Itty Bitty Hooves

Shrinking and Expanding all at once

I love my job… make that jobs. I work from home so it’s lovely. I commute to my office down the hall every morning, and in fact, since I got my new laptop, I don’t even go that far anymore. At the moment I’m working from my couch while the TV is playing in the background. In my office I don’t have a TV. I like this. If I did have to find a job off line and in the real world today it would be much easier than in the past. Now you can find jobs online no matter where you live. If you live in Philly you can go to jobs in Philadelphia and find jobs of all kinds listed there. Just about any city has not only job searches specifically for them, but there are places online to find jobs everywhere. You can even find local classifieds online easily.

Online living makes everything easier even if you don’t work from home on the Internet. Kudos to the computer, the Internet and the marvelous techies that made it all possible. The world is shrinking and expanding all at once thanks to the worldwide web.

Equal Rights

Bob keeps asking me to quit smoking. Not in this lifetime most likely. Actually I have quit a couple of times over the past 30 years (yes, 30 years and that’s 30 smoking years). Those brief intermissions usually last anywhere from 6 months to once a whopping 2 years. What really gets me is that when you go back to it (and for most it is a question of when not if you go back, although some people do manage to quit for life) you are right back to where you were when you quit. It’s not like starting over, it’s just picking back up where you left off. I know why he wants me to quit. He wants me around, and that’s sweet, but what are you going to do? It’s not a good habit, it’s not clean, it’s not nice, but it’s not the worst one. I don’t drink, do drugs, or play around. I smoke, that’s it. It is hard to find smokers life insurance though. Everyone from the business world to the health industry has it in for smokers nowadays. Funny though it hasn’t hurt the sale of tobacco much. I really doubt it will. Thankfully there are still some insurance companies that will insure us evil smokers. Sometimes it seems like ‘equal rights’ are only the priviledge of those that follow the system, so it’s equal rights for who they say has equal rights.

Great new computer … but

I recently got my new computer and I really love it but there are a couple thiings that I don’t like about it. One of the speakers doesn’t work so unless a piece of media is sterio i can’t hear it at all. Even if it is in sterio it is so soft it’s hard to hear. The computer does have headphone jacks but read that appropriately JACKS–plural. Who makes headphones anymore with two prongs? I’m not counting the microphone jack that many headsets have. This computer has the microphone jack too, and TWO headphone jacks. And you MUST use them because you do not get both sides of it if you don’t so you’re listening to half ’sterio’.

Out of State Real Estate Made Easy

Texas is such a beautiful country. It’s high on my list of places to look for a new farm. What better place to raise horses or goats than Texas? I can’t think of a single place I’d rather go. Looking for a Fort Worth realtor is pretty easy and probably the best way to go when looking for property out of state. You have to get enough properties in line with what you want to see on a single trip down to check them out. That’s hard to do on your own but with the help of the Internet finding that great Texas realtor is as simple as a click. Lots of things are made easy with the Internet. You can find out a lot about a piece of property long before you go to look at it. Many sites offer great pictures of the land, buildings, houses available and indepth descriptions of what comes with each place. The Internet makes house hunting a snap. If it could only make the actual job of moving as easy that would be really great.

Cool New Gadgets

I should take my new laptop out to the barn and use the built in webcam to broadcast the goats at play. It isn’t going to get any use any other way because dang, there’s nothing like a webcam to let you know exactly how crappy you look. No camera should be only a foot away from its subject unless the subject of the picture is Marilyn Monroe, Pamela Anderson, or even, heck, Tommy Lee, but this girl just doesn’t look hot on a camera shoved directly in front of her face, and you are not going to be seeing any webcam pictures soon. It’s a pretty cool gadget though. a little bitty camera lens about the size of a pea on the top of my window here and it takes a fairly wide shot, about shoulder width (that you will never see). I’ve always seen webcams as those clunky little devices that you can buy seperately but the built in ones are so small you hardly even notice they are there.

Funny Vacation Memories

I haven’t been on a lot of vacations. Most of my traveling (and I do a lot of traveling) is for work either as a writer, or for the farm at livestock shows and such. However, I have had some funny vacations when I do take them however. I’d say my absolute funniest was during a trip to Los Angeles a few years back. I was staying with a friend who lived about an hour or so north of there. They were working one day and I had stayed behind to relax and in the middle of the day I decided that I wanted to go and meet up with them, maybe go out for dinner, or something. I was bored. The rest of the day was much less boring. I got lost in the mountains, spent several hours trying to find one of the biggest cities in the country and when I got there ended up in an area that was–well for the want of a better word, less than safe. I ended up calling my friend, confessing my ’sins’ and begging for rescue which arrived promptly and found out my friend had been worried sick but couldn’t get ahold of me because my cell phone was out of range or something and they weren’t getting through. Finally got my dinner. It was about midnight, and it was a bucket of very greasy chicken, but nothing ever tasted better in my entire life.

If I had known then about the online travel guides at Trusted Tours I would have gone online then and checked out where I wanted to go, got detailed information–oh who am I kidding, I probably still would have gotten lost, but at least I would have known what I was missing before I left. Next time I’ll look up what I want to see on my vacation–and make sure I have someone with me who knows how to get there too and really have a good time.

Check out the Trusted Tours website and sign up for their newsletter and you can win $150 Magellan’s Gift Certificate while you get all the information you need to plan a really great vacation. You can also check out the Knotts berry farm tickets and other great deals they have available for family fun on vacation.

What You Gotta do

I don’t know about you but I tend to be a person who can do whatever it takes when it comes down to ‘gotta do it’ but I’ll procrastinate forever on something that only takes a few minutes if it isn’t something I want to do. There has been a patch of weeds that has grown higher than my head right outside the garage door by the house. Pulling them would only take a few minutes, but I walked past them for months. Today I decided I wanted the picnic table over by the garage because Bob and I sat outside last night and I had my laptop with me, just playing around and was thrilled I could be online outside so I decided it would be even better with a picnic table there instead of balancing the computer on my lap. Cleaned out them weeds in no time today, moved the picnic table and now it’s nice and pretty again outside my backdoor. Only took about ten minutes. Why is it that I couldn’t make myself do it before? I knew it wouldn’t take that long. Yes, I’m busy. Really. Between taking care of the animals, taking care of my mother in law, doing my work everyday, I work from morning til night, but those weeds were getting on my nerves–and I still walked by them instead of taking 10 minutes to clear them out. Maybe someday I’ll learn to quit procrastinating and just take 10 and get it done. It would have been nice and pretty not to mention much easier to walk around all this time. At least I got it done now, oh, hey, I just thought about why it was easier… Bob was home today and I made HIM pull the weeds, haha. That’s it.

Safety First

Before using any diet products like Fenphedra it is a very good idea to look at reviews and articles besides just the sales sites to see if the products are safe, or will do what you hope they will do. Sometimes it can help you to understand the product ingredients better, or see if a product is mislabeled, or misleading. Take care of your health and always check every possible means of information you can find on medications, prescription or otherwise. Just because they are over the counter does not always mean they are safe. No diet or amount of weight lost is worth risking your health for. There are great products on the market, make sure the one you choose is safe.

Fit and Healthy Takes Help

Weight loss pills can help a great deal especially when you have a seditary job like I do. There are times when I need help getting over a hump, or can’t exercise as much as I should and weight loss pills give my metabolism that extra little boost it needs to keep from becoming stagnant. Most of all there are times when I just can’t seem to control my appetite. Most of the time I’m okay but certain times of the month, or even at other times for no seemingly understandable reason at all, I just can’t control my desire to eat and weight loss pills help for those times. All in all, I am really happy with how things are going with my weight loss plans. Hopefully by next spring I’ll be ready to jump up on the Tennessee Walker I’m hoping to bring home here, and ride again. I miss riding.

Break or Back Breaking?

I have been so busy lately that I barely have any time for my own work here on the blog, my fiction and non-fiction work, or even outdoor work. While I am NOT complaining, in fact, it goes to show how badly I had slacked in the past and my whining that working online was a ‘feast or faminine’ situtation was so wrong, it was me who wasn’t out there looking for the work. Not only have I found great–good paying work, I’ve found A LOT of it. I did have to take a break on Tuesday though. On Monday I got up and my neighbor down the road knocked on my door…I opened it to find her standing on my porch with a bunch of my goats surrounding her. They got out and made there way all the way to her yard. Oh my. So I locked them up in the barn for the day and when Bob was home on Tuesday we put up new fencing–fun fun, but at least it got me out of the house and away from my computer for awhile.