This all started about a week ago, in the great big patch of dirt, fencing, gates, small leantos, and horse manure fields a short distance from this house. There, my grandparents keep a couple of horse manure producers; namely, horses. Around this time last week(so I was told), the one I refer to as Old Old Man(as my dad is Old Man, my brother is Young Man, and I'm just Dude) was taking his horse out for exercise. As he rode through the open gate to take the horse to the other pen, the horse randomly decided to attempt to explode. It was like any time a Fox News host was talking about Obama's part of Obamacare that would require employers to provide contraception to their employees free of charge, with a section written by Kathleen Sebilius specifically to exempt religious organizations from the requireme - I mean, war on religion this weekend: total anarchy. The horse for some reason started bucking and jumping up and down and trying to throw off Gramps and all-around raising hell. Choosing to just fall off instead of being trampled into a bloody pulp by a half-ton of twister powering the downward force of four iron U's, he got his feet out of the stirrups and fell just as the horse was at the top of its jump, about twelve feet of gravity in total, straight into about a millimeter of loose dirt and about 10,000 miles* of hard Arizona ground(*rough estimate from core to crust). This is where he came in lucky: The internal organs of his torso could have burst like ballons, his skull could have smashed to bits and airated his thinking muscle, or he could have snapped his spine in twenty-seven places and paralyzed him from the eyelids up. Instead, he just broke a few ribs(four on the left side and seven on the right, if I remember correctly).
He landed just about face-first, cutting open his head quite a bit and making him look really gruesome. This scared the living everything out of his wife, who called 911 immediately. The dispatcher had a helicopter drop in and airlift him straight to the Phoenix hospital, and having driven by a building with a sign out front denoting it as the Globe Medical Center(it looked abandoned). There they cleaned him up and alerted everybody related to him that they could reach(with some notable exceptions) to his status of being within an inch of death. There were around 6 people visiting him in the hospital, where he was doing his best to recover and/or breathe. After a few days of looking terrible and feeling worse(you try breathing with 11 broken ribs), he was sent home Thursday(about 2 days ago).
While preparations were being made for him to head back home, I was on my way to Little Rock to take my first plane ride ever. I got checked out of school(for some reason I was sent there for an hour and a half) and rode with the Old Man to the Little Rock airport. After spending a half-hour alternating between standing around and walking, we got our boarding passes and went to go stand in line for another few minutes. This line was for the metal detectors(I removed my shoes, wallet, belt, glasses, jackets, phone, and had to take my 3DS, laptop, MP3 player, and charging wires out of the backpack I brought my stuff in) and the digital naked machi - full-body scanner. I opted out of being thoroughly patted down by a Touching Someone's Ass member. After going through and it being decided that I was not, in fact, a terrorist or Sith overlord, AND a black hole not opening up and consuming the planet, I spent a few more minutes putting all my shit back in order and heading down to sit around for another hour. To be fair, I actually stopped at the 'secure area's' sandwich shop(half the space, twice the price!) to have a nice sandwich. There was a little fridge full of water bottles with the warning "These products may contain nuts" which amused me to no end. I'll need to put that picture onto this post right about here when I get home.
Soon enough, we were loading onto the submarine with wings also known as a plane. The seats were about as spacious as the average airsoft pellet, but I did get a window seat so I got to see the endless forests between Little Rock and Houston whiz by(I didn't get to take any pictures as my 3DS is my main camera, and my phone is the other, and I'm not sure whether the 3DS was allowed to be used on planes because of how it actively seeks out signals) for an hour and a half or so. It felt vaguely like a roller coaster for small and retarded children, absolutely nothing to fear at all. Of course, I did not once go into an uncontrolled 600-mile-per-hour vertical dive, so my view may be a bit skewed. Houston's airport was spectacular in size. We didn't have to walk from where we landed to the terminal we were going to get on the plane; we had to take a tram, in which my face almost met tram floor at least three times. The layover was only 40 minutes, so I only had enough time to boot up my laptop to realize that unlike LIT, Houston's airport didn't provide wi-fi, and buy a pack of gum before getting onto the next plane, which was slightly more spacious, about the volume of a slice of cheese. I was in the window seat this time too, but my fellow rowmates were complete and uptight strangers(who pestered me until I had the window shade mostly closed. Bastards). Most of this 3-or-4-hour-ride(Arizona doesn't do dayight savings, so when I last came out it was 2 hours earlier, this time one hour, and the boarding pass didn't point out time zones) was spent reading my gaming magazine, which I will scoot around advertising by not naming, since I couldn't get a good view out the window(the New Mexico/Arizona landscape is beautiful, even from 30,000 feet up, though).
A few hours later, we arrived in Phoenix's airport, which claimed to be the friendliest airport in America(I'm sure only all the airports claim that!). It was actually a really nice place. Nice tones that didn't make the building look suffocating, the people at work were somewhat human in demeanor, and there weren't endless piles of crap that I ran into on the way out. We went to rent a car(which is hard to make fun of, not that I'm particularly good at it), and then drove to the Elder Fielders' residence. My grandma's daughter(my dad's stepsister and my random stranger) was there along with one of Gramps' old friends. And a dog, two cats, and two birds. I'm allergic to cats too, and the generic allergy medicine took twelve hours to kick in. Lovely. The next day I woke up late(a few minutes before 8 AM) to find the step-aunt-person and friend of the Old Old Man had already taken off back to Wyoming. The day was spent taking pictures, watering plants, feeding horses, de-pooping the backyard, cleaning a pool, de-pooping a stable, and feeding horses. Good day of honest work helping people that really need it, and that wasn't completely sarcasm. I still got plenty of doing nothing with nobody around in to boot.
In my home country, we call this a horse and/or a person.
That's me, by the way. I'm a guy last time I checked, and I was mostly worried that the horses would take out their hunger on my hair so I was on guard the whole time I was out with the horses. There were two horses, actually.
A black horse of some kind...
And one that is slightly emo-looking in this shot.
I'm not sure which one tossed Gramps through a Rube Goldberg machine into the hospital, unfortunately. They were both pretty mellow though. And they loooooooove alfalfa. Not to mention they take dumps everywhere. At the house there are the two cats(Sonny and Sharon), the two birds(Orion[more on him later] and Pretty Bird), and the dog(Babydog). Such classic naming unparalelled by anyone anywhere. The cats are basically two-year-olds that don't speak and climb literally everywhere. In fact, in the process of typing up to this point each cat has mosied over and sat about an inch from my screen to see what I'm up to. The dog is more or less a log with legs and a head, friendly enough but after the first few minutes she doesn't seek out attention. Today I wandered around a swap meet(basically a pawn shop without the building and with multiple vendors) and a gift shop. There was so much obviously fake stuff at that swap meet, it was like Congress was meeting in about an acre of gravel in a small town in Arizona. I didn't buy anything that interested me(there were some things, but I dare you to take a small battleaxe through airport security). Ended up buying a little ceramic fox at the gift shop, I might send that to someone as a gift but that's somewhat classified information so we'll end the paragraph there. Hopefully it won't get me detained when it gets scanned at the airport tomorrow.
The cats are somewhat docile as far as cats go. I'm told they stopped turning the knobs on the stove after being burned one too many times and they don't really tear anything up, so they're alright as long as I'm medicated.
This cat was not, in fact, a dish waiting to be washed.
My grandma was so pissed that the cat moved before she could take this picture, she almost burst into flames. Lucky for me I had my 3DS on me at the time.
I'm really about halfway done with this post, but I'm gonna pull a lazy asshole and just post the other half about Orion and the trip home(which I have yet to go through in fact) when I get home. Hope you enjoy what I have so far.
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