Just to prove that life is an all successes and rainbows today was A Day. And even as I sit with a cup of Dutch Bros hot chocolate in my hand, watching Tarma hoover up her alfalfa, I acknowledge how lucky I am to even be able to make that statement. Even my hardships are dealt with in a bubble of relative financial and family comfort.

Today it kind of all came to a head for me, just one too many things on the plate, enough to outweigh yesterday’s triumph. I have been busting ass at work trying to get a new office off the ground to help make my team’s and companies employees lives easier, but I have a coworker who just keeps being a negative Nelly and it’s really hard to push the project forward with that kind of energy. My boss has placed trust in me and told me in no uncertain terms that I am in charge of this project, but I don’t wanna pull rank and be that kind of coworker, which leads to me putting in extra brain energy into finding a different way to move things forward. I am also still grieving the loss of Flash even as I try to get to know Tarma, it’s a little bit tougher to learn what she needs and can deal with from me. Kade had heavy emotional day and needed a lot of attention from me, even as I was in the middle of a ton of meetings and trainings. I had to set aside my grief and parent him because it’s part of the job description.

A well beloved endurance rider, a friend of a friend I met a few times, just died way too young from cancer and meanwhile I’m having a serious trust issue with my best friend, so I haven’t been able to talk to her as we normally do. I know the truisms that’s life’s too short and you need to set aside disagreements and move on with this one’s proving a tougher nut for me to crack.

I desperately miss my wonderful Cyrus, a solid cuddle with him or watching him wiggle around on his back could turn any day around. The search for a dog isn’t as exciting as searching for a new horse was, and I finally pinpointed why. A horse doesn’t live with you, a horse doesn’t live with your child. If they have some rougher edges you can find a trainer and you can work through certain issues, you can give them plenty of turn out and find other solutions but at the end of the day the horse goes in the field and you go to your house. A dog lives with you and you have to have a certain level of trust for them to do so. It’s hard to find a dog like that, one that could just slip pretty easily into our lives.

The straw that finally let everything loose, as it always is, was something very minor. I cannot get our Google home speakers to recognize that Kade has a separate Spotify account from me, so as I was driving to the barn and blasting my music to clear my brain out he kept trying to play his to dragon audiobook and that’s the kind of thing you can’t figure out when you’re trying to drive safely.

So here I sit turning into a popsicle with my rapidly cooling hot chocolate, watching my horse eat our money…I mean, her hay.