I know, what the hell does this have to do with horses, right?!

But I do love the Fred man. And he's right, Huckabilly is a liberal, not a conservative. Here's what Rush had to say about Fred's comments. He's spot on in my humble opinion.

I've been run ragged this week. I came home from work last night and fell asleep on the sofa at 6PM. At some point, I actually dragged myself to bed and slept soundly for 12+ hours.

And the good news--

is that we are safe from the layoff scare now. The national lab my husband works for had lots of people sign up for the early retirement they were offering, thus saving the behinds of the rest of us poor scared-to-death slobs. We were just informed that we are all OK and that no one's goin' against their will.

I think part of the raggedness is just the shock of the sheer relief of not having the potential of losing our livelihood hanging over our heads anymore. It's funny how you endure something over which you have absolutely no control for a long period of time with a kind of stoicism, and then when the relief comes, you simply collapse. You had no idea how stoic you'd become!

The sun was shining today. We spent time outside with the horses, doing some barn and paddock cleaning. We are both breathing much easier now.

I don't believe I've mentioned before that I'm married to kind of a real life Jack Bauer (he will roll his eyes if he hears me calling him that), and that's really all I can say on the topic. I can say that as long as there are folks out there who want to kill freedom loving people, we probably have a reason to believe the job we rely on is as secure as anything can reasonably be in this strange and unpredictable world. But the same dark cloud has been hanging over all of us for too long, until this week.

(Now if I could just photoshop a Stetson cowboy hat onto ol' Jack here ... maybe add in a snotty Polish Arabian mare ...)

Heck, today feels like a Brand New Day, and tomorrow I'm going to the big fancy horse barn filled with dressage queens and do some equestrian vaulting, or at least longe the vaulting horse for grade school girls who don't have a messed up ankle and bursitis in the other knee.

Here's Thompson's comment on "virgins" in reference to the momentary naval standoff this week in the Straits of Hormuz, which made me laugh out loud.

And laughing is good. Very good indeed these days.