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February 14, 2008
Newest photo of Kai
Cheryl's daughter, Shannon, took this photo of me sitting on Kai. That's Cheryl holding Kai's lead rope.
Cheryl and I had just finished our ride together, and Shannon had climbed aboard their horse, Gambler. Cheryl said, "Why don't you come back out into the arena with Kai after you untack him and keep us company?" so I did.
Then Cheryl said, "Why don't you climb up on Kai bareback?" I hadn't ridden bareback since I was a teenager. The first few times I attempted to mount the very patient Kai, I ended up whacking his poor butt with my boot. (I'm not as young and spry as I used to be!) Then I got the idea of placing the mounting block on top of the wooden "bridge" that is used for teaching horses how to negotiate trail obstacles. That raised the mounting block up a couple of inches so that I could hop on Kai's back.
It was fun, but looking at the photo gives me a great incentive to lose some weight! Poor Kai, good thing he is a stocky Arab!
Posted by Jessica at 10:21 AM | Comments (0)
February 11, 2008
Economic Turbulence
I don't know how else to describe this, although the economists have better terms, I suppose.
I love my house. I don't want to move. I spent $20,000 on remodelling my bathroom, it is exactly the way I want it. It has a lovely, historic cast iron clawfoot tub and the white hexagonal tile floor that I adore, and the wainscoting all around the walls. We put a new roof on the house(a forty-year roof)a few years ago and had the exterior painted.
I told Brian when we moved in that I never wanted to move ever again.
But now we might be forced to, and it's looking more likely as the days go by.
Brian has still not found a job, and it's been over two months. The unemployment checks are less than half what he used to earn at his job. Next month we will have real trouble paying the mortgage. I am selling off things in preparation for deep financial trouble.
All of the jobs that Brian is qualified for are out of state. He is a highly-educated person with an advanced degree and years of work experience.
He has to earn at least $46,000/year in one of the the surrounding counties within commuting range in order for us to keep a slightly lower standard of living than we currently enjoy, but stay in our current house. He has been earning about $51,000.
Since there are no jobs posted from the surrounding counties, he has been forced to consider jobs outside this area, which would mean a move. More on that option later. But first, a note about the job postings. The postings tell you how much the position offers, not how much you will need to make in order to live in the community that is posting the job.
Brian excitedly told me that there were lots of job postings in the San Fransisco area. They started at around $65,000, which sounded like a lot of money. "Great," I said, "But they have a MUCH higher cost of living. My mother's friends live there, and they told me once that they could never afford their little house that they bought in the 50's if they had to try buying one today."
Brian went to a salary converter. Holy doodle! (As Grandmother used to say.) Brian would have to earn a whopping $116,000/year in San Fransisco and the surrounding area in order to enjoy the same rather modest standard of living as we do now. He was quite surprised.
That nixed San Fransisco, so I had him check Virginia. Same deal-a lot of job postings close to Washington, D.C. and they seemed to start at $65,000. But once again the salary converter nixed that idea.
So we hit upon Oregon. (We had already decided that if we had to move, it wasn't going to be anywhere with more snowfall than Michigan or higher summer temperatures than Michigan if we could help it.)
Some friends had moved out there a couple of years ago, they really like the area. The salary converter says that Oregon is a great place to live as it is roughly similar to Michigan in terms of what a dollar will buy.
Now back to our house-the housing market is so bad that the chances of us selling our house for anything even resembling what we paid for it are slim to none. We would end up owing money at closing. Our other option would be to just give the thing back to the mortgage company and take off for Oregon. But I'm sure it would be difficult for us to purchase a house if we had such a bad mark on our credit rating. So it seems like we're in trouble no matter what we do.
If Brian takes a lower-paid service job in our area, we still would eventually lose our house as we wouldn't make enough money to keep up the payments in the long run.
Posted by Jessica at 03:27 PM | Comments (0)
February 05, 2008
Vintage custom stock horse
This vintage custom from the Breyer Stock Horse Mare mold is in my collection. I don't know who painted her, but their initials are AKL. The artist might be from Europe, as the number 7 in the year the model is dated ('97) is written in the European style.
Vintage-style customized Breyers (or, as we used to call them R/R/Hs, which stood for "remade, repainted, haired" - the word "remade" indicated that the model had been repositioned or resculpted in some way)had fallen out of favor in the U.S. by the mid-1990's. The new fad was for extremely realistic Artist Resins, which were original sculptures that were cast in a resin material and then sold as blanks to be repainted by talented artists. The costs for these new resins far exceeded the costs of the old-style customized Breyer, but they were and continue to be eagerly snapped up by model horse showers. Hair manes and tails fell quickly out of style here, anyone still customizing from Breyers wanted their models to resemble the high-profit resin-cast ones as much as possible.
Europeans and Brits still liked the hair manes and tails, though, and many customizers there still used and continue to use this technique.
I adore this sort of customised Breyer, and I love the hair manes and tails!
Recently, I found a Yahoo group for fans of the old-style vintage customs. I plan on taking this particular custom, whom I have named Cutty Sark in honor of her cutting horse pose, to a model horse show this weekend.
Posted by Jessica at 10:07 AM | Comments (0)