Emily is PERFECT!

I volunteer for the Little Bits Therapeutic Riding Association as a sidewalker and leader, and it is probably the best 4 hours of my week.

As a side walker I walk alongside a horse named Spud and help a girl named Emily keep her balance. On the other side of Spud and Emily is another sidewalker named Annabritt, and leading Spud is a lady named Kath. I don't really know what Emily has, but I suspect maybe cerebral palsy. At any rate, Emily is an 18 year old girl who is confined to a wheelchair, but lives a very full life. She goes to school, she rides horses, she has swimming lessons. And my favorite part is that when Emily arrives someone asks her how she is and she replies very enthusiastically "I'm PERFECT!" with a huge grin on her face. She's enthusiastic about everything! When she's telling the instructor who she's riding and who's leading and who's sidewalking. When she's telling Spud to "walk on" or "whoa". It's her enthusiasm, her spirit.

It's so beautiful, and I wanted to share that. Emily is perfect.

Then, as a leader I go out to the pony pen and I catch poor old Prince and haul him into the stables where I brush him, clean his feet, and saddle him. The poor old guy is the cutest little pony who has an aura about him that seems to say "anywhere but here". He plods along. Riding Prince is a young boy named Ben. I don't really know what Ben has either, but I suspect autism. Ben is so cute. He loves 2 things: outside, and music. The thing with Ben is that if the horses stop for even a little bit he goes to climb off. So we've learnt that we can sing to him and it'll keep him on the horse, or we'll keep walking. However, today his mom told us he was sad. And Ben is never sad. But today he was. So the moment Ben got up on Prince he was ready to throw himself off, and he was making crying noises and it was just not Ben at all.

So I sang. For an hour. Straight. No stopping. The 2 sidewalkers chimed in a few times, and offered up song suggestions but mostly I just plodded along with old Prince and sang. And I actually impressed everyone (because EVERYONE could hear me) with the number of songs that I knew.

But those are my volunteering adventures. Emily is PERFECT! and I sang for Ben.

Life is beautiful.

A Divine Thumbs Up OR When the Muffler Fell Off

So today my lil brother and I were heading back to the big ol' city from teeny tiny Breton and we were talking about my new car and how we both suffer from buyers regret when we purchase something expensive (and let's face it: a car is pretty much the most expensive thing I 've EVER bought...with the exception of 4 years of university tuition). Then just the itsy bitsy-est bit further along the road and we hit a medium sized bump and I look in my rear view mirror and there is my muffler (except I don't know that's what it is) rolling down the road behind me.

"wow, that bump took the bottom off my car!"
"ha ha, yup. It was close"
"No! Seriously! Look!"
"whoa! I thought you were joking"
"nope."

So then follows a five minute period of my roadside dramatics which ranges from dramatic screams, fake sobbing, dragging my feet through the mud, and hysterical laughter, while my brother calls my dad to inform him of the latest katies-car-update. (I hear my brother say "So, Katie's muffler just fell off" and my dad starts laughing.)

So anyway. I think that God was telling me not to feel guilty for buying a new car, and the clearest way He could think of doing this was to just drop my muffler on the side of the road.

So ultimately: I can't wait til Wednesday!!

The Invisible Man

Today I bought a new car, which seems incredibly ridiculous to me. I'm not supposed to do something like that! Yet, as I was driving home in my old car thinking "Wow, when I go back to Edmonton it will be my last trip to Edmonton in this car" I couldn't help but feel that somehow I was passing some sort of "rite of passage". A societal landmark, like highschool graduation is supposed to be.
Which makes me think: wow. I graduated from highschool pretty much 4 years ago, and it is now a distant memory, a rather un-impressive achievement in fact. And in 7 months I will graduate from my nursing program which will overshadow the whole car buying thing. What milestones have I got to look forward to after my BScN?? (this may not be clear to you, but it is clear to me that a list is in order):

--in 8 months I will have passed (crosses fingers) my Canadian Registered Nurse Exam (300 multiple choice questions...shudder)
--in 63 months I will have paid off the car that I bought
--in an unknown number of months I will have paid off my student loan
--in 12 months Miss Molly/Nicole will be getting married
--perhaps in 15 months I shall go to Haiti to work with Dr. Mano
--one day maybe I'll go to Europe
--hmmm...in 2010 we talked about having a CBC reunion at the 2010 Vancouver winter Olympics...so we should do that
--and perhaps one day I'll do the other "milestones" of growing up like getting married, buying a house, having kids, etc. Those all sound like fun adventures.

There's so much to look forward to in life, but right now I'm going to live in right now. I'm going to be excited about my new car (who's name is Charlie *pronounced with an accent that makes the 'r' really soft--so it sounds like Claire from Lost is saying it*)!

Now for 2 short stories that make me laugh when I think of them:
1. At work yesterday Heather (who is training me) made me talk to real customers and she would remind me to say something like "Ask how they will be paying" And I would say "How will you be paying?" And it just made me laugh because the poor customer heard everything twice. Once I even repeated what Heather said and then added "I'm really sorry that I'm just parrotting everything she says" And the customer said it was ok, and Heather laughed.

2. Today, my dad came and helped me negotiate for my car, since I would have just taken whatever the original price was not knowing what it was appropriate to ask for. However, when my dad left to go run his errands he told me to agree if the guy would come down another $150.00. So I said my piece and the salesman (Justin) went to talk to the manager, and came back and told me the manager would give me $100 since he has a soft spot for students. So I agreed. And then after Justin was saying that he was surprised his manager had gone for it, and that he had been pretty tough to get to the agreement and I said "Wow, your manager just seems like a really mean man! He's like the banker off of Deal or No Deal...some invisible scary man sitting in an office making decisions!" Justin assured me his manager was in no way a mean man. When I told my mom this story she just laughed and said "You actually told him he was a mean man?" Maybe I shouldn't have said that...but it's how I felt. If you don't want people to think you're mean don't be invisible.

Mosquito Bite

Today as I sat in my lecture on disaster planning I realized I had a mosquito bite on my toe. That made my already tortuous class a little bit more torturous since every time I wiggled my toe it became itchier and itchier.

I wonder why something is not itchy until you know it is there. It seems rather strange. The mind is very powerful, but how can it be that it just creates an itch because you see a red dot? That seems ridiculous!

My mind is powerful but it's thinks up the silliest things.

And now writing about this has made my toe itchy again, and proven that even blogger.com can't make me sound articulate and wise.

And I think maybe I have another bite on my ankle. It's driving me crazy!

Dotty

I'm feeling dotty right now. So my template will remain dotty until my headspace changes.

I have been reading blogs and I am in awe of how incredibly thoughtful and articulate my friends are, and I want to be like that. So I'm copying them, and starting a blog over here because somehow that will make me thoughtful and articulate too.

I'm going to write my paper now.