When I first started freelancing, I had to commute barefoot on hardwood floors 20 feet to my desk, uphill both ways. A few years later I found a shortcut — I bought a laptop that weighed slightly more than a farrier’s anvil and kept it on the floor by my bed. On those days when I couldn’t face the traffic in the hallway but needed to get to work right away, I could lean out dangerously over the edge and haul my computer up to, yes, sit on top of my lap. When I became more prosperous, I installed a hydraulic lift to spare my back during this precarious commute.
In these modern times, I barely commute at all. Now I can check email from my phone first thing and address any work fires immediately. (If you work on the west coast but have coworkers and clients on the east coast, you know what I mean about checking email as soon as possible after 5am Eastern time.) If I can send a brief answer, I do so from the phone. If I need more screen real estate or want the luxury of larger keys, I can answer from my iPad. That clears any bottlenecks for my colleagues and buys me time to pet a horse before breakfast.
But this morning, my eyes locked onto one subject line and I could not even skim the others until I had read it thrice:
Congratulations on passing your Level 2 On Line audition!
And even though I have a WordPress app on my phone and on my iPad, I patiently made myself deal with the work email. Then I completed my usual morning routine of teeth brushing, healthy breakfast, editing a few online help topics for a client just to get myself started. And as a preventative for diving into horseblogging and horseplay and not getting through the day’s quota.
My Audition
My Scorecard
The mastery student who evaluated me is Molly Sanders, who is my age and whose horsey background is similar to mine: horse-crazy childhood full of Breyer models and every possible encounter with real live horses, then years without horses, then in her mid-30s getting her first horse and finding Parelli. Somehow this similarity makes me feel even better about my audition — like I have been evaluated by someone who knows. Even though she didn’t know my backstory as she watched the video. Here is her bio on the Parelli Central website.
She also included a few articles to help me with the next step, both of which I read ages ago, and which I’m reading now with more understanding of how to put the principles into practice. Hopefully it won’t take me another two years to get the Freestyle video done for the rest of my Level 2. 🙂
Horsegirl on a Journey 