I went to the horse racing track with my dad quite a bit in New York as a kid and I have always followed the sport with a little bit of interest since, primarily because my dad still watches and from time to time places some bets on the daily races. It is fun to watch and it can be very exciting, until you get to the thick and thin of it. These horses are bred, bought and trained for one reason only; to run very fast and make their owners lots of money.

Should the horse get sick or hurt, they are of no further use to their caretakers and often killed. I guess I always knew this, but from my armchair, clubhouse or grandstand view never took too much of that into account. Until today...

I just watched a beautiful filly finish second in the Kentucky Derby and then collapse with what was said to be two broken ankles. They bring out the equine ambulance and only a few short moments later, they kill her on the spot saying she had two fractured front legs.

Instant death just like that.

I know horses can't live long with broken legs, because they spend most of their lives standing, but instant euthanization on national television? I mean with all the money that the owner's have, are there no pain meds they could have given the horse, is there no surgery to repair the damage? Hell they can repair broken bones in cats and dogs and humans - albeit we all sit and lay a lot, so we can recover unlike a horse.

I just find it sad and heart-breaking. And what's worse, this same horse finished first in the Kentucky Oaks yesterday, so they had the horse running two major races in two days. I think that is abuse on behalf of the owners. I think the horses should be given at least a week between major races like that and I think they are at fault for her injury and subsequent death. I need to find me an animal-rights group that is willing to pursue something like this. I just find it wrong.

And before I get slammed for eating cows and pigs on my panini, I just want to say that more and more I am questioning people's treatment of animals and maybe one day soon I'll figure out a way that works for me to live with the knowledge. I don't think I could give up meat as a result for any lengthy period of time, but I may start looking for places that serve meat from only well taken care of farm animals and game.

RIP Eight Belles

I bought my dress today from brides by demetrios in Scottsdale....I had to try on the Sand color and I ordered it in white...due to secrecy policies, I can't post any pictures, but I will say that I had tried on a total of about 30 dresses at different stores all of which I would have altered extensively. This dress will take a few weeks to get in and since I am not a 10 and not a 12, but what would be a 10.5 or 11, I had to order the 12. I hope they can take it in and make it look as awesome as the 10 looked on me even if it didn't zip. It was over budget, but made of taffeta, with embroidery, sequins, asymmetrical, with a mini-train but not too much and soooooooooo CORY! I can't wait to see what it looks like in the white and after I add black sequins to the myriad of others already there, plus maybe some black lace around the bottom. I showed ravyn440 some of the others I tried because I just really wasn't in love with any of them. This one I hope I can keep a secret until wedding day because I am that happy with it.

Woohoo!

100 days to go!

Anybody got any quit smoking tips?

got the bulk of the info on the wedding website

it is a work in progress

it basically mirrors the save the weekend cards, but i don{t think anyone read those

oh well

check out our photos

http://wedding.deadbunny.com/

we are getting there

thanks holly, i added your info front and center even though i am trying my hardest to get at least ten rooms booked at montbleu XD

wherever you are I wish you a very Happy Fun-Filled Sugar and Sweet Birthday!

I am at mount snow, vermont skiing today and there were eggs hidden all over the mountain, but even slipping through the trees and going on the easier trails i still didn't find one. oh well...some young kid found the golden egg and one season pass for next year.

Well anyhow Happy Bunny Easter day to you all and of course happy 23rd of the month!

Good day all. I'll be back in phoenix tomorrow except i left my ID at sky harbor on the way here....which means I'll get the anal probe to get through security...oh boy i can't wait!

Ok kids I am going to take the plunge and go for Monday night as an "official" gathering since I know most people use their weekends for other engagements, rest and relaxation and so forth, that's not to say I may not still go out Saturday night...but I think it would be super fun to get a core group of you to come meet me in Tempe for some mini-golf at Fiddlesticks on Monday the 10th...besides it will make mondays suck less! We can race and fight to be go kart and mini golf champs.

They have a little game room and go karts and other stuff there too...so maybe I'll even bring my own cake and we can take over the place. I'll have to check the times, but I think they are open pretty late...well not too late but until 9pm on Monday night...so time permitting maybe some of us can meet up before say around 6 or 6:30 depending on when people get out of work, go for drinks and food somewhere nearby and then head over for some golf and cart mayhem

http://www.zumafuncenters.com/tempe/contact.html

I'll have to find a restaurant....most people love Sushi Eye, and even though it isn't my kind of food, they do know me well there and they are right across the street...but they can also get a little pricey so I am open to other suggestions, but that could work out well.

I usually use the whole month of March to celebrate my birthday anyhow. I guess I will have to cross post this to Facebook and that crappy space and text and email those that I want to come who are not on LJ, but please let me know if you'd like to gather and celebrate my new life of living at the ripe old age of 32!

Yay

for at least a month now

my birthday is in 12 days and I will be 32....the backwards of 23...more spookiness

everyone in the past year seems to have been planning their own parties...i haven't done that for myself in a while because we always end up off skiing or in vegas...i want to do something so i don't end up miserable like i did at the Wynn hotel and casino steakhouse like i did last year. luckily after the restaurant experience i "had a wonderful experience on ecstasy" (thanks beastie boys) and all was well that ended well...but i could have done without the steakhouse lapse into deep depression

there were so many goals i wanted to meet by 32 that just haven't happened, so rather than lament my incompleteness, i want to celebrate my future

but i have no idea what or how...my friends have pretty much whittled done to a select 5 or 6 in the state of arizona that almost never have matching schedules, my birthday is on a monday (march 10)...so i am thinking something really silly like mini-golf or bowling on the saturday night before, then maybe followed by dancing and drinking...i really need to dance. i haven't been to a club since armin van buuren at myst and i think that was in october

what do thirty-something year olds do for their birthdays anyhow? spacekadette (well she isn't quite 30) had a fun poker tournament game night thing...Tanya did roller skating (31st bday), tara (not quite thirty) did a tempe marketplace gathering at some restaurant...i guess i want a mixture of mini-golf and dancing, but how will i muster up such an event in such short notice

anyone interested in helping me get out of my slump and celebrating the beginning of the rest of my life? and if you were to attend a birthday party what kinds of activities would make you more inclined to go than others? a house party or an outward location party? and anyone free the night of the 8th?

last time i tried to plan my own thing, not very many people showed up...so i guess rather than risk that and feel like crap...i'd like to go all out and get lots of people to show up...hell we could even start at my house then move on to other places, or just stay at my house...i really don't even know if it is worth it, because honestly i do feel like that since i have been such a hermit crab, no one respects me anymore...but who knows maybe friendships are resilient and maybe i am not a bad person after all

i don't sleep much anymore and mind you this post is coming at 4 in the morning when i am usually in my most pensive hour, but i want to have some fun damn it!

so i'm on a plane headed back to phoenix for a few days and it is leaving from gate A 23

the 23 is real see my last post

happy 23rd again

23 has been an especially fruitful number for me in 2008, so I plan to celebrate the 23rd of every month until December!

Happy 23rd!

(this begun with a chain of events centering around vegas and chinese new year and I will leave it at that)

they are everywhere...two of my close friends are 5 months pregnant...two of my other close friends have kids under the age of 4...my cousin just started working at a preschool with 3 and 4 year olds, there was a very pregnant woman in my real estate class yesterday, connecticut natalie has three babies under a year and a half and a babyblog which is so cute to read since it's in baby first person ( http://www.koprowskikids.blogspot.com/), people on LJ are loaded with babies, at least 3 babies popped out while i worked at smoca, ernie's office seems to be popping them out at a high rate too, as well as a lot of my now former friends, and there is more and more and more everywhere i look...ACK!

there are baby shows all over TV from regular people to celebrities, not to mention the tabloids and super market magazines and all the pregnant women at starbucks and the grocery store (are they all getting decaf?) and even in the casinos and the malls just wandering around with their little ones and bulging bellies

i want one YES, very badly but not YET - have other things to do first in the next 2 years- and I am going to be 32 in march....but if this baby overload continues I am going to meltdown in fear of getting too old or being infertile (which by the way i saw a billboard today for nobabytobaby.com or something to that effect for a fertility clinic)

I had to suffer through a happy hour about a month ago where my two pregnant friends talked about the inefficiency of maternity clothes for women with big boobs for at least 30 minutes...boohoo on you...they had big boobs before and they are bigger now and none of the clothes fit...so sad for them

and don't get me started on boobs...i have an average C cup, but I guess given my body type and the fact that I spend a lot of time in scottsdale and las vegas, I feel like an A cup 12 year old!

help help help

I get this letter from the City of Tempe at our Vegas address saying:

In regards to your photo enforcement complaint the charge has been dismissed. You no longer have to appear in Court.

If you have any questions or need additional information, please contact the Tempe Municipal Court at 480-350-8184.

Sincerely,

Civil Traffic Hearing Officer

----------------

1. I never got a photo ticket in the mail (at least not for 3 years and definitely not since my car has been registered in Nevada

2. I never complained about it

I'm glad there are people there spending time sending out letters like this for no absolute reason.

In other news, I am back in Vegas for the second time this month, but this time it is a working vacation. Long story short I am making up 24 hours of CE credit for my NV RE license. I've only been here a day and I got up at 6am yesterday! I usually wake up at home between 11am and 4pm. This was all well and good yesterday, but now it is Thursday and I crashed at about 10:15pm last night and woke up at 3:30am....What the heck am I supposed to do with this? I want to wake up at 7 not 3:30.

I guess I'll read more Rolling Stone which I get for free here now and try try try to fall back asleep.

-------------

I will be 32 in 18 days, please help me...that puts me in my almost mid-thirties. My goals for my 32nd year, sustainable recurring income, teaser classes for grad school, our wedding, a trip to Greece and maybe some other places over that way, more time with friends, exercising like hiking, biking, skiing, swimming and all that fun stuff, taking the GRE and applying to grad school, quitting smoking and lots more but if I list too many it will never happen..

Ok please let me go back to sleep now body

Thank you!

now that i am self-employed, every minute I have that I am not working is time I could be spending either working or generating business for new projects. I spend most of my time in the house online emailing people back and forth and lest I need to show a house, meet someone at the Museum or go out for dinner or a party with friends or even hit up the grocery store, sometimes I can stay in my pjs until 3pm. I have been trying to be more pro-active about time management and spending the evenings of the last week of January and the first week of February watching all of season 1 for lost, playing halo and starting season 2 has not helped my case one bit. I have been out of the 9-5 scene since August 1st and in that time I have made almost $3850 in contract work for the Museum with more yet to be invoiced, plus I had a $4,000 real estate sale and I am really really close to helping my latest set of buyers pick a house (we have been out more than 4 times and seen just about every foreclosure north-central phoenix has to offer, but they keep wanting to see more and more.

So if I add that income together (mind you it is untaxed, but that's ok as long as I can make enough deductions to not show a profit) that means that in 6 months I have generated $7850 worth of income. My annual salary at SMoCA was right around or just under $30,000....so I am at less than half of what I was making there. When I left to start this new business I really thought time would not be an issue because there would be oodles of it, but with self-directed marketing and self-directed projects must come discipline and motivation as well as perseverance. Then you have life, social gatherings, boyfriend stuff, household stuff and everything in between until you find yourself in the very situation I am in now. It is almost 7am...I have been up all night. I took some sleep aid at 11pm, but here I am - STILL - worried that if I go to bed I won't finish enough work nor will I be able to get up at my desired 10 am to do more buyer showings between 11 and 1. I want to order business cards, set up email marketing campaigns, send out Just Sold cards, get turbo tax working, implement streaming audio on a webpage (as a test for the latest smoca project I have been hired to do - which is consequently due friday.)

I have a planner, a web calendar and I am pretty choosy about social events too so I can maximize my work time but there keeps seeming to be a deadline on the horizon that supersedes that which came before it.

Oh and I thought I would be so smart and buy 3 pints of ice cream which I thought would last at least 2 weeks, but between all this, I've already eaten 1/3 of my supply. Is there any winning?

at least there is early valentines day to look forward to this weekend with ravyn440 in Las Vegas

and I can honestly say that in spite of everything on my plate I have been pretty happy for the past 5 days...lots of things are coming together and I feel stronger and more confident. i just need to lose the illusion that I have freetime like a person who had a 40/hour per week job...everything i do, everyone i meet and everywhere i go can be some how related to my business should i decide to play it that way

in other news i am about to fight progressive for paying out a claim i was documented as saying i wanted to handle privately, my rates went up $330 for the next six months without my authorization to even open the claim, it"s because it is being considered an at fault accident on my part - well there is no police report proving that and my my car isn't even fixed. I can either fight and see if i i can get it reversed or join them, take the $1000 deductible reopen the claim and try and get my car fixed too and risk my rates going up again in 6 months. funny how no one on their end can tell me what would/will happen for sure if i do that. i can also do nothing, pay the increased premiums and still get my car fixed out of pocket. the whole thing happened in vegas in november when a cab and i side swiped each other. my credit score has also dropped almost 100 points since september and i'd really like to work on fixing that too.

What's weird is that like i said i am not unhappy, my home life is going great, the boy and i are seemingly getting along and just as in love as we ever were if not more even after almost 5 years of being together and although I have a ton of shit to take care of i think it is all going to be okay. i just need to learn to sleep between 12am and 8am...that shouldn't be too hard right? morning people do get more done and they don't slog through the day feeling behind all the time, but whenever i attempt to reverse my schedule i either get sick or end up so overtired i can barely function

I guess I will attempt a two hour nap even though that never works but in my current state i am useless. wish me luck for my 10am wake up call!

but really I think I should be called procrastinator of the year...I just spent 25 minutes refashioning my mouse pad because I was having issues with the cable extension on my mouse (no i haven't gone wireless yet), so i re-routed the wiring and now it has a nice cozy home below my second monitor, but my new configuration was not complete because the mouse pad that I had customized for myself about 3 years ago had finally started to fall apart...so now I have this nifty little black fabric wrapped pad held together by aleenes tacky glue, 8 very carefully placed green metallic paperclips and a few staples to give it that rivethead look. Yay me...of course the fact that I use a pink swarovski crystal coated mouse designed and signed by Erin Lareau - celebrity bling designer (at least she was back in 2002 when I got the mouse - www.erinlareau.com) - does not help my case too much here.

Yay I finished the game on normal about 30 minutes ago! I have to say parts of it were really fun, other parts were extremely annoying and I just wished I'd stop dying, but I eventually made it through. I am not pleased with the ending though. I feel like something is missing from the story and it just kind of went to sleep, so to speak....

So it took us awhile to get an xbox 360 and finally play this game. E's mom got it for him for Christmas though so it was time. Ernie finished it two days after he got the xbox 360 (which was New Year's Eve) and I've been playing it off and on since. Currently I am on the 7th or 8th mission and inside the flood mothership trying to find Cortana and I just have to say the people who designed this game are sick. All these nasty, swelling, morphing disgusting flood creatures are jumping all over me and there is just one yucky beast after the other coming at me. It's quite gross, blood and guts everywhere in this twisted zombie infested place. I almost got sick to my stomach because of the ickiness. I like the grunts and the other enemies better. This flood stuff is just rank.

there are a whole bunch of people outside on my street...two boys are throwing a baseball, two little kids are riding their bikes, one neighbor went across the street to say hello to the other neighbor and another family is outside with their dog and their mobile dog trainer

AND

people are being friendly and all talking to each other

my neighborhood just got cool

p.s. sorry I have been vacant from LJ for awhile
the holidays sucked up everything with E and I traveling back east to visit my family and I had two huge projects to finish the first week of January:
I built this site: www.flipastrip.org with some outsourced programming AND I got paid for it wee!
plus I sold a condo to the mom of the autistic boy I have been working with for the past 3 years!
now I'm all about marketing and I have the freedom to choose which project I want to work on next with some hourly web updates for the museum to keep me occupied in the meantime

it's 7:22 am and I'm still awake. I guess it didn't help that I was still sick and nauseous yesterday and slept from 11am to 5pm. I got a lot of errands accomplished at about 7am Tuesday morning, then came home and crashed.

Now I would really like to be in bed by at least 2am and up by 10am but so far no good. I have a ton of new photos and at least 10 new albums I posted on picasa that I would love to share, but I consider that slacking off when all my time lately is MY time and I need to devote it to the most productive and beneficial tasks that will hopefully facilitate me in carrying out my goals of getting my real estate business and web marketing company off the the ground and running.

I just got 40% up front to launch, design and maintain an architecture design competition website for SMoCA which I am super psyched about. This covers me for at least 45 days as far as cash goes and then there is even more to be paid when all the bugs are fixed and it goes live

it's all because of you...

why can't i find peace and in all reality, "keep up with the joneses"

i always feel like i am last in line

most of the time i don't even know where the line begins

i interview with ADT tomorrow for door to door sales...my dreams are all coming true and let me tell you, it is picture perfect /sarcasm
(edit: the interview didn't happen because i was 10 minutes late, then had to wait 20 after that for someone to come talk to me..i gave up and walked out - maybe the recruiter will actually learn how to check his email now)

japan photos are being uploaded in parts by alphabetical order of location

i think i have about 10 albums to go

but first i bring you asakusa (funny how it is the first album but last day we were there):

Asakusa, Tokyo, Japan 10/13/07

So either I've gotten really boring or I only post too many photos...but either way I have totally geeked out. I now have two 20" flat screen monitors on my home workstation. Yay for extended desktop. I feel more productive already!

Got a full week ahead: highlights include getting my oil change, possible replacing my front tires, sealing our new tile, sushi (two nights in a row and I don't even like fish), meeting with an ASU advisor about graduate design school possibly in architecture, an interview to be a door to door security saleswoman for ADT, a first aid renewal class and oodles of data entry and software education for this new program I am hoping to get started so I can sell it to other agents.

Oh yeah, then Friday afternoon with a fresh oil change and hopefully some new treads I am hitting Vegas until about the 16th. I am hoping to steal some inspiration and ideas from the REALTOR convention. If I was ever so enterprising, I could get these mktg packages bundled and in a sales presentation so I can hand them out and describe my services to people while I am there. Con starts Nov. 13...I know about 10% of the program I want to use, sell and promote for all the mktg plans. Time? we've got time!

I guess I better get moving.

Oh best for last: 5 year vegas-versary on 11/11/07 for ravyn440 and I - so we plan to boogie down or at least do something fun Saturday night. It's not our "official" dating anniversary, but aptly our "vegas-versary". I'm ready for more fun. Bring it! I am tired of waking up feeling behind or sad or like I am not accomplishing enough. I just want to look forward and KNOW with all my heart that everything will find a way to work out into something I can find favorable.

..to Myst in Scottsdale, AZ for Armin Van Buuren...you should all be there! I just bought my tickets through paypal. He goes on at 11 and I am going to show up at 9pm for $2 drinks on the patio. Hopefully the whole will call process will be smooth and painless. I have talked to a few people who have been there recently who have had major doorman issues. I don't really feel like putting up with that so getting there early is the best bet.

Hope to see some of you there!

Cory