I would’ve rather gone riding…

I went to our GMO awards banquet this year simply because I really want to do the newsletter, and I had the bright idea of writing an article about the banquet.

Let me start with this… the banquet started at 10:30 am.

At the time I was thinking “Who starts a banquet at 10:30 in the morning?”. But off I went, bundled up in my heavy winter coat, to endure a couple of hours of interaction with other people. (I’m not a big people person, hence my inevitable drift into IT) I even brought my riding clothes so I could pop over to the barn for an afternoon rider when the banquet finished.

But no, the banquet was loooooooonnnnnngggg. After the door prizes, another drawing for prizes, silent auction (I didn’t partake), the guest speaker (very good), and the general announcements and updates from the board members, I was so ready to get the heck out of there. But…  they hadn’t even started handing out awards yet. 

If I had known the plethora of awards and ribbons that would be handed out over the next two hours, I don’t think I would’ve gone at all. Apparently everyone’s a winner. Don’t get me wrong. I like the idea of awarding beginners for their struggles and hard work. It’s great to see a kid with a huge ribbon and big smile.  But 94 ribbons?! Really?  Enter three shows = Come on down for your three foot ribbon!!

It ended up not meaning anything (to me). I walked away with two Grand Championships that I utterly have no attachment to.  I’m nearly 40 years old… I don’t need a “Yay, you stayed on the horse” award.

Anyway… after sitting through 94 ribbons, and 60+ certificates, I’d been there for 3 hours. I got to listen to several people complain about how their horse couldn’t possibly compete against warmbloods and how unfair that was. Which I can’t tolerate (it’s not the horse, it’s you). And I’ll just be blunt, I can’t for the life of me understand why a professional trainer would care about a stupid ribbon for entering a novice horse class at a schooling show. You want your horse to get some show experience… fine. You honestly need to take a ribbon away from a 12 year old who’s never been to a show before? Are you really that heartless? Geesh!

Finally, hours and hours later, the banquet ended. Then….  the board meeting started (Omg, kill me now) . I sat through the board meeting (wasn’t as long as I had feared), and by the time I was able to leave I was so exhausted that I didn’t even want to go ride.

Skip to today:  I wrote the article for the newsletter about the banquet. The board member’s updates held great information about the activities the board has been doing to create educational opportunities for the members.  I felt that most of the substance to the banquet was this is the one time (during the entire year) where members actually heard what the board was doing.  So I wrote about that, with a small blurb about the guest speaker, and brief mention of the awards. When I showed it to the board, it seemed like really what they wanted was a list of the winners names.   *sigh*