIVES, we've had some awesome parties already, (pot luck.....we're still broke as heck LOL!) but our lives are so much richer for the experience. We're grateful for every second we get to spend with each other, the horses, and doing things around the farm that make it better, even if it's only tiny little things that only we will notice. Right now, there is a large 4 foot ditch in front of our 5 stall barn where we're laying in a french drain. Our wonderful neighbors, Christy and Aaron came over with their barely-alive backhoe over the weekend and dug it for us so we can fix the drainage in the barn. It will be alot of backbreaking shoveling, but it's on OUR time, and (thanks to just boarding to a few friends vs a huge public facility like we've done for 10 years) we don't have clients staring us down asking us "when will this be done?!?!?!?!"

It's wonderful. I'm happy even digging a ditch......because it makes the home for our horses better.....on my terms......when I have time....with no huge expectations or judgements because it's not done fast enough, pretty enough, or with footing that Pooky likes but Fluffy doesn't. (hey, 10 years of listening to client demands will make anyone a little sarcastic LOL!)

So, for the first time ever since we bought this 7 1/2 acre farmette in 2002, we have our own horses in the barn instead of running down the street and spending more time at a leased facility than our own home. I can sit on my deck and watch the horses chew peacefully on their hay and notice how beautiful the back pasture is as Ariana and Sandy stand under the tree that's turning red this fall. I didn't really have a reason to go out on the deck and drink my coffee under the morning sun before. I didn't have Tiki to go watch and laugh at as she tries to mimic the older horses by putting her head in the round bale holder pretending to eat hay I KNOW her little neck doesn't let her reach the hay. I didn't have a chance to laugh while Tiki victoriously grabbed a mouthful of hay she discovered outside the round bale holder, waved it in the air for all to see that she too has hay like the adults!!! I didn't have the time, either. I was always racing to go teach a lesson or train a horse.

I decided this morning to take the time to go out on the deck, have coffee and watch Tiki nap for 10 minutes. The view from the deck is great. Sure, there's a lot of projects we want to work on around here--the work is never done--but they're OUR projects. We own them. They're for us, our happiness, and no one else. They benefit other people who come here to enjoy their horses,sure, but we're boarding to friends now and the barn is peaceful. The horses are incredibly happy and so are we. Even Pepper has found a happy place to nap. Makes all of us nervous as heck, but she uses a birds nest for a pillow and snores away during the daytime.