About Me
Colletta et Moi
I'm old enough to smoke, marry, vote, and apparently have a bio. So here goes. XD
To begin with, my name is Molly Rose. I am currently taking classes at the local college (graphic design, for those who may be interested), even though I'm of the personal opinion that college is optional for a REASON. Maybe my opinion will change as I continue to take classes.
I was homeschooled all my life--never set foot in a school except to take Driver's Education and the basic skills tests to let the state know that yes, we DID know what we were doing. (Or at least that was the carefully crafted illusion we created, shhh.)
I was raised in rural Illinois alongside three brothers (two older, one younger). Since we didn't have a TV we spent most of our time riding and racing bikes, visiting our grandparents who lived two blocks away, holding 'Indian and Trapper Club meetings' (a club that my oldest brother invented), bashing sticks together and calling it sword fighting, and playing with our various animals.
A relaying of my formative years would not be complete without at least some mention of the animals. The most memorable of the menagerie would have to be Jack, a mutt that showed up on our doorstep one day and hung around for about 12 years before passing on in March 2008. (*RIP JACK*) During those twelve years he lived through two other dogs, getting hit twice by cars, eating unrisen bread dough, and having a song written about him. Yes, we did write a song. It hasn't been recorded (that's probably a good thing) but it grew over several years until it had 10 to 12 verses and covered his various idiosyncrosies and major points in life.
I still remember the second time Jack got hit--we kids had just bought a really nice runner sled for $40 (an exorbident sum back then) and taught Jack and Duffy (our other dog at the time) how to pull the sled. We used horse halters for harnesses and hit the streets for pulling--it was great. But at one point, my older brother Henry stood up off the sled in order to get some snow out of this gloves and the dogs took off. During their little bid for freedom an old man was driving on Main Street (about a block away) and hit Jack and the sled when the dogs ran into the road. Duffy, good, clueless dog that he was, dragged Jack and the sled back home. The casualties: Jack had a broken pelvis (amazingly enough, he lived for several years afterwards) and the sled was totaled. Thus ended our brief career in dog-sledding.
The other animals worth noting would have to be:
~Duffy (Golden Retriever who showed up in a blizzard and stayed around for about 8 years before dying of lymphoma)
~Peanut ('white' Shetland pony we had for about a year before he died of heart problems)
~Colletta (Morgan/Arab mare--started out as a young green filly and now, at the age of 11, has turned out all right)
~Violet (Arabian filly--acquired at 6 weeks of age and is still a young green filly)
~Javert (Black German shepherd/Lab mix whose weirdness sometimes makes it on my site)
Not to mention the rabbits, goats, cats, and various horses and ponies who have either moved on with their lives or stayed on until their deaths. I am an unabashed animal lover, so I talk about the animals on a pretty regular basis. My commentary on them may not seem very loving towards them at times, but I really do love 'em. Really. ^-^
We acquired a computer in the year 1999. Said computer was only a year old at the time, and as huge and clunky at they come. It didn't have access to the Internet (I don't think we even knew what the Internet was until several years later), but considering that it probably would have seized up and died on the spot had it been connected to the internet that's a good thing. With the appearance of the computer, we discovered COMPUTER GAMES. Ahh, many a fond evening did we spend glued to the 'puter playing 'Carnivores', 'Lego Island', and the first 'Age of Empires'...and around this time I discovered a fascination for typing and writing that hasn't abated to this day. I think that my peak is 110 WPM...and I owe it all to Mavis Beacon. Man, did I love that program. I seem to remember checking books out from the library with the intent to type them out so I wouldn't have to buy a copy of said book...I never did finish a single one. Oh well. There was also the recording of 'Star Wars' movies on casette tapes (I still have them, actually) and transcribing the films into story form. Yes, we were starved for entertainment--why do you ask?
After we had had a computer for a while, we finally re-entered the realm of TV-dom. It still isn't actually 'hooked up' to channels and such, but it was enough to watch movies. And boy, did we EVER watch movies. I can still remember watching movies over and over and over again in order to recite them verbatim at (a) the dinner table, (b) at people's houses, (c) etc. My brothers and I could recite whole films in about half an hour...it was great. Yes, we were starved for entertainment. Deal with it.
The odd part about all this reminiscing is that I can't place a date on any of it. All I have are the random blips of disorganized information that flit through my brain, dateless and context-less. Sigh. Oh well, let's keep going!
I've had a life-long fascination with horses--you know, every little girl ever always dreams of owning (or riding) a horse, and over time that dream usually fades or is forgotten. In my case, it was rather encouraged. When I was 8 my parents bought two Shetland ponies: Sparky and Peanut. Sparky had been a 'pony-ride' pony--the thing where several little ponies are hitched up to something that looks like a spoked wheel on its side and they walk around and around until their brain cells are fried from the monotony of it all. For clueless owners, he was perfect. Peanut, on the other hand, was two years old, 'intact' (hadn't been gelded), and barely trained to lead with a halter. I shudder mentally when I think of all the times that I would fearlessly hop on his back with nothing but a halter and lead and make him walk around the pasture. *shudders* Man, was I a dumb kid. And BAREFOOT, too!! *shakes head*
Sparky stayed around for several months, until the too-rich grass in our pasture made him founder (other known as laminitis--a medical condition brought on by a rich diet that centralizes in a horse's feet) and the people we bought him from had to take him back. Peanut lived for another several months, but besides being untrained he also seemed to have a heart condition. He died on the night that we had gone to see 'Toy Story 2' in theaters (so this would have been 2000 or so?)...that movie has never been the same since. I still cry at that scene with Jessie reminiscing--dangit, Pixar! *sniffles*
After Peanut died, we remained equine-less for a couple of years. Around that time my oldest brother Isaac was going through his 'Amish phase'--in other words, he wanted to live like the Amish--so he bought a green-broke mare named Colletta, because as you know every self-respecting Amish has a horse. Man, do I have some Colletta-related stories...she was straight from the Amish and hated people. When I say 'hated' people, it wasn't just some mild dislike--she actively avoided people whenever she possibly could. I kid you not when I say that it took over half an hour to catch her in order to ride (she's much better now--only takes about 30 seconds to catch). We still didn't know a whole lot about horses, so it's a miracle that we've come out of this unscathed. Some of my earlier memories of Colletta involve her freaking out during Thanksgiving and rearing up while hitched to our two-wheeled cart (falling over and breaking said cart in the process), her previous owner coming out to 'break' her of rearing (his methods involved putting hobbles on her with some long reins, running the reins through the and driving in the gravel driveway. When she reared, he would pull her legs to her chest so she would fall on her knees in the gravel. Rinse and repeat. Then he and a friend of his hog-tied her and sat on her head. Fun, yes? Colletta and I have never quite been the same since.), me mercilessly teasing her and chasing her so she'd run (I still cringe at those memories of being such a dumb little kid), and then after wising up and reading LOTS of training books my teaching her (mostly through trial and error) how to behave. Oh, and her eating about 50 pounds of grain at one sitting after breaking into the barn and coming out of it unscathed, which earned her the nickname 'the horse with the iron gut'. Ahh, good times, good times.
A year after buying Colletta, Isaac decided that he needed another horse. So he bought an Arabian/Mustang cross named Woody. Woody was a year younger than Colletta, but 2.5 million times ornerier. He would bite, nip, kick, and mercilessly herd Colletta all over the pasture in his spare time, and he LOVED to run. My goodness, did he run--it must have been that mustang in him, because I've never seen anything quite like it ever again. When Isaac first saw him he was straight from the Amish...let's just say that the Amish don't feed their horses very well, because Woody was quite subdued. Then we got him home and after fattening up a bit on some good solid food Woody decided that he LIKED to be nuts. Suffice to say, after a few months of his tormenting Colletta and generally being unmanageable (he tore up our Aussie saddle during one of his fits--I STILL remember that vividly) he was taken to a horse auction and sold.
So Colletta was a solitary horse for several years, until Violet entered the picture. There's a bit of a story behind that: Isaac wanted a foal out of Colletta (by this point I had bought Colletta from him and she was legally mine), so the guy with the stallion said that he'd trade out breeding her for us taking care of a mare and a foal for him. Violet was the foal, we decided that we really liked her, and so she's stayed on for nearly four years. Colletta had her foal Shiska in 2007, and as things stand we have three horses with no decrease in sight. But I kinda like it that way...
Wait, this was a reminiscing about my life, right? Okay, enough about the horses then. Yeesh.
Another significant part of life at the Nolden house was a go-cart. Boy, oh boy, did we LOVE that thing. It was ancient, and didn't always run--or start, for that matter. Once my brother Henry got the thing about a mile out in the middle of a cornfield before it died, so Isaac rode Colletta out to haul it back. Let's just say that Colletta didn't much appreciate this new job, especially since it involved pulling An Unidentifiable Beast through a cornfield. So after Isaac hitched her up, Henry sat in the go-cart, and they took off through the field. By 'take off' I mean 'full-fledged panicked charge that didn't stop until they were safely next to the barn'. It was intense.
But when the thing actually RAN, it ran WELL. At some point my youngest brother Will, who had a propensity towards mechanics, adjusted the fuel injector so that more fuel would go into the engine. After that, we hit speeds of around 30 MPH on the smooth fields. It was awesome. We would pretend that the go-cart was a moon buggy and pick up 'moon rocks' in the field and communicate with 'base' (the house) via walkie-talkies. Ahh, those were the days...there was talk of getting a frame and an engine for another cart when this one gave out, but we never did get around to it. Not being able to weld probably had something to do with that...and all we kids could raise was $200 towards hiring someone to weld it for us. So when the go-cart died, that was the end of our motor-run wheels--it was still several years before we could drive legally, so it was back to plain old bikes.
Bikes have been a huge part of my life until I bought my truck at age 17. There was (still is) this old man, Mr. Smart, who spent his whole time taking bikes, repairing them, and selling them for very reasonable prices. Every single bike I've owned has been from Mr. Smart. The last one was a retro-looking blue bike with one speed and the kind of brakes that are applied when you pedal backwards. I love that thing. Before I bought a truck, I had to bike everywhere--considering that we lived on the edge of town it wasn't a terrible thing. The only places I remember biking (since I really didn't have any friends in town) were the public library, piano lessons, and the Education Commons after we kids discovered the Internet and online games. Don't worry, online gaming was short-lived. Still...we went EVERYWHERE on our bikes. I remember trying to joust with bikes in the yard once...I think the thought was that if I fell, it'd be on relatively soft grass. I never did learn how to joust, and I just tore up the yard. Oh well, it was worth a shot.
...wow, this is turning into a reminiscing episode like none other. I need to wrap this thing up.
I guess the point of all these seemingly unrelated instances is that I had a very atypical childhood, and I wouldn't trade it for the world. One of the best things my parents did was let us kids spend our formative years without a TV or a computer, letting us use our imaginations and the things at our disposal to learn how to get along, use our minds, and basically have a good time before life swooped in and started giving us a hard time. It also ought to give at least a tiny glimpse into how I've gotten this way...and if I ever feel like it I'll take these stories and bits of my childhood and expound upon them. They're a lot more interesting than my current life (or that's how I feel sometimes).
To begin with, my name is Molly Rose. I am currently taking classes at the local college (graphic design, for those who may be interested), even though I'm of the personal opinion that college is optional for a REASON. Maybe my opinion will change as I continue to take classes.
I was homeschooled all my life--never set foot in a school except to take Driver's Education and the basic skills tests to let the state know that yes, we DID know what we were doing. (Or at least that was the carefully crafted illusion we created, shhh.)
I was raised in rural Illinois alongside three brothers (two older, one younger). Since we didn't have a TV we spent most of our time riding and racing bikes, visiting our grandparents who lived two blocks away, holding 'Indian and Trapper Club meetings' (a club that my oldest brother invented), bashing sticks together and calling it sword fighting, and playing with our various animals.
A relaying of my formative years would not be complete without at least some mention of the animals. The most memorable of the menagerie would have to be Jack, a mutt that showed up on our doorstep one day and hung around for about 12 years before passing on in March 2008. (*RIP JACK*) During those twelve years he lived through two other dogs, getting hit twice by cars, eating unrisen bread dough, and having a song written about him. Yes, we did write a song. It hasn't been recorded (that's probably a good thing) but it grew over several years until it had 10 to 12 verses and covered his various idiosyncrosies and major points in life.
I still remember the second time Jack got hit--we kids had just bought a really nice runner sled for $40 (an exorbident sum back then) and taught Jack and Duffy (our other dog at the time) how to pull the sled. We used horse halters for harnesses and hit the streets for pulling--it was great. But at one point, my older brother Henry stood up off the sled in order to get some snow out of this gloves and the dogs took off. During their little bid for freedom an old man was driving on Main Street (about a block away) and hit Jack and the sled when the dogs ran into the road. Duffy, good, clueless dog that he was, dragged Jack and the sled back home. The casualties: Jack had a broken pelvis (amazingly enough, he lived for several years afterwards) and the sled was totaled. Thus ended our brief career in dog-sledding.
The other animals worth noting would have to be:
~Duffy (Golden Retriever who showed up in a blizzard and stayed around for about 8 years before dying of lymphoma)
~Peanut ('white' Shetland pony we had for about a year before he died of heart problems)
~Colletta (Morgan/Arab mare--started out as a young green filly and now, at the age of 11, has turned out all right)
~Violet (Arabian filly--acquired at 6 weeks of age and is still a young green filly)
~Javert (Black German shepherd/Lab mix whose weirdness sometimes makes it on my site)
Not to mention the rabbits, goats, cats, and various horses and ponies who have either moved on with their lives or stayed on until their deaths. I am an unabashed animal lover, so I talk about the animals on a pretty regular basis. My commentary on them may not seem very loving towards them at times, but I really do love 'em. Really. ^-^
We acquired a computer in the year 1999. Said computer was only a year old at the time, and as huge and clunky at they come. It didn't have access to the Internet (I don't think we even knew what the Internet was until several years later), but considering that it probably would have seized up and died on the spot had it been connected to the internet that's a good thing. With the appearance of the computer, we discovered COMPUTER GAMES. Ahh, many a fond evening did we spend glued to the 'puter playing 'Carnivores', 'Lego Island', and the first 'Age of Empires'...and around this time I discovered a fascination for typing and writing that hasn't abated to this day. I think that my peak is 110 WPM...and I owe it all to Mavis Beacon. Man, did I love that program. I seem to remember checking books out from the library with the intent to type them out so I wouldn't have to buy a copy of said book...I never did finish a single one. Oh well. There was also the recording of 'Star Wars' movies on casette tapes (I still have them, actually) and transcribing the films into story form. Yes, we were starved for entertainment--why do you ask?
After we had had a computer for a while, we finally re-entered the realm of TV-dom. It still isn't actually 'hooked up' to channels and such, but it was enough to watch movies. And boy, did we EVER watch movies. I can still remember watching movies over and over and over again in order to recite them verbatim at (a) the dinner table, (b) at people's houses, (c) etc. My brothers and I could recite whole films in about half an hour...it was great. Yes, we were starved for entertainment. Deal with it.
The odd part about all this reminiscing is that I can't place a date on any of it. All I have are the random blips of disorganized information that flit through my brain, dateless and context-less. Sigh. Oh well, let's keep going!
I've had a life-long fascination with horses--you know, every little girl ever always dreams of owning (or riding) a horse, and over time that dream usually fades or is forgotten. In my case, it was rather encouraged. When I was 8 my parents bought two Shetland ponies: Sparky and Peanut. Sparky had been a 'pony-ride' pony--the thing where several little ponies are hitched up to something that looks like a spoked wheel on its side and they walk around and around until their brain cells are fried from the monotony of it all. For clueless owners, he was perfect. Peanut, on the other hand, was two years old, 'intact' (hadn't been gelded), and barely trained to lead with a halter. I shudder mentally when I think of all the times that I would fearlessly hop on his back with nothing but a halter and lead and make him walk around the pasture. *shudders* Man, was I a dumb kid. And BAREFOOT, too!! *shakes head*
Sparky stayed around for several months, until the too-rich grass in our pasture made him founder (other known as laminitis--a medical condition brought on by a rich diet that centralizes in a horse's feet) and the people we bought him from had to take him back. Peanut lived for another several months, but besides being untrained he also seemed to have a heart condition. He died on the night that we had gone to see 'Toy Story 2' in theaters (so this would have been 2000 or so?)...that movie has never been the same since. I still cry at that scene with Jessie reminiscing--dangit, Pixar! *sniffles*
After Peanut died, we remained equine-less for a couple of years. Around that time my oldest brother Isaac was going through his 'Amish phase'--in other words, he wanted to live like the Amish--so he bought a green-broke mare named Colletta, because as you know every self-respecting Amish has a horse. Man, do I have some Colletta-related stories...she was straight from the Amish and hated people. When I say 'hated' people, it wasn't just some mild dislike--she actively avoided people whenever she possibly could. I kid you not when I say that it took over half an hour to catch her in order to ride (she's much better now--only takes about 30 seconds to catch). We still didn't know a whole lot about horses, so it's a miracle that we've come out of this unscathed. Some of my earlier memories of Colletta involve her freaking out during Thanksgiving and rearing up while hitched to our two-wheeled cart (falling over and breaking said cart in the process), her previous owner coming out to 'break' her of rearing (his methods involved putting hobbles on her with some long reins, running the reins through the and driving in the gravel driveway. When she reared, he would pull her legs to her chest so she would fall on her knees in the gravel. Rinse and repeat. Then he and a friend of his hog-tied her and sat on her head. Fun, yes? Colletta and I have never quite been the same since.), me mercilessly teasing her and chasing her so she'd run (I still cringe at those memories of being such a dumb little kid), and then after wising up and reading LOTS of training books my teaching her (mostly through trial and error) how to behave. Oh, and her eating about 50 pounds of grain at one sitting after breaking into the barn and coming out of it unscathed, which earned her the nickname 'the horse with the iron gut'. Ahh, good times, good times.
A year after buying Colletta, Isaac decided that he needed another horse. So he bought an Arabian/Mustang cross named Woody. Woody was a year younger than Colletta, but 2.5 million times ornerier. He would bite, nip, kick, and mercilessly herd Colletta all over the pasture in his spare time, and he LOVED to run. My goodness, did he run--it must have been that mustang in him, because I've never seen anything quite like it ever again. When Isaac first saw him he was straight from the Amish...let's just say that the Amish don't feed their horses very well, because Woody was quite subdued. Then we got him home and after fattening up a bit on some good solid food Woody decided that he LIKED to be nuts. Suffice to say, after a few months of his tormenting Colletta and generally being unmanageable (he tore up our Aussie saddle during one of his fits--I STILL remember that vividly) he was taken to a horse auction and sold.
So Colletta was a solitary horse for several years, until Violet entered the picture. There's a bit of a story behind that: Isaac wanted a foal out of Colletta (by this point I had bought Colletta from him and she was legally mine), so the guy with the stallion said that he'd trade out breeding her for us taking care of a mare and a foal for him. Violet was the foal, we decided that we really liked her, and so she's stayed on for nearly four years. Colletta had her foal Shiska in 2007, and as things stand we have three horses with no decrease in sight. But I kinda like it that way...
Wait, this was a reminiscing about my life, right? Okay, enough about the horses then. Yeesh.
Another significant part of life at the Nolden house was a go-cart. Boy, oh boy, did we LOVE that thing. It was ancient, and didn't always run--or start, for that matter. Once my brother Henry got the thing about a mile out in the middle of a cornfield before it died, so Isaac rode Colletta out to haul it back. Let's just say that Colletta didn't much appreciate this new job, especially since it involved pulling An Unidentifiable Beast through a cornfield. So after Isaac hitched her up, Henry sat in the go-cart, and they took off through the field. By 'take off' I mean 'full-fledged panicked charge that didn't stop until they were safely next to the barn'. It was intense.
But when the thing actually RAN, it ran WELL. At some point my youngest brother Will, who had a propensity towards mechanics, adjusted the fuel injector so that more fuel would go into the engine. After that, we hit speeds of around 30 MPH on the smooth fields. It was awesome. We would pretend that the go-cart was a moon buggy and pick up 'moon rocks' in the field and communicate with 'base' (the house) via walkie-talkies. Ahh, those were the days...there was talk of getting a frame and an engine for another cart when this one gave out, but we never did get around to it. Not being able to weld probably had something to do with that...and all we kids could raise was $200 towards hiring someone to weld it for us. So when the go-cart died, that was the end of our motor-run wheels--it was still several years before we could drive legally, so it was back to plain old bikes.
Bikes have been a huge part of my life until I bought my truck at age 17. There was (still is) this old man, Mr. Smart, who spent his whole time taking bikes, repairing them, and selling them for very reasonable prices. Every single bike I've owned has been from Mr. Smart. The last one was a retro-looking blue bike with one speed and the kind of brakes that are applied when you pedal backwards. I love that thing. Before I bought a truck, I had to bike everywhere--considering that we lived on the edge of town it wasn't a terrible thing. The only places I remember biking (since I really didn't have any friends in town) were the public library, piano lessons, and the Education Commons after we kids discovered the Internet and online games. Don't worry, online gaming was short-lived. Still...we went EVERYWHERE on our bikes. I remember trying to joust with bikes in the yard once...I think the thought was that if I fell, it'd be on relatively soft grass. I never did learn how to joust, and I just tore up the yard. Oh well, it was worth a shot.
...wow, this is turning into a reminiscing episode like none other. I need to wrap this thing up.
I guess the point of all these seemingly unrelated instances is that I had a very atypical childhood, and I wouldn't trade it for the world. One of the best things my parents did was let us kids spend our formative years without a TV or a computer, letting us use our imaginations and the things at our disposal to learn how to get along, use our minds, and basically have a good time before life swooped in and started giving us a hard time. It also ought to give at least a tiny glimpse into how I've gotten this way...and if I ever feel like it I'll take these stories and bits of my childhood and expound upon them. They're a lot more interesting than my current life (or that's how I feel sometimes).