Three and a half months of my life in a mere 1035 words!! ;)

So dad was making fun of the fact that I have named all of my blogs such and such morning, and joked that my next one will be named Idaho morning! Idaho? I hear you say, but you’re in Florida. Well we were in Florida, and due to be there until the middle of May. Yes, that was the plan, but in the ever changing world of Sam and Jess, that is no longer the case.

Due to a sequence of random events we have abandoned this plan and changed it entirely.

The background… As non students at the time we had to leave the Parelli centre for a month between our Fast Track course (which went very well by the way and resulted in final scores for Sam and I of 80 and 82% respectively!) and our Externship; the Parelli’s very kindly offered us a place at a close by property to keep our horses and park our trailer. The current tenants of said property have a questionable reputation and we decided not to stay there.

We asked Jennifer and Martin Black if they may be able to provide horse and trailer housing, they told us to come on over in their nonchalant way. This resulted in us having the opportunity to be involved in a two week long colt starting clinic, which was extremely educational. Sam is now a pretty talented bronc rider after a bit of a rough start! This opportunity rolled into a week long horsemanship clinic and now into a chance to go to their place in Idaho and then on to the Alvord Ranch in Oregon which runs around 3000 head of momma cows!

Sam left Florida to help take their horses to Idaho, I was left behind as Scoot was leased out at the Parelli ranch and wouldn’t be available for pick up until four days later, and consequently I had to drive across the United States with three horses in tow alone. Not the funnest prospect. One gets used to travelling with a fully qualified mechanic, not to mention tall, strong, good looking cowboy.

Day one of the trip resulted in a broken window grill on Mouse’s stall of the horse trailer, a broken rear window in the truck due to my superior lack of driving skills. When turning I jack knifed the trailer, not necessarily a problem, but it turns into one when you then back up just a little bit and smash the window of the truck with the nose of the trailer. Whoops!!

Upon arriving at the horse facility where I was planning to stay I found it all locked up with no one around. I managed to find an open gate into an arena and some stock pens behind that. So I snuck the horses in and put them in a dark corner pen where they couldn’t easily be seen. Ok, so now I just have to tape the window of the truck up, hope no one steals our shit and go to bed, right? Wrong!!

Now Sam’s horse is acting colicky (sick) he hasn’t drunk any water all day and been in the trailer for 12 hours, the problem is he wouldn’t drink then either because the water in Jackson, Mississippi is so nasty even the horses won’t drink it!

Anyway, so after taping the truck window, I walked Sam’s horse around for 20 minute sessions, made a few calls around to find an emergency number for a local vet, took a little one hour nap then got up again to check on him at 1am. Got to bed around 2 still not really sure his horse was doing well enough not to be monitored. Got up at 5am, luckily Sam’s horse was still alive, and got ready to leave as I wanted to get out of the facility before any nosey, money collecting, rule enforcing, members of staff showed up.

Not a great start to the trip. The rest didn’t go too badly, met up with Sam and the rest of the crew in Lund, they left 5 days before me but took a bit of a leisurely approach to the trip, unlike me who put in 12 hour driving days every day.

Martin, who did not travel with the crew, wasn’t a fan of the leisurely approach and as a result we left Lund at 4.30am the next day in order to get to Bruneau to get started on projects the same day.

Bruneau, the final destination of this particular trip is very close to the Snake River in Idaho, very beautiful area; this is home for about 8 weeks before we head to Oregon to go play at being cowboys.

The time has passed quickly with lots of projects to keep us busy, mainly fence building; we are now self professed experts. I can even advise you on how not to attempt to snap your body in half while lifting an extremely heavy rail road tie (keeper). If you were to wish to entertain your partner however, you may want to ask me to show you the correct technique on how to achieve near spine breakage; apparently it is a very entertaining thing to watch!! Why do I love him again? Oh yeah, because he’s pretty.

So we are just tying up a few loose ends here and then we will head to Oregon to rope and ride all day!! J

We will be there for a month and then we will head back to Colorado to the Parelli ranch to complete our 12 week Extern course, which our performance in our Fast Track course qualified us to attend.

The end of our Externship will mark over a year of living in an extremely small trailer, living the horsemanship education dream. The horses and Sam and I have benefited greatly so far, the same cannot be said of our bank accounts and I cannot be sure they will ever forgive us!!

What’s in store after the Externship? Who knows, certainly not Sam and I.

Disclaimer: I realise the above text may be grammatically incorrect in places, I apologise to the educated among you, but you’ll get over it!! J

Up Before the Crack of Dawn

So, I promised I was going to keep up on my blog for my father's benefit, and it seems I am writing one of these every month. Seeing as January is almost over I guess I'd better get on with it!!

My day started this morning with a 3.55 am, yes I said am, alarm going off. I know some of you were not aware that I could get up at 3.55 am, (I used to be one of them!) but apparently I can!
Lelah and I fed over 100 horses in 2 hours and then I resisted the urge to go back to bed and went to work in the office instead.

We have over 100 students coming in to participate in the 1 and 2 star instructor courses starting Monday morning at 8am!! All week we have been making name tags and folders and name tags for the folders and .... The printer has been going non stop, I am amazed it hasn't gone up in smoke. I have carpel tunnel from repeated punches of the stapler and paper cuts numbering in the thousands! Well maybe that's a slight exaggeration; reality is I don't have any, but that is simply because of my paper handling prowess!! We have killed I don't know how many trees in the printing of the necessary handouts, and it aint over yet! The trees sacrifice won't be in vain however when we produce many, many new Parelli Professional's to go out into the big wide world to teach. I mean that literally, we have people coming from all over the world, France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Australia, even a few Brits are gracing us with their royal presence!!

Two weeks after the instructor course arrives is the beginning of FT1 that's highly secretive Parelli code for Fast Track number 1 for the year!! This is the one which Sam and I will be participating in, it begins on February 14th and runs for four whole weeks. By the time it comes around, Sam and I will have been at the Parelli ranches for over 5 and a half months, a long time to go without very much horse time or instruction. Our Parelli journey is truly about to begin.

I have been making good progress with my horse recently; only now he is sick, with a pretty nasty cough and runny nose, I haven't done anything with him for over a week and I feel a little bit like we are losing ground!! I hope he improves quickly and is completely over it well before FT1 begins, so that we have some time to tune up a little, so as not to embarass (the computer doesn't like that spelling, but I disagree and argue that is exactly how you spell embarass?!) ourselves. I think we are ready and will be fine, just a scary prospect, we start with theory and practical testing on day one of the course!!

Scoot and I are in this months DVD distributed to all Parelli members, titled Performance Summit Highlights, we are in there doing our mounted shooting demonstration!! I am trying to get some free copies to distribute to y'all so I'll keep you posted!

Pat Parelli and some of his mastery students, as well as Sam and I recently went to a ranch roping clinic held by Martin Black, Martin is a very talented man trying to spread the way of traditional ranch roping. Unfortunately both of our horses were sick and so was Sam, so our participation was limited. We learned a lot though and it was really great to see Pat in a learning environment, I think he picked up a lot of new techniques and information. Sam grew up in the same town as Martin's wife Jennifer, he is good friends with her brother, Jennifer invited us over there and it was a lot of fun getting to know them a little bit.

Sam has a real interest in this type of roping and the more I am around it, so do I. We plan to take a little time away from the Parelli ranch at the beginning of April. Sam has a commercial drivers license and Martin and Jennifer have asked us to help them drive their horses from here in Florida to their place in Idaho, it will be a four day trip probably, and mostly driving, but will be a good chance to take a little break. It may also help to develop a valuable contact with Martin and Jennifer to advance our skill and learning in other areas, and provide a real purpose to our horsemanship. Exciting!!

I am very excited to be an auntie, Nathan and Charlotte have had the most beautiful baby girl in the world, (until I have one that is!!) named Mia Gilbert, she was born on January 15 and they are both obviously instantly in love. I got the opportunity to speak to Nathan for about 25 minutes a few days after Mia was born and he gave me the whole story. I am pretty sure that Charlotte is his hero!

Well, that's about all I got really! I've been awake too long to concern myself with editing so, you get it in the raw I'm afraid!

Enjoy.

Love to you all.
Jessica