“I wasn’t born in a barn, but I got there as fast as I could.” A kindred spirit wrote that. Actually, barns aren’t my forte. I like the wild open green fields where the animals frolic, and the air smells fresh.
But I loved my run-in barn, 24 x 12 feet, open on one
side where my two horses could be dry and out of the rain. And I kept the
rubber-matted floor clean. They used one side for their hay, and the other side
for a bathroom. It worked perfectly. I cleaned it every morning.
My love of horses must have begun when I was six years
old, before I ever touched one. My father took me to the carnival when he came
home from the war. I lusted after one of their prizes: a small horse statue. He
bribed the hawker to sell it to him—I’m sure that was meant to be a surprise
when he won it, but I knew the truth, and it forever endeared him to me. He
disappeared from my life after that…for 38 years.
When I was nine years old, my mom and step-dad moved
from a small town in Oregon to a house on one acre of land outside the city
next door to a farm with a number of acres, two horses, a cow, chickens, and
rabbits. There, one of their two daughters, a high school student, would pull
me up behind her on their big horse, King, and we would take off roaming the
countryside.
The other daughter rode their old mare, King’s mother.
Sometimes we would go to the store to buy Grape Nehi, or to the creek to swim,
or to an old racetrack grown up in weeds but still fun to encircle. During hay
season, in the cool of the evenings, we tried to get the horses to jump the
small piles of hay the boys raked up from windrows into small stacks. Only the
horses plowed through instead of jumping them, and we had to rake the hay into
a pile again.
Why Lois spent time with a nine-year-old is beyond me,
but I will be forever grateful. She was my mentor, and she sent me on a journey
of wishing, dreaming, and praying for a horse of my own.
Three years later, we moved away from Lois and King,
but I got Boots. My horse. A super horse. My step-dad chose well. I totally
loved that horse.
And now I am in love again.
With baby goats.
It happened yesterday when I drank my morning coffee
sitting in clean, sweet-smelling straw, holding a baby goat. He was quivering,
and I held him until he was warm and snuggly. The other goat was a bit
standoffish, but by afternoon all of us were sitting in the sunshine, happy as
three otters on a creek bank, with the babies nibbling grass and crawling on my
lap.
Daughter dear, grandson and I picked up the goats on
Sunday afternoon. It’s Tuesday now, and we’re settled in, happy. This morning,
I, again, drank my morning coffee sitting in the straw and holding a baby goat.
They greeted me with “baas.” I thought they were crying yesterday, but I think
they were happy to see a person.
How am I going to get anything done?
These are boy goats, but will not be Billy goats. They are called wethers; that is, a neutered goat. They haven't had surgery, but they have rubber bands—you figure it out—it’s your biology lesson for the day.
And now I am here with you. It’s Tuesday, blog day.
Last Tuesday I was a mess. I had already written the
blog the night before. I would clean it and publish it in the morning, I
thought. The trouble was, when morning came, I fiddled with it. I didn’t like it. I changed it.
I lost it.
Lost it? What the heck? Where did it go? I searched. I
thought I could get my history back. I couldn’t.
After hours of trying, I rewrote the blog, but it
didn’t have the enthusiasm of the first. I thought I had it together. I
wanted to get my blog out. I hit publish. Then refused to look at it for two
days. But when I did, I screamed bloody murder.
What a mess.
I’m embarrassed.
I cleaned up my mess, and I’m off again. It will not
stop me.
And this brings me to the question I began for this
post a few days ago: “Why is it that when someone from the opposite end of
the political spectrum from me will say I’ve been lied to, when apparently they've
been given the truth?”
We used to expect people to tell us the truth. A liar
was soon ignored.
Ignoring or shaming tended to weed out liars. Honest
Abe, remember him? Nixon probably would have gotten away with his break-in, but
he was caught lying. This administration can lie right to our faces, even with
fact-finders right behind him, and half the country doesn’t care.
But half the country does care—you know how a lie will
travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. And
the people who care are walking the hard road, against constant opposition.
It used to be that we expected reporters to have
integrity. Do you know what integrity means? I thought it meant telling the
truth, but it actually means speaking within one’s own moral system. Can you
believe it? A person with no morals can tell you lies and be within their own
integrity.
This shocked the heck out of me.
But this morning, I looked up the word integrity. I
found it described basically as I originally thought—to be honest.
Integrity:
- Honesty:
A steady refusal to lie, steal, or deceive in any situation. [1,
2]
- Consistency:
Acting in the exact same ethical manner whether people are watching or
not. [1,
2]
- Wholeness:
Deriving from the Latin word integer, meaning a state of being
whole, complete, and undivided in character. [1,
2]
- Soundness:
Maintaining an unimpaired, solid condition, often applied to moral
character or physical structures. [1]
Do definitions
vary? And if it’s from AI, AI knows only what we tell it.
How can it get
smarter without the data in the first place? It’s like history. His Story. Written
by a man. Recycled by a man. Run through the biases and the thought processes
of a man.
What if the data
is wrong? Whoops.
Yesterday an ad caught me. I was curious –a honey cure
for Alzheimer's? Only one dollar a day? It can be found in your kitchen?
Numerous celebrities, their voices and faces online, claimed that their
fuzzyheadedness disappeared within a week. They could remember words again. I
looked closely; has this been AI-generated?
The faces didn’t look exactly right. But wouldn’t the
media need permission to use people’s faces and voices to sell something? Would
celebrities allow that?
Honey is a hot topic these days. It’s good for you;
it’s not good for you. Alzheimers is a hot topic; everyone fears it. The fear
of losing our memory—now that’s a good distraction.
It isn’t plaque buildup in the brain that causes
Alzheimer's, so said this ad, it was something else. Okay, I’ll bite. What is
it?
I watched for at least one half hour—it felt like an
eternity. That’s one reason I blog—you can read me in two minutes. And if this
has any AI content I will jump up and down and scream.
I hate those long commercials that give their
credentials, their life story, their research, their conclusions, and then I
find that, of course, they had made a world-shaking discovery, something they
would sell to you.
Whoops, I told you my horsey life story.
This particular ad I’m talking about came from substances
found on a tiny island with fresh, unspoiled soil, water, and nutrients not
found in the US. They believed two minerals found there could soak up the toxic
metals we accumulate over time that cause Alzheimer’s. One was found in their
wild honey. The other was in their water.
The people raised on the island rarely got
Alzheimer’s.
A picture on the ad showed someone stirring honey.
I saw no kitchen, and no menu.
But I did see a bottle of capsules available for purchase.
How much did they cost?
You had to wait a while until they disclosed that.
The special price was reduced to about one dollar a
day.
They did not mention that confiscating that rare and
precious commodity would use it up. I don’t think there is an endless supply of
wild honey on a small island.
I wasn’t born yesterday.
But I don’t want to doubt everything either.
This is like the touchstone, said to bring one’s
heart’s desire. Legend said you would recognize it by touch, for it was always
warm. A person learned it was on a rocky beach, and so he searched, picking up
stones to feel their heat. And so, to eliminate the stones he had checked, one
by one he threw them into the ocean.
One day he found the stone; it radiated an uncommon
heat. It was the touchstone. His arm, however, had become so used to throwing
stones that before he could stop himself, he slung it into the ocean.
Sleepy time.
P.S. The ad I mentioned is considered a
fraud. Bill Gates does not have a cure
for Alzheimer’s. How can whoever controls our information get away with this?