The love of my life

Well here it is a Thursday and I am at work. Normally I have Thursdays off but a coworker asked me to switch and I had Tuesday off instead. It has thrown my whole week off! Every day I am confused as to what day of the week it is.

Anyways, I thought I would share the story of how Sean and I met. I am originally from Michigan, moved to Kentucky to work with horses in 1995. I travelled around a little, went to Florida for the winter while I was working for John T Ward and spent a year in Texas training halter horses during my apprenticeship with Mike McMillian and I also went back to Michigan for two years where I was a caregiver with Home Instead. I was living a pretty decent life in Michigan, loved my job, enjoyed spending time with my family, was making decent money. The one client I worked for was awesome. She was an elderly woman who had suffered a stroke and needed constant care. She lived with her daughter and son in law and I adored her and her family. They were the epitome of how I wanted to live, a happy, loving couple, a daughter who loved her mom beyond reason. Just being with them inspired me be a better person and get my life in order so I could have a full life of my own. Being with them also reminded me daily how much I missed my own mom, who was still in Kentucky, and made me realize that I needed to come home to be with her. I realized that my place was close to her not only because she's my mom, I loved her and missed her but if anything ever happened to her I needed to be close enough to be there for her. Through 2006 I felt more and more compelled to go home so finally the week of Christmas I picked up and came back to Kentucky.

While in Michigan I had been introduced to an online classified site called Craigslist. I bought, sold and gave away items on there as well many times. There is a personal's section but after browsing it a few times I decided there was never anything in there but porn spam and people looking for one night stands so I quit checking out the personal's section. I hadn't been to Craigslist for a few months but on January 5th I thought of it and decided to check out the Lexington Craigslist, see what was interesting on there (it is a local type site, different sites for thousands of cities). I had been on Craigslist for a few minutes when I thought of the personals section. I dismissed the idea, knowing it was likely the same environment. Over the next half an hour or so I kept feeling like I should look at the personals section. Finally I decided to quit fighting it, take a peek to satisfy my curiosity and be able to move on.

The first ad I saw was really sweet sounding, he sounded nice, sincere and listed as interests a lot of the same things I am interested in! I sent him a relatively long email introducing myself. he emailed me back a few minutes later saying he was at work but would email me again later and also gave me links to some pictures of his dogs and to his Myspace page. He sent me another, longer email a few minutes later and he sounded wonderful! We emailed back and forth all day long then when he got home from work we got on instant messenger and chatted for a while. I had to go to work, this was a Friday night and it was an all weekend job so I told him I would talk to him Monday morning when I got home from work. When I got home I made a beeline for the computer and he was there waiting. We visited until he needed to go to work, then more when he got to work. We "talked" all day and night (I worked nights doing caregiving but we text messaged too) all week long and decided to have dinner on Friday night. I was supposed to be off Friday night but shortly before we were to meet for dinner work called and asked if I could go in later that night. Pushover that I am I said yes then I was terrified he would think I was making it up to cut dinner short.

We met for dinner at a little Mexican restraunt in Frankfort, he was waiting for me with a boquet of flowers, it was TOO sweet! He was absolutely wonderful and we had a wonderful time. We were very surprised when we went to pay for dinner and our waiter told us someone had paid for our dinner! We still don't know who it was that paid for our dinner but if by chance that person reads this, THANK YOU! I went straight from there to work and we texted back and forth all weekend.

We went on several more dates and talked nearly constantly when we weren't together. 3 weeks later on January 29th we were officially engaged (we had been talking about it for a week though), I moved in about 2 months later and we got married November 3rd of 2007. I have never been happier in my life! This last year has been the best year of my life.

We both knew from the start that it was right. We are so much alike it's scary and we have yet to have our first fight. We discovered along the way that our paths actually crossed several times over the years. While I was working at Patchen Wilkes, he was working for Vinery and they were leasing pastures across the road from Patchen Wilkes. He was taking care of horses in those pastures as well as working in the breeding shed while I was taking mares back and forth to the breeding shed, it's possible we actually met in the breeding shed at Vinery. We also had been on a couple of the same email lists at the same time (rawfeeding & kynaturaldogs - his own list) and we had emailed back and forth a little about dogs. I used to run a pet sitting business and he still had one of my business cards. Last but not least he was renting a house on a farm I was nightwatching on. It really was meant to be.

Marquis

About 7 years ago I saw a picture of Marquis on Dreamhorse message forum. In fact it was this picture I saw...

I instantly fell in love with him and emailed his owner, Linda Harper of Needville, TX. We emailed back and forth and became friends. It wasn't long before I decided that someday I would have an Arabian and when I did it would be a Marquis baby.

In 2003 I put a down payment on MM Diamonds N Pearls, aka Pearl, who was then a yearling. Two short payments in I was injured at work and had to back out. I was afraid Linda would be mad at me for breaking our agreement and I laid low for a few years.

In 2006 I decided I was ready and approached Linda about arranging a breeding. Another friend of ours conveniently had a VERY nice Arabian mare headed to Linda's for boarding so we got together with her and got things in motion. I bought the baby before it was even bred for and waited what seemed like forever for the baby to make an appearance.

In March of 2007 a beautiful little filly was born. MM China Doll was a perfect little grey carbon copy of her daddy and I was tickled pink. Thanks to Linda's superb and dedicated photography skills, I was able to watch her grow up in pictures while I waited for weaning time so she could make the trip from Texas to Kentucky.

About a month before China was due to be weaned, Linda dropped the bomb that she was retiring from breeding and offering Marquis for sale! As soon as the world quit spinning and I could breathe again, I emailed her and in a few hours of discussions we had a deal made for me to bring home not a pretty little weanling filly but her gorgeous father instead!

Marquis made the trip from Texas to Kentucky in December of 2007 and my world has never been the same. He is everything I ever dreamed of and more and I am so grateful to Linda for allowing me to the awesome responsibility and privelage of sharing my life with him.

Thank you my friend!

Here is Marquis' pedigree.
Pictures!

Happy Tuesday!!

Hey two days in a row I'm posting! Boy we are on a roll here. I love Tuesdays because the knitting group gets together on Tuesdays. I don't make it as often as I would like to but tonight I actually get to go YAY! Like I mentioned yesterday, my sweet and wonderful husband got me knitting. I have wanted to learn to knit for a long time but I honestly do not remember ever actually mentioning it. Well for Christmas Sean got me a ball of yarn, a pair of sticks and a gift certificate for knitting lessons! It was AWESOME! I played with it for a while, finally figured out how to get started, found the group and started hanging out with them and by the time I actually got around to taking the class I was already doing pretty good. The knitting group has been great, I have really had a blast and learned a LOT from them.

Here are some knitting group relevent links:
Rebelle - the awesome yarn shop where Sean got my stuff and where I took my lessons
SNB-Lex - the Lexington Stitch-N-Bitch email list

A little more about me

Ok so I guess I should try to get your interest so you will subscribe to my blog, wanting to keep up with the juicy details of my life right? HA. Some people would say my life is boring and wouldn't rate a low budget made for tv movie, others would say it's a soap opera worthy of usurping NBC's best.

In reality it's somewhere in between. Here is me in a nutshell...32yrs old, recently married (for the first and only time), no kids (yet), animal lover - have horses, dogs, rabbits and chickens and soon a goat! I work full time for TwinSpires.com - the online wagering site for Churchill Downs (yet we can't offer wagering on Churchill. I know, I know, it doesn't make much sense to me either, all I know is I am tired of getting chewed out for it when it's NOT MY FAULT. We WANT to offer wagering on Churchill, the KHPA won't LET us. Just like the Florida Horseman's group won't let us offer wagering on Calder, which Churchill also owns. NOT MY FAULT! Hollering at US for it is like calling the Nestle Chocolate plant and screaming at them because your favorite store doesn't carry the Nestle baby formula (or does, depends on which side of the fence you are on hehe). AAAARRRGGGHHH!!! Ahem...anyway, sorry...)

Ok so you got the basic stats. Some of my interests include knitting (a lovely hobby my wonderful husband helped get me interested in), writing (though I haven't done so in quite a while), animals (duh), music, internet, and much much more. I am so ecclectic it's almost ridiculous.

And I got busy working and lost my train of thought. I will come back to this later.

The beginning of the end?

I have no idea how this will turn out lol. I am looking at it as sort of an online diary. My thoughts and ideas but not the most personal ones, only Sean gets to hear those lol. Anyway, we shall see what this morphs into, maybe I will make an attempt at the type of writing we did in my college English class. I can't remember what it's called, but it's when you just spit out whatever comes to your mind, letting your mind take over and spit out whatever it wants. That could be scary lol. Anyway, welcome to my life!

ETA: BRAINSTORMING! Of course that's what it's called, sheesh. Thanks Kim!

Michelle