Time for a spiffy new blog! The last one I had was on Xanga, but infrequent posting and an overall useless experience on there prompted me to create this one. This will be a place for me to regurgitate the various thoughts running through my head, vent, voice concerns, and to relate the (hopefully) entertaining events of my life. Hey, you needed another excuse to procrastinate, right?
This summer I am working at a horse camp pretty close to where I live. This entails living at the camp during the week (room and board included in my wages) and helping to care for the horses, as well as teaching campers (who stay for a week) how to ride and developing my own horsemanship skills. I just started a week ago and am now home for my first full weekend off after staff training.
I'm definitely settling in at camp. I really was not looking forward to it before actually going, mostly because I felt so unprepared--but training has helped assuage some of those fears. I've also realized that I'm not the only staffer who feels this way, which is oddly comforting. Somehow it's better when a LOT of us are scared stiff rather than just a few. We're all in the same boat.
It's easy to count off the things that are tough about this job. Mornings are absurdly early (have to be up, showered, and ready to get horses out of the pasture by 6:45 a.m.). Nights are... earlier than my college bedtime, but still not enough for me to get a good eight hours of sleep every night. Days are either way too cold (mid-forties) or swelteringly hot (in the 80's these last few days)--and it doesn't help that we need to wear long pants and boots around the horses for most of the day. All of us wranglers are allergic in some way to the hay we have to feed the horses three times a day. I am currently about five times more sensitive to sunburn than I normally am, which has resulted in an extremely painful burn on my forearms and hands from the two or three hours in arena class I spent a few days ago.... and my nose is starting to peel. Once we get into the usual camper schedule, we will get close to an hour and a half of free time per day, plus one extra hour on one day of the week. I am a music major in college and need to memorize a Rachmaninoff Etude over the summer, which means using as much of that free time as possible to practice piano... on one of the sadly out-of-tune, antiquated (usually upright) pianos around camp.
But! Pretty much all of the camp staff get along with each other and work well together. We have SALTs now (which are like CIT's) and they are enormously useful in helping us get things done. I get to come home every weekend and do laundry and visit my family. I have a car that I love to drive. My old roommate will probably come down to visit this summer, and at some point I want to go back to Bellingham and hang out with people. And... I have a job working with horses. How cool is that?
Looking back over the last few days, I guess there hasn't been that much going on. Just lots of learning and figuring out the ropes. I've settled into my room there... know (kinda) what I'm going to do... have gotten to know the other wranglers, the counselors, the other staff that I will be seeing over the summer. I don't feel ready, per se, but somewhere in my mind there is the notion that I will struggle through somehow.
Next week will be the fun part. I will be seven days and nine kids (how many are in the riding group that I teach) wiser, with hopefully a little knowledge to carry through into the next week. I'm nervous, yeah. But I think I can do it. I was put here this summer for a reason, and I'm carrying through with that no matter what. I just need to figure out my plan...
Pray for me, please.
No comments:
Post a Comment