One of the great things about any national show is that you get to meet people from all over the country. You get to see friends you only see once a year, or perhaps friends you've talked to online but never met in person. I'm facebook friends with all kinds of people I don't know at all, simply because we have mutual friends and interests. Some of them are pretty well known, so I always wonder if they think I'm some sort of weird Internet stalker. I'm not! I swear! Can I come to your house and pet your horsies and be your best friend? Anyway....
I was holding a horse, Scarlet, for the farrier the other day, and a nice woman from Ohio (I think) was also there with her horse. We chit chatted about this and that, and at one point she looked at Scarlet and said, "She doesn't have any weight on her? That's my kind of horse." I looked at Scarlet, and although she was wearing a sheet, the Friesian half of her heritage was quite obvious and she's a pretty chunky girl. How on earth could this woman think she didn't have any weight? Oh, Scarlet's kind of vain, so don't tell her I called her chunky.
"Um, what?" I so eloquently replied. My career as a writer gives me a wonderful way with words.
"Weight," she replied. "She doesn't have any weight on her. I like that, because it's so easy to keep them clean."
Ah, light bulb moment...she meant white, and Scarlet indeed has no white. Being from California where we don't speak with accents (it's because we're so highly evolved. Us Californians are quite superior, you know), it's not often that I hear a southern accent. It's something we mostly hear in movies, so it's kind of fun to hear so much of it everywhere we go.
Apparently, there's a difference in swimwear between the south and California, as well. I realized when I learned our hotel has an indoor pool that I forgot my bathing suit, so I went to Walmart (I think in the south they say "the Walmart") to see if they still had any. Given that it's September and raining every five minutes, my expectations were low.
I was pleasantly surprised to find a sale rack with a bunch of suits, but they were all two piece. I have lost a bunch of weight (yes, weight, not white) recently, but I'm not quite ready for a two-piece bathing suit.
I wandered around until I found a Walmart employee and asked her in my perfectly superior non-accented, easy-to-understand English, "Excuse me, do you know if you have any one-piece bathing suits?"
She looked at me, raised an eyebrow and said, "Y'all want what now?" This story is funnier when I tell it in person, but you can add in the little lilt on the last word for dramatic purposes.
I enunciated even more clearly. "One piece bathing suits. Do you have any left?"
"What do you mean by one piece?" came the reply. This threw me for a loop, because although I'm accustomed to coming up with different ways to say things so I sound like a really good writer, I don't know of any other way to describe a one-piece bathing suit. I mean, that's what they're called, right?
I also have a low tolerance for stupidity, as my friends can attest. I took a deep breath, controlled my face and tone, and answered, "You have two piece bathing suits, I'm just wondering if you have any one-piece left."
"It don't work like that," she proclaimed. It don't work like that?
I stiffened my spine and said somewhat loftily, "So you don't have any. That's all I wanted to know," and strode away. She didn't have to be so snippy about it.
One more difference that I've noticed between California and the south: yesterday, I noticed a display of country hams in the gas station convenience store. Now, I have consumed many a gas station convenience store cheeseburger, hot dog, bag of chips, cup of coffee, donut and I even trust them with bananas. However, I have never in my life purchased actual meat that I would cook for dinner in a gas station convenience store. That just weirded me out...how long have they been there? How do hams count as convenience store food? Do people in the south say things like, "I need to go get something for dinner. I think I'll go to the gas station on the corner."
Ah, it's almost 9:00 and I need to get to the show-there's a great service that checks on your horses during the night, tops off the water and even feeds in the morning if you ask them to, so we're getting pretty spoiled. I don't think I've ever started a horse show day at 9:00 in my life. Have a great day!