a surprise day off!

Apparently the ranch foreman accidentally missed scheduling me for one of my days off, so today I get to merrily stroll about town before going back to those 6 a.m. workdays.

I'm going horseback riding later today with a couple of my co-workers. One of them, Mike, told me to call him when I got up this morning: "But I get up kinda early, Mike." I woke up at 5:30 this morning, woke again at 7:00, and finally called Mike at a little after 8:30, to his great dismay. Hey, he INSISTED. Anyhow, Whitney, Mike and I are going out to who knows where in a while. Sarah, my roommate may come too, if I can get her out of bed.

In the meantime, I think I'll mosy on over to the bakery and maybe the kayaking place as well

my job

Okay, this is actually a section of a letter that I just finished writing... But I figured I would post it here just to give you all an idea of what exactly I do every day.

Here's an average day at work:

Work starts at 6:00 a.m. I hitch a ride into work with some of my housemates. We put hay and grain out in the outdoor stalls, and then open the gate to the 'dude horses' pasture. The dude horses pile on out and find themselves a stall and start munching away. While they're busy eating, we go along and put a halter on each horse (they know what's going on and very politely lift up their heads and poke them into the halters). At the same time as they're being haltered up, someone else is going along and setting the horse's saddle on the wall beside him (they're all geldings). Once they're all haltered, we brush them all down: this is a really quick brushing and takes less than a minute per horse---basically, we concentrate on the saddle area and ignore the rest unless he's caked in mud. Then, we saddle them up.

Once the dude horses are saddled, we grab a halter and head over to the guide horse corral. There, Booner, the foreman, assigns each of us our horse for the day. Usually, I wind up with Chief, a big appaloosa. I share Chief with another girl, though, so sometimes she has him and I wind up with another horse... Sometimes that horse is a guide horse, and sometimes it's a dude horse that just got in from a winter in the back country and that they want to test out before they send back to the dude pen.

As soon as I've saddled my horse and made sure he has food, I hop back in the car and head back to staff accom. Usually, it's around 6:45 at this point...

I have to be back at work again at 8:00. Once we roll in again at 8:00, we grab the dude horses and take them over to their pen. Usually, we grab three or four of them at a time, to make things go a bit faster. Once they're in the pen, we take their halters off and bridle them. Then, we do the same for our own horses.

And then, our day begins! Rides start at 9:00 and leave every hour on the hour. From the main stables, we offer every thing from one hour to three hour rides. We also offer half day rides, full day rides, breakfast rides and steak fry rides... Everything up to six day rides, actually.

I'm only doing the one to three hour rides right now, with the occasional steak fry thrown in there. On average, I usually spend between 5 and 7 hours in the saddle, but that'll probably go up in number once the busy season starts. The other day, I came in from a ride and went straight back out on another without my feet ever touching ground.

When I'm not guiding, I'm usually doing barn chores. That involves a lot of shovelling manure (we can't have the paying customers seeing horse poop). I've also helped fix a few fences and have learned how to hook up and drive the draft horses, which means I can now drive the shit wagon over to the manure pile... The joy!

I'm usually out of the stables by around 6:30... 8:30 if I go on the steak fry.

Of course, that's just my day if I'm at the main stables.

Sometimes, I'm stationed over at our other location by the Fairmont. If that happens, my day starts pretty much the same, but I have to be back from breakfast by 7:45, so that we can tie the horses together and guide a string over them over to the 'Spray River Corrals' as it's called. The Corrals are pretty fun... because we don't have a foreman there watching over us and no barn to clean, we tend to spend the time not guiding playing card games or napping. We only offer two trails there, a one hour and a three hour, but both are very cool and involve a lot of river fording and mountain climbing.

Anyhow, that's my summer job for you... I wrote my 'guide test' today, which means I will soon be officially guiding, as opposed to just kind of tagging along on the rides.

Being a cowgirl is hard work.

I'm really tired. It's taking me twice as long as usual to write this entry, because I keep typing in the wrong letters and having to go back and correct 'em. If I haven't corrected them all... Oops.

I learned how to hitch a draft horse up to a wagon today! I also learned how do drive him. Awesome, eh? I drove the shit wagon all the way over to the giant shit pile.

Tomorrow's my day off, which is excellent. I've been getting up at 6 a.m. every morning and working until 8:30 every night. My muscles are sore and my body is all bruised. My formerly pretty fingernails are disgusting.

All moved in and ready to start work in the morning

So, tomorrow after I finished writing that blog entry I finished moving in. Then, my new roommate and I decided our room was too small and repacked all our stuff and moved into a HUGE room in the basement of the house across the street.

My new roommate's name is Sarah. She's from Nova Scotia and seems like she'll be a lot of fun.

Sarah and I headed down to Warner Stables at around 5 for 'beer time' with the cowboys/girls. We all sat in a circle by one of the barns and drank Pilsner. Then, we headed back to our new house, where our new housemate, Richard, cooked us spagetti. What an excellent fellow!

After that, Sarah and I headed over to visit with Texas John, one of the Warner crew. He reshaped our cowboy hats for us and showed off all his rodeo trophys, etc... He showed us pictures of his parent's Quarter Horse spread in Texas. Very nice. The three of us went to the Rose and Crown, where nothing at all was happening. I did, however, notice that bartenders are very impressed by cowboys/girls. ...Actually, I noticed the same reaction when Sarah and I went to breakfast at Bruno's today.

Anyhow, looks like it's going to shape up into a fun summer.

Went on a trail ride today. Start work tomorrow.

Moving Day

I really quite detest moving... even when I am just moving one block over. It is beyond me how I have managed to accumulate such a large amount of useless shit in such a short amount of time. About half an hour ago I was pushing a grocery cart full of my belongings across the street, tripped on the curb and took a header into traffic. I then decided maybe it was time to take a breather from the whole moving thing, so here I am, sitting in the internet cafe.

I start work at Holiday on Horseback on Wednesday. Right now, I'm enjoying my four days of freedom.

I spent the weekend in Calgary visiting with Rokaya and Chris. It was a good time... Friday, Rokaya has a 'girl's night.' We did manicures and pedicures... Girly stuff. I also wound up doing a ton of shopping (well, not really a ton by most people's standards, but considering this is me, the anit-shopper talking, a ton). It's been getting warm, and I have almost no spring/summer clothes here in Alberta. Oops.

Okay. Break time's over. Back to ye olde grinde.

shwa...

The kitchen is clean. It was a frickin' pigsty when I started cleaning it an hour ago. But now, it shines. And none of the previous mess was mine, thank you muchly... but according to the schedule on the bulletin board, it was my week to clean the kitchen, so... Having said that, I had forgotten how satisfying I find cleaning. It's dirty, you make it clean: presto, you have affected a dramatic change in the world!

I worked the 5:30 a.m. shift today. It was supposed to be 5:45, but Alex asked me to come in early. Yay. I got out of there before 10, though! And tomorrow's my last full time shift at the restaurant!

Sarah, my friend who went to Queen's at the same time as me, but who I didn't meet 'til I came to Banff, and I went hiking today. She's got a car--a nice one, at that--so we drove out to Lake Minnewanka. The sun was out, the air was fresh. I've been missing springtime in the Maritimes, but this was pretty nice, too.

I am actually in a pretty good mood, these days

Mom tells me that my last few posts have seemed somewhat grouchy/bitter, so I thought I should clarify that point.

Yesterday, I had the day off. I went on a hike of Grotto Canyon with Alec, a guy from my staff accom, his buddy whose name escapes me, and James, a.k.a Prettyboy from the U.K., who used to work with my roomie Jess. Then, in the evening I went out for drinks with John, who my former boss Pam has been after me about since the second day I started working at Snowflake. The drinks wound up streching out over 4 hours, before I had to cut it short and go home (5:45 a.m. work-day today).

And then today, as I just mentioned, I was at the Inns of Banff by 5:45 a.m. Fun, fun. My boss, who was also there, asked me if I was all right: "You look like shit."

Me: "It's 5:45 in the morning."

Why, you may ask, were we there at that time? A group of 120 Japanese schoolkids wanted to eat at 6:00 a.m. It was quite a surreal sight. They marched in by class and found their seats, chanting something as they walked in. Once they found their chairs they sat with their heads bowed until everyone had filed in. Then, the headmaster jerked his hands in the air, and two teachers ran forward in unison to close the doors. He made a brief speach and the kids, again by class, filed up to eat off the buffet.

I was in charge of tea and coffee.

The early morning kind of sucked, but I was also out of there by 10 a.m. Not bad at all.

I served two tables frozen chickens last night.

Which went over well, not just with them, but with all the surrounding tables who had ordered chicken.

One lady called me over.

"Oh, they weren't raw," I said. "They were just frozen." Apparently frozen, previously cooked chicken is just as bad as raw chicken.

I don't eat at the restaurant much.

work = ugh!

So, today I came into work a few minutes before my starting time of 6:30. I WOULD LIKE TO EMPHASIZE THAT MY START TIME WAS 6:30. The restaurant was dark, but as I approached, I could see figures standing in it. I stepped over a dead bird that was lying in the entryway of the hotel, and entered the restaurant. One of the front desk guys was standing in there, along with a few of the cooks, and a japanese tourist.

"Hey, there's a dead bird..." says I.

"Where the hell have you been?" asks the bellman. "The restaurant is supposed to open for a japanese tour group in five minutes, and nothing been done."

Just to clarify, two servers always come in a half hour before the restaurant opens and get it set up for the day. There's a huge amount of stuff that needs to be done behind the scenes, and never enough time to do it.

Today, however, that didn't happen. Myself an Magda were scheduled to open the restaurant at the same time as a group of 21 japanese tourists were scheduled to dine.

Yay.

I turned on the lights and threw a pot of coffee on. What else could I do? The customers kept coming up and asking me, "Um... Where is the ----?" At which point I would run and get the ketchup, the cream, the bread, the butter, or whatever else hadn't been brought out yet.

Good times.

And then... THEN... We had 100 middle school kids in for lunch. They were having fajitas. And of course they didn't understand the concept of one serving each, or portion sizes, which meant that some kids wound up with four helpings, while others wound up with none. I also wound up with none, which sucked, since the only reason I like working buffet functions is because I get to eat the leftovers.

Good times.

the intransience of Banff...

My roommate, Jess, has been packing her bags for the past two days. Our room is a mess. Jess is off to Hawaii to catch some sun, and then she's going home to the U.K.

The Aussie's are all packing their bags, too. Frosty flies home tomorrow. Ben flies to a job in Sweden. Chris and Jus are doing a quick tour of North America, and then they head back to Aus.

MJ, who lives in room 4, and has been dating Chris, is moving back to Montreal. Claire, who only just moved into the room beside me is moving back to Ontario next month....

And even the people who are staying here in Banff are moving.

Magda, my super at the restaurant is moving up to the campgrounds on Tunnel Mountain for the summer. It started out as just one person, Remi in maintenance, moving up there. Now half the staff seem to be! I'm kind of envious. It looks like a fun way to spend the summer. If I wasn't moving into the staff accom for the stables, I'd do it! In any case, I'm definitely checking out their bonfire in a few weeks time.