No, not health insurance for horses, but rather for people.

I feel extremely lucky that there has never been a time in my life when my health insurance has really been in doubt. There have been short periods when I have not had insurance, but always when transitioning between jobs. It was more a question of getting the paperwork in order than scrambling to find something else.

That said, I’m sorta-kinda in that place right now. On January 1, I transitioned to my husband’s insurance – which has opened up all these weird dependency anxieties like I am all of a sudden not my own person and a functioning, independent adult, THANKS A LOT BRAIN.

His 2016 insurance cards haven’t arrived yet, and I’m off my own plans, so I am in a weird place where if I had to go to the emergency room and they said “what insurance do you have?” I’d have to say “ummmmmm…” The answer is out there, somewhere, but it would require calling around to find.

All that is by way of a possibly TMI and almost definitely boring intro to my main question.

If you have gone without health insurance in your life, has that impacted your horseback riding?

On those occasions when I have been sort of in-between coverage for two weeks, or once a full month, I did not ride. Maybe I was being overly cautious. I have a much, much higher degree of risk-aversion than the normal person, I know. But my feeling is that riding is a genuinely dangerous activity, and that I cannot predict with certainty that I won’t be injured while doing so. If I were to take a bad fall and needed to go to the emergency room, it would cause real problems, especially if the paperwork hadn’t cleared yet or whatever. Like I said, really risk-averse.

That said, I’m riding a lot right now, even though my insurance card is floating out there somewhere. Maybe I’ve become slightly less risk-averse. Maybe I’m feeling more confident that all is settled since technically my husband has last year’s insurance info and it’s more easily figured out than if we were on something totally new.

Either way, now that I’ve typed all this out I’m going to nag him again to call his insurance company and figure out what happened to those cards.

So – what about you? Have there been times when you’ve been between health insurance? Have you chosen not to ride, or ridden anyway? Has it ever caused you problems?

…you start to notice things like this.

I went with the intention of watching sleighing, but only saw a few go thanks to my scheduling fail. Still a gorgeous day.

I have so many questions.

I love reading everyone’s goal posts. I’ve done many of them in the past, but I’m just not feeling it this year.

Many years ago, I did a series of new year’s resolutions for my personal life that were qualities I wanted to cultivate through the year, rather than specific achievable goals. I’m a pretty big goals person, but I like them to be broken up into shorter chunks and to be more actionable. Big annual goal-setting has never worked for me.

I thought a lot over the holidays, and during my blogging hiatus, about what I really wanted out of the coming year, and I thought about the year I set those qualities.

It hit me that I could sum up my hopes for 2016 in one word: focus.

I want to focus on doing fewer things, but doing them better.

I want to focus only on the things that really make me excited, that really matter to me, rather than frittering my energy and my direction away on too many things at once.

I want to increase my actual capacity for focus, which has sadly degraded over the last few months especially; longer stretches of paying attention to one thing at a time. No stopping to check social media, tidy the living room, chase the dog – one thing at a time.

In horse terms, that means more emphasis on the basics, instead of getting caught up in chasing whatever’s next. Am I riding my horse on a regular basis? Am I getting him through and supple and working well in each ride, even if it’s just at the walk? Are the things I’m buying true needs, and quality items, or am I just flailing and making purchases out of a loss of direction? How are my finances – solid and growing?

I’ll try to touch back on this, maybe quarterly, to see how it’s going. But that’s where my head is for 2016. Here’s to the new year.

Doing anything in this house without the moral support and crucial help of the dog or the cat is impossible, and wrapping my gifts for the 2015 blogger gift exchange was no exception.

So, I present to you visual evidence of their aid, as a series of outtakes.

Anyone else have overly-helpful pets?

You may have guessed this what with the complete lack of posting and all, but I’ve decided to take an official hiatus from blogging until the new year.

I am trying very hard to shepherd what remaining mental energy I have into riding my horse and getting through the holidays. I am one of those sad-around-holidays people and it seems to get a bit worse every year.

So I am coping by making sure I get lots of barn time, deliberately taking things off my to do list, and consuming every possible Star Wars media that I can. (Because I am also That Person.)

Tris is doing ok, not great, but he is back under saddle as I try to find a program that works for both of us.

I do have ideas to blog about and just need to not have it on my mind for a bit. I also need a working computer at home, which is currently not a thing in my life (after sending it in for some upgrades all of my drivers got wiped which…kind of makes it inoperable. so it is back there getting fixed, hopefully.)

In the meantime, I’m still doing some posting on my FB page, so if you want some updates you should find us there until January.

Certain shithead puppies have decided in the last few weeks to forget they are housebroken (ARYA) and the dining room rug took a terrible beating.

Because it’s always something, this floor had 3x as many staples as the two previous rooms COMBINED. That handful above? From my third pass. Ugh.