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July 31, 2004

I need to recover from vacation

It would have been so nice if John and I could have just hung around the house today - blog nekkid, have a drink, relax. Relax some more.
But we couldn't. We have responsibilities.
Many of you will not understand this, but here goes.
We are fortunate enough to be able to board our two horses, Willie and Petey at the Ft. Leavenworth Stables. This is an MWR Activity. We are able to do this because John is a retired Army guy. But, because it is the Army (or, I'm sure any branch of the military), we have to make sure that the Stable Activity makes a profit, while keeping costs down.
One of the ways we do that is to hold two horse shows a year. The proceeds help keep costs down and profits up, so the Army doesn't raise our boarding fees.
Several years ago, I wrote an Access/Visual Basic program to track all the riders, horses, monies and classes in a horse show. I need to run the office at all of our shows so we can keep track of the money the Stable makes, and so the Show Judge can keep track of who is in what class, etc.

It really does make life easier for the folks at the stable - we used to need 4 or 5 volunteers just in the office to run the financial stuff for the show, now we can do it with just 2 people.

However, everytime I teach someone how to do the software part, their spouse ends up getting transferred to Germany or something, and they can never help again.

Therefore, I am the computer person for all shows. I don't mind, because the Stable needs our support.

Today, though, we only had an announcer until 11:45 in the morning, and we ended up having a larger turnout for the show than normal, so I called John of Arrggghhh! to do the announcing. He had had a lot of experience doing speaking things, but this was his first horseshow.

If you have met John, like Rosemary and Dean Esmay, you know just how wonderful his voice is. Well, I suspect that now that the other members of the Ft. Leavenworth Riding Activity have heard John's perfect delivery, he will be a permanent member of the putting on the Horse Show club along with me and my good friend Sgt. Linda Day - who is the Paddock Master.

Anyway, we had a long, hot day, but we did well, and the Stable will be allowed to exist for another year.

But I'm still pooped from vacation!!!

Posted by Beth at July 31, 2004 08:01 PM