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Upon finishing this, I realized that it's really TL;DR, but that's okay. It really is just to get it out.

All right. First off, I have to say this: I love my job. I love what I do. I love getting to work with horses all morning, and sometimes helping kids learn how to groom and lead and lunge them. It makes me feel really good.

BUT.

I don't like working seven days a week, since it's a very heavy physical workload (hauling hay, mucking stalls, lifting bales of shavings and fifty-five pound bags of feed). I don't like having to get up at six in the morning to go there. I don't like putting out hay in the dark at six-thirty in the morning. I don't like having to walk carefully around the barn for fear that the owner's rescue dog, who used to try to attack anyone who came near the barn, the house or the owner and is only somewhat better now, will go back to its old vicious ways and try to rip out my throat. I don't like having one of the owners lecture me for twenty minutes and conclude by telling me that my behaviour was 'absolutely unacceptable' because I dared to walk her precious baybeee out past a tractor in a perfectly safe and careful manner, keeping myself between the horse and the tractor (which was off, by the way, and had the edge turned down so that it was safe). I don't like walking them past the tractor, either, but it was broken. I couldn't move it. Taking her horse out the other door was really not an option, because that animal is a menace. Taking her out the short way, I still often end up bruised, stepped on, bitten, knocked into fences, or injured in some other manner. If I had to take her all the way around the barn, I would likely end up with a concussion or a broken bone if not worse.

I don't like having a coworker I can't trust to handle the work. One of them is a good guy. Really trustworthy, always shows up (an hour after I do, but then he doesn't have to go anywhere in the afternoon like I do and often stays after I leave to finish up chores I didn't have time to do, so it's fair), and we share taste in music, so he always plays his iPod for us while we work. My weekend coworker is also great. She's sweet and friendly and a lot of fun. It's the other weekday coworker, who I shall call M, who is the problem. He has some mental issues, and probably shouldn't be working with large animals and machinery in the first place. But our employer is softhearted, and won't fire him, so we find stuff for M to do. These days, though, he's always calling in sick, leaving the other coworker and I to do the work. To be honest, it's almost a relief, because then I don't have to be afraid he's going to leave one of the paddock doors swinging open and release all the horses, dump a water bucket on the floor and let it freeze to ice, or get me or Good Coworker injured - all of which he has done before.

On a more specific note, today sucked. SUCKED. First, I got up at six in the morning to go to work. I had agonizing pain in my stomach, could barely breathe, and had to walk hunched over. I didn't eat because I knew I wouldn't be able to keep it down - this is a condition I have that comes and goes at random intervals. So I went to work (heavy physical work) with no food, and miserably ill. Now I know you're wondering Why the hell did you go to work, Silent? Well, to be honest, because I couldn't leave Good Coworker there by himself, knowing that M was going to be skipping again. We had a bunch of kids who were supposed to be coming in today, and one of us would have to supervise the grooming and stuff that they would do.

Yeah, you know what's coming - the kids didn't show. Turns out they thought it was tomorrow. So now it is. >.< That didn't make me feel any better. Then I drove home, showered fast and went to school. So now I was cold and miserable and ill (remember it's something like -20 C here now). Then I sat painfully through classes that I could easily have skipped - we did nothing of importance.

And on the way home? I got rear-ended by some douchebag who'd been tailgating me since downtown. I kept trying to get space from him, he kept closing it - he must have been speeding, since I was going the limit in my attempt to get spacing. Then I had to stop for a changing light. I admit that I stopped a little abruptly, because my truck is having a few minor brake issues. But the guy was too close, and he rear-ended me. Luckily the damage was very minor - just a little bit of scraped paint and a little bump on the bumper, so I let him go because it wasn't worth the insurance-company hassle. But still. This is only my fourth day with my driver's license, and I've already been in a minor accident. Now I'm sick, in pain, and pissed right off.

On an entirely different note, I'm pissed because I have to change my lesson. The riding lesson that I have taken once a week, Saturday mornings, eleven a.m. sharp, for eight years. I have to change it now. I'm telling everyone it's because I have a club meeting every Saturday at one, which is true, but I'm omitting the fact that it's also partly because of a girl who was recently added to our lesson. She's a spoiled little princess who has to have everything she wants. She likes to ride my favourite horse, who I've ridden for almost a year and helped to train. Now, since he's not mine, I can stand - have to stand - knowing that she's riding him. But I can't stand watching it, because she uses her whip way too liberally and sometimes over nothing at all. I have had to bite my tongue so hard that it literally almost bled. And I don't need that kind of hassle.

Re the Volvo/Twilight thing: I'm also annoyed with my Stephenie Meyer-worshipping friends who insist that Twilight is amazing, it's the best thing ever written, and if I'd just give it another chance...
Uh, no. No thank you. I have better things to do with my time. Even worse is the friend who thinks that yeah, Twilight sucks, but The Host is amazing and wonderful and blah blah blah. I now have her copy of it in my bag because she kept pestering me about it until I gave in. I've only gotten to chapter six or so, and have no interest in reading more.
And the Volvo commercials can die in a magnesium fire. That is all.

...Whew. Okay. I'm done. Aside from one thing, and that is this:

Spaniard, your post about bitchy women was the first good thing about my day. I laughed so hard. Thank you.

MY G*DD*MN TRUCK ISN'T WORKING. AGAIN.
How the hell am I supposed to get to work? And after that to school? I can't get to work without transport, dammit. ARGH!!!

I love that truck, I really do. When it's working. When I don't have to jump the G*DD*MN battery before every FRICKING time I drive it - and don't say that I have a dead battery, because I don't. I DON'T. We just bought a new one today for it, and installed it, AND IT STILL WON'T WORK ARRRGGGHHHHHH.

See, we aren't mechanics. I don't even know what to look for. It goes something like this: I turn the key, and it just clicks once. Then silence.
And yet the lights, the heater, the radio, all that is turning on - it's just that the engine won't turn over! It's ridiculously annoying. And once I jump the battery it goes just fine. Until I turn it off again, anyway. [/pissed]

The truck is a Dodge Dakota. I think it's 2002? Not all that old, anyway.

Copy-Cat.

I thought someone else called me a copy-cat.
I was about to get pissed.
*smacks nose with rolled up shamwow*

Everytime I use toilet paper I think of shamwow.