This week, I am thankful that we have this guy at our barn, Red AKA Cooper. Thanks to my friend Sarah Parlier who saved him off a feed lot where he was going to be slaughter-house bound to Mexico or Canada (which this would be a whole different blog post if anyone is wondering about that and SoCal’s dirty little secret when it comes to kill buyers and slaughter houses for horses >:/) if somebody didn’t take him in and save him!! He’s been at the barn for about 3 weeks now and he’s doing great! He is such a sweet sweet boy. So sad to think of where he may have ended up if he wasn’t so lucky to have someone like Sarah to come and rescue him!!!

Sarah does such AMAZING work. She re-homes race horses from the track that are either too injured to race or are finished with their racing careers and need a new job to do now. Helping owner/trainers find new homes when their racing days are over gives them a chance for a second career and to keep them off the auction lots or fall through the claiming ranks as so many do.

Besides re-homing horses off the track, she also saves as many as she can off the auction lots that kill buyers frequent. Sarah is VERY diligent about tracking and keeping up with these horses that she does re-home to ensure they are happy and well taken care of. If they are not being taken care of, she will gladly find a new home or take them in herself if she is able to until she can find a new loving home from them. Sometimes some of the ones she has re-homed end up at these auctions and does everything in her power, with the help of a few other amazing Ladies like Jenny Earhart, Christina Swan, Megan Gaynes and many others! They all take these horses in, round-up the funds to purchase them, re-hab them back to health then find loving homes for them.

Red is not one of her previously re-homed horses, he’s never been raced, and we don’t even think he is a Thouroghbred. He looks like he may be some kind of warm-blood or an appendix. Either way, he is very kind and looks like he will make one very nice riding horse, possibly even a show horse! 🙂

If you’d like to see some of the amazing work Sarah does, the horses she has up for adoption, or the horses she has placed into loving homes to date, go check out her website! You will be glad you did.  http://www.equineracers.com/

I am so very thankful that there are people like Sarah out there that do such selfless work to re-home as many of these magnificent equines as possible. These horses deserve another chance at life!

I just recently got myself a new iPhone 4S the other month as my DRIOD X crapped out on me, and for one of my businesses, I really need a smart phone.  Literally being only 7 DAYS away from being eligible for an extra “loyalty discount” on top of my “new every two” deal, I was even contemplating just using one of my old phones until I could use that discount as well. Alas I had an event that weekend that I needed the smart phone capabilities for, so I gave in and went for the iPhone 4s!!!!

*Note to the wise* DON’T charge your phones overnight or keep them plugged into the wall 24/7 to charge!! It will ruin your battery in your smart phone!! That’s what happened to my smart phone apparently… I didn’t know since with all my old regular cell phones, I did this EVERY night, and NEVER had any battery issues with them…. guess these so-called “smart” phones aren’t so SMART after all and are very delicate that way… no matter how well you take care of them. I always keep my phone in a nice protective case and have screen protectors on them from Day 1, so my phone looked brand spanking new, just the battery was all out of whack and wouldn’t charge. The guy even thought I’d only had my phone for a short period of time just by looking at my phone (I had had it for about 1 year and 8 months…) so I got a very good credit at least for my worthless phone that looked very pretty and brand new, but on the inside was shot and dead.* Long story short, only charge your phone for short periods of time and right before you go to bed, but don’t leave it in overnight!! Will kill the life of your smartphone drastically!!!

Anyways….

Now I’ve been playing around with my phone and trying to find interesting APPS to add to it!! These are my favorites so far:

*PLEASE FEEL FREE TO COMMENT AND ADD YOUR FAVORITES THAT I HAVEN’T ALREADY MENTIONED!! I LOVE LEARNING ABOUT NEW APPS I CAN ADD TO MY PHONE!! THANKS!! :-)*

Here are my TOP TEN FAVE APPS so far!!! (*Aside from your usual apps like Facebook, twitter, messenger apps… those are just standard ones you gotta have ;-)*

1. Instagram–  I absolutely love this app! I love the quality of the pics; it’s so fun to take them with my cell phone and play around with the different filters and options and then post for other friends with the app to see! You can get some REALLY amazing high quality pics with this app! You can also post pics directly to your twitter or Facebook accounts as well! FIND ME on Instagram @horsingaroundinla  Quite a few of my pics I have posted on my blog here came from instagram!

2. Foursquare– Fun app to play around with and check into places with.  Keep up with friends, discover what’s nearby, and save money at places you love.

3. Square– Great to have if you have any kind of business of your own, do vendor or craft events. Start accepting all major credit cards,   anytime, anywhere. Sign up and they’ll mail you a free credit card reader.

4. Tiny Tower– My new favorite game on my phone to pass the time with (sorry draw something!) Tiny Tower lets you build a tiny tower (it doesn’t stay tiny for long though in my opinion!!) and manage the businesses and bitizens that inhabit it. You can pick what each level in your tower will be (residential, retail, creative, food, recreation, service) and which store each bitizen works in. You can play for short amounts of time or longer periods, which I love since sometimes I only have a minute or so to play at a time! Look for me on there with my user name: HorsingAroundInLA 🙂

5. Draw Something– Just like playing pictionary! You can play with a friend or with a complete stranger. Pick from 3 words they give you to draw, ranging from easy, medium, to hard leveled words, each worth a different amount of coins. Use the coins to get more colors to draw with or for “bombs” to destroy letters, or get new words with if you don’t like the ones they give you. You draw a picture, your friend guesses. If they get it right you both get coins. If not, oh well, then you just start over. Then they draw a pic for you to try to guess. Then it just keeps going on and on…. you can find me on here through my Facebook account.

6. Disney Parks– I LOVE anything Disney, so of course I would have this app! Gives you all the info you’d need to know during your trip to Disneyland OR Disney World. Gives you the hours for that day, Maps of the parks, Dining info, WAIT times for all the rides, Locations of the Disney characters that are out and about for picture opps, Shows & Show times, and SO MUCH MORE! A MUST HAVE for any Disney passholder or Disney fan!!

7. Shopkick–Like to get FREE stuff? Well then you’ll LOVE this app! You get points for checking into different stores & stores that you already go to anyways (think Target, Macy’s,  Toys R Us, Best Buy, American Eagle, Wet Seal, Wal Mart, Michaels) You can get rewards that are worth different amounts of points. I’ve had this app for about a year now, and have gotten a couple $25 gift cards to Target, and a few $25 gift certificates to use at restaurant.com!! YUM! I still have most of my points, saving them up for a COACH gift card, so I can go by me a new COACH purse!! 🙂 I LOVE COACH!! They also have gift cards for Best Buy, Hotel Cash Cards, Macy’s, Sports Authority, Arden B., Wet Seal, Toys R Us, American Eagle, Old Navy, iTunes, Gas Cards, & MORE!! If you’re interested in joining, send me a comment/email, so I can give you a link to join so we will both get bonus points for you joining!!

8. Lemon– Lets you track your expenses. You can easily scan your receipts & it will keep track of how much you are spending, and what you are spending it on. Very cool to have!

9. Pandora– Who doesn’t love listening to music? If I get tired of what I have on my iTunes, at the moment, its fun to mix it up by turning good old Pandora on. 🙂

10. Dictionary– Being that I am a teacher and tutor, this comes in handy to have.  You can easily look up words & it will give you the definition, part of speech, examples, and it also has a built-in thesaurus. This especially comes in handy when I have my students over for tutoring and we need to look up a word quickly vs. having to go pull the dictionary out. One other thing that is kind of neat about it is that it has a “word of the day” each day, so you will learn something new everyday!

These are just a few of my favorite things when it comes to my iPhone! <3