So I’ve always loved horses. I get excited whenever I see them, I have dozens of figures (including My Little Pony), and my walls used to be plastered with them.
I took lessons for about a year, but since my family was never very rich, I was left to pay for them myself, and eventually I was no longer able to do so. I had planned on going to school for Equestrian Studies, but that turned into Computer Science.
When my husband and I moved back to Blacksburg, I figured it would be a perfect opportunity to get back into horses. Unhappy with programming as a job, I was eager to find something I did like.
So I handed out applications, called farms, and got tons of nos or non-answers (never returned my calls).
One lady looked over my application and saw that I had a cs background. She needed help getting her website to work on IE8 (So does everyone else in the world, stupid Microsoft.) and so I came back to help with that.
It turned out that the solution was either to upgrade to the newest version of Microsoft Publisher (/slaps forehead) or get the server to send a command that made the page display the same as it would in IE7, which is something I couldn’t do.
Despite that, Deb, mentioned that her workers worked for barter. They cleaned stalls and took care of the horses, and she gave them lessons. While this didn’t solve my problem of no income, it would get me back near horses, and give me a chance to ride and get some exercise. I decided this seemed like a decent deal as long as I got a paying job elsewhere.
So Wednesday past I started going in the mornings and helping out the other morning worker, Becca. I learned the feeding schedule, mucked stalls, helped turn the horses in and out. I still don’t know all the horses on sight, and a few of them I probably only know because they’re almost always in their stalls, but I figure that will come with time.
Right now it’s just good to get out and do something. I still feel guilty about not having a paying job, but I have another two applications to put out today. Not sure what to do if no one contacts me. I am really dead set against any fast food job, and I’d like it to be a place I think I would enjoy working.
I’m probably being too picky, but I’ve been unhappy in a job before and the money isn’t worth the depression it brings.
