From Janell

Well, it’s been an exciting and busy weekend, so my visits to the Blogosphere were put off until today.

Retracing my events: yesterday afternoon Bubba and I went to Arlington and rode with our Saddle Club in the Washington County Fair Parade. I almost backed out because at home, when I was hitching up and moving the trailor, he started acting up. I had him tied to a fence post and he was rearing up and pulling on his rope and being an all-around BRAT about the whole deal, but I decided to just ignore it and went in anyway. I’m glad I did, because by the time we got to Arlington (about a 15 minute drive) he was settled down and reconciled to his fate. He was very well behaved throughout the whole event. And if you’ve ever been in a parade, you know that 70 % of the time, you are at the staging area, waiting to get started. Once you get in line and actually start going, you spend 25 % of the time at a stand still, waiting for the line to start moving again. The other 5 % of the time you are moving along, smiling and waving. Now, waiting patiently for anything has never been Bubba’s strong point. Standing still annoys him beyond his ability to deal with it. He ends up tossing his head up and down, pawing the ground and we usually end up walking in circles. On the trail, his second favorite thing to do is to walk along at a pretty fair pace, usually at the front of the line. His favorite thing to do is trot. Our place in line happened to be at about the middle of the line of 20 horses or so, walking in twos. Yesterday, he very politely stayed in line and didn’t even try to bump the horse in front of him. He even stood still without all his usual rudenss. In fact, he was so well behaved, that one of my friends, who was a little nervous about being in the parade with her inexperienced horse, said, “We’re going to ride beside you so your horse can be a good influence on mine.” That’s one of the nicest things anybody’s ever said to me.

The other fun thing about being in a parade it that as we go along, I can see people point at us and say, “Oh, that’s the prettiest one.” (They are, of course, referring to Bubba.)

Yesterday morning, my friend Renee and I sang a special musical number for our 8:00 church service. We sang the Selah version of “You Raise Me Up” with our church’s summer intern Music/Worship Leader, Josh. It was his last Sunday before heading back to college. He has been such a blessing to our church and to me personally. More about that some other time, maybe. His late grandma was one of the best friends I had at church and it still makes me sad to write or talk about her very much. Just need a little more time before I can tell that story without my heart breaking all over again.

Saturday afternoon, Jack, Randy & I cleaned ourselves up and went to the fairgrounds. We strolled through the exhibits, had some fair food (Gyros, egg rolls and a snow cone) for supper and then went to the Rodeo.

Now any musical presentation requires practice, so Saturday morning was devoted to singing practice with my gospel quartet and with Renee & Josh.

So, with all that going on, I spent Monday morning doing all the stuff, like mowing, laundry and blogging, that I usually do over the weekend.

Going back into last week, we were without a toilet for 4 days. It was ugly. And that’s about all you’ll be wanting to know about that.

So there you have it. Life in the Redneck Lane.

So how was your weekend?