I saw horses!

So this weekend was a little different than most of our weekends. Lately life has just consisted of work and school. There are two job openings at my school so I worked on the paperwork to apply. They require that anyone who wants to apply fills out an application, submits a cover letter, resume and two letters of professional references. Everything is done, but I need one more letter! My old manager told me two other doctors said they'd write one but I haven't gotten an email yet. I really would like to get an interview with the school, so I want to submit my paperwork asap before they find someone! Work has just shot into extremely busy mode and I am not enjoying it at all. If you've ever worked in a restaurant and been in the weeds then you know what my mornings feel like during my whole shift. At least in restaurants people understand when you're in the weeds, but at my job my manager constantly tells us we should have been done. It gets old hearing that after a while...
Oh, and other new news is that I signed up with a personal trainer at the gym. We start this week on Tuesday. We've heard great things about her and she's a fun to be around. Unfortunately she leaves in a month, so I'm not sure what will happen then. I'm just so tired of the weight I gained, but I can't find the motivation to do anything about it myself. So now that I'm paying for someone to babysit me and I have an appointment ... it will get done.

Anyway, yesterday after work Satoko came and picked us up. She was going to take us to a farm that was having its grand opening party, but she also took us to another farm to scope it out. She is so awesome ... she even called both farms beforehand for me to get information on riding. The first farm was in a town south of us called Towada. I've seen this farm advertised before and it looked nice in the advertisements, but in reality it was a dump. They had quite a bit of horses, but the facility wasn't well kept and the horses weren't either. So after we scoped that farm out we headed to the farm called Erde. It was an hour drive into the city of Aomori and we took a very scenic route through the mountains. I've posted photos of the mountain view before from base ... and well yesterday we drove over those mountains! It was a really cool drive and the road was so twisty. Gian sat in the back of Satoko's car and he got a little under the weather with all the winds and turns going up and down in altitude. It was neat to see what those mountains looked like up close and person since we always see them from afar. Somewhere along the route we stopped at a roadside store for some soft serve ice cream. It was so delicious! Best way to describe it is home made soft serve ice cream. About an hour later we finally arrived to Erde, and it was actually 10 minutes away from the aquarium we visited recently. It's a small property with three horses, but it was nice. It was more of what I was used to; they actually have shavings and green hay. (The Towada farm had straw in their stalls and their horses were eating brown hay and some of it was moldy.) The owner is a young Japanese Dressage rider who rode in Germany for a while. When we got there they were working on the arena and after a while they made a bon fire and we all sat around drinking and eating. We really only chatted with Satoko, her friend and the owner because they were the only ones who spoke English. But one of the owner's friends came for the party, who is an Australian trainer. It was the first Aussie that we met in person and his accent was awesome. He lives in a town called Morioka, which is about 2-3 hours from our home. He has 22 horses there and boarders. He invited us to come whenever we wanted to hang out and ride. I decided I like Erde and wanted to ride there so I gave them my info and will come back after they officially open. It's a long way to go to ride, but it will be worth it. His English is ok, so lessons should be interesting. I didn't get to see him ride, but hopefully he knows what he's doing. Now the bad part is my boots don't fit! I know I gained weight, but who would have thought my calve grew too! Ugh, how annoying because of course there aren't tack shops where I could just buy a new pair and I don't want to wait for a pair to get here. Tomorrow I'm going to a shoe repair shop to see if they can do anything. So I'm glad I finally found somewhere to ride and I owe it all to Satoko.

Today we saw Night of the Museum Battle of the Smithsonian and it was really quite funny. We wanted to go see Transformers 2 at the Japanese theater, but they charge about $17 a person so we're going to wait for a day with special rates. Of course it's cheaper when you go later at night, but their movies play so late that we have to make sure we don't work early in the morning. We also went to a large produce farm. Not only did they have produce, but they also had soft serve ice cream, a foot onsen, a donkey, a pony and rabbits. We bouth watermelon, peach, and yummy sweet potato chips. Oh and of course we had to get some soft serve ice cream to see if it was as good as the place Satoko took us to. Of course it wasn't ... but it was good.

That's about it for now!