Carolyn Shepard:
CLASS OF 1972
Salinas High SchoolClass of 1972
Salinas, CA
California Polytechnic State UniversityClass of 1977
San luis obispo, CA
Hartnell CollegeClass of 1974
Salinas, CA
Carolyn's Story
Who am I, really. Why, I'd have to say I'm me.
I have no fashion sense, never desired one. I wear blue jeans and tee shirts. If it's cold, I put on a sweat shirt. All different colors. My cap is red, my sweatshirt is pink. I don't care, and neither do the horses!!
I love horses. My first memories (except that one where I remember my mom breastfeeding my little sister)were all of horses. Some girls grow out of that. I didn't. It's a disease, but I'm not seeking a cure. And I hope no one develops a 12 step program for it. Or my husband might make me go.
I got married while in college to a man who didn't realize I was horse crazy. He had inklings, but he's under the impression I fooled him. I mean, hey, in college you don't have time to fawn over horses, so he thought I was okay with that apartment living. Which I was, because, like I said, you don't have a lot of time for stuff other than classes and studying if you need to graduate before the money you earned for college runs out.
Thirty two and a half years later, I'm still married to him, so I guess he's a patient man.
I graduated from Cal Poly, SLO, and got a job as a clinical laboratory scientist. Bob's a computer design engineer. We made a nice income. I bought a horse. :-) And stabled her at Fort Ord (while Bob was in the Army). It didn't seem right that I had to get into my car and drive out to visit my own horse. Your horses should be in your yard, where you can pull back the curtains and see them! But then I somehow got pregnant (never figured that one out, although folks have tried to explain it to me) and realized it was either the horse, or the baby, and I opted to keep the baby. I didn't really bond with that horse, anyway.......
So, after Amber was born, we did the decent thing, and bought a little house in, of all places, East Salinas. We lived there for 11 years. We'd find spent bullets in our back yard that had fallen from the sky. My dark cat vanished on Halloween. There were sirens and police activity at all hours of the day and night. Mostly the nigh...Expand for more
t. And the trick-or-treaters. Literally hundreds of them. Bussed in from the outlying areas, by the swarm. Hundreds and hundreds of greedy little kids. That was the worst. :-)
And meanwhile, my desire for horses hadn't died. But I almost did. We'll spare the details, but it occurred to me that if I wanted horses, I had better do it NOW. So we packed up and moved to a 10 acre patch of ground outside of Paso Robles, and I started collecting horses, and am now a stay-at-home horse mom. With no more money, but happy as a clam. I guess my daughter, not so much. As she moved out when she was 19. She did a several year stint as an international fashion model, and did okay, but couldn't walk in high heels, so that limited her job options. :-) She's married and living in Washington now, some distance from Seattle. Horseless. She likes horses okay, but not enough to ruin her life for them.
And we have no, zero, zip trick-or-treaters on Halloween!!!
If just having the horses weren't enough, I developed an obsessive interest in horse color genetics. And certain colors in particular. I run the International Champagne Horse Registry and am pretty much the world expert on the champagne coloration. :-) :-) Then along the way, I was the first to document a new dilution gene in Paint Horses that was eventually named "pearl." So I'm almost famous in some horse color circles. Yeah, baby! LOL!
I own way too many horses, a lot of them champagne. And one pearl. Some palominos and such. A few normal colors. And a donkey. Koko Kinko, a white donkey jack. I love him, too.
My husband would like to eventually move back to the city, and live where he doesn't have to mow the lawn or repair horse damage, or pick up after the horses, or even look at the horses. But there's not a very good chance that will happen as long as I'm alive and kicking. Where I have to laugh. We have a running joke that I had better not die, as if life is anything like TV, then the first person they arrest is the spouse. Bob's not that type. Trust me, he didn't do it!!
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