School!

Class started today, so I'm busy writing due dates into my wall calendar and getting things organized.  I actually took the afternoon off of work to get a solid start on this stuff.  I'm taking three full semester classes this time around, which is the heaviest workload I've done so far.  It's not full time, of course, but if I can't balance work and school I get overwhelmed and go into a tailspin.  It's not pretty and doesn't do anyone any good.


Now that class has started, posting may be a little slower.  I'm going to try to post two or three times a week, and right now I'm going to schedule Tuesdays and Thursdays as blog days.  That will give me several days to work up a topic of some sort and spew out something cohesive, I think.  Today will be some miscellaneous updates!

First and most importantly, the raffle ends this Saturday (Aug 27) at midnight central standard time! I'll compile the comments information Sunday afternoon and try to get winners announced that night.  There have been 157 comments so far, which is totally exciting! I've loved reading all of them, and you guys have had some great things to say!


I started working on a trade project Sunday afternoon.  It doesn't look like much right now, but eventually it will be an upper level dressage set for Dinky Duke.  DD is just a little larger than Wee Jay, and is the largest I've gone so far.

The tutorial is officially with my volunteers! I've already heard back from Christine of Last Alliance Studios, and she has pictures of her first try up! She did a brilliant job both assembling the saddle and giving me feed back.  We've found one place already that needs clarification and more pictures. Leah at Shoestring Stable is also testing the tutorial for me, and as soon as I hear back from her I'll start revising and putting together a "clean" version. Right now the tutorial is functional, but not very pretty.  I want to format it a little bit and enlarge the photos.  It's sitting at 7 pages with 11 point type and thumbnail-sized pictures right now, so it's going to be the size of a small novel by the time it's done! I'm going to have to put it in a PDF, I think. Related but not: after using Adobe's InDesign so extensively at work, I find myself extraordinarily frustrated with the limitations of Microsoft Word.

That sort of sums things up for now! Theoretically, the next post will be about going "buckle-less", which is sort of a misnomer since there actually ARE buckles...you just don't use them!