SEA-Horse Corral - About Me

Stewart's Corral

Photo Album - about me and horses

page 3
visitor #

This series is about How I went from a high-tech techno-nerd to a low-tech sufferer with EHS
enlarge (100570 bytes at 1024x768) enlarge (99047 bytes at 1024x768)	1982.May.13 Stewart riding Penny I started riding horses before high school. I don't think many knew that. Here is the one picture I have on Goldie when I was flying. This was back before I got into computers, which became my academic focus for a decade.
Although the following decade had nothing to do with horses, in fact quite the opposite, it is notable that I excelled in high school, earned a GPA of 3.80 overall (including straight A's in 5 of 8 semesters), and received first place at FHS in the American High School Mathematics Exam. Then I became a computer programmer, systems analyst, technician, and network engineer, over the following 7.4 years of my career. I enjoyed those years very much, until the sensitivities I first noticed in high school, became a serious problem.
enlarge (178593 bytes at 1024x768)	1992.Aug.26 Roxy (1972-1995) Here I was getting back into horses, searching for a relief valve to the stress of my career. This was before I had a clue as to what was going wrong, and what would come.
My career was abruptly truncated in 1993 by multiple over-exposures, resulting in multiple chemical sensitivity, neurological damage, and electrical sensitivity, which sent my health into a tailspin. As more and more people have the same thing happen to them, my problem is no longer unique. See my health page to learn more. What was unique to me, were the specific exposures that ruined everything for me. I grew up under BPA powerlines. I grew up downwind of refineries. (One butcher at Lynden remarked about the livers of the cows/heifers shows serious disease near the aluminum refinery.) I started eating microwaved food in 1988. I was ignorant of the danger watching the food cook with my head close to the door, not to mention the altered nutrition (or lack of) in the food itself. I had just gotten two more fillings in 1992, drilling out existing mercury without precautions. I had my corner cubicle sprayed for ants in 1993. Lack of ventilation was not considered. The day my health crashed, and the 24/7 headache started, I was installing a computer network in a customer's new office building built Right NEXT to a Transformer Yard. The place Buzzed.
enlarge (287832 bytes at 1733x840)	1999.Apr.24 Riding Shadow (1984-2000) up Forks Creek D-line After living 4 years on the SW coast, this was the first year I could say I had a day go by without 24/7 pain and headaches. During this time, I had abandoned computers and all electrical pollution, going low-tech from my formerly high-tech life. The only employment I could find that didn't aggravate my symptoms, was trimming trees, and herding cows from horseback. No motors, no magnetic fields, no electronics. At this time, this area was quiet, rural, and beautifully green, thanks to all the rain.
Enduring 24/7 pain for so many years made me hard to be around, but finally by this year I started acting and looking normal again. Then as my nest egg was erased, I stopped eating organic foods, and my health turned around for the worst. Then wireless towers were being put up in Lebam, and later around the Willapa valley. With my already known sensitivity to (magnetic fields of) power lines, and emissions from electronics, the new danger of wireless quickly became obvious. I could not tolerate being around cordless phones. I marked the threshold of cell-towers at 1.5 miles radius, from within I avoided. Power lines required a 0.25 mile buffer to not hear the buzz in my head, or simply feel better. The short term memory loss and brain fog, or inability to think straight, reappeared and interferred with my job on the farm. My declining health, combined with the cordless and wireless phones all around the neighborhood, eventually made it necessary to move again.
enlarge (89352 bytes at 800x600)	2004.May.09 Stewart riding Snowcrest Glamour (1978-2007) Here I am in the mountains of NE WA, and it didn't take long to find a new horse.
enlarge (71893 bytes at 640x480)	2006.Apr.03 Glamour trotting and cantering around when left behind. Glamour furthered my education in hoof care, and as I learned how to correct her lameness, I found something to excel in again. This interest in hoof care was strongly motivated by Roxy's rotation in her last year, Roan's soring at every shoeing, and Shadow's strong dislike for a farrier's work in 2000. She could kick.
enlarge (139135 bytes at 800x600)	2006.Jul.04 Stewart riding Cowgirl (born 2002) Training a young horse this time, working on Level 2 Parelli in new Round corral. Now happily Bitless, Treeless, and Shoeless.
Around this time I was feeling better, and venturing out into using electronics again, having discovered the key ingredients to making a computer tolerable, and finding I could use a digital camera, I let the 35mm film fall into disuse. Since I am very sensitive to the chemicals from the film, it was not a hard switch. I furthered my interest and talents in surveying and cartography, along with programming again, this time for flightgear, something I started in 2001 when I briefly found it useful for locating towers, thus deciding where to move to in 2002. My talent for photography also found a new outlet.
enlarge (62014 bytes at 640x480)	2008.Jun.25 frame# 0739 From a video of riding Cowgirl to the mailbox.
enlarge to 640x480	2009.Feb.17 Riding back from mailbox through snow covered woods 16½ inches
enlarge (60050 bytes at 640x480)	2009.Feb.26 frame# 188 From a video of Cowgirl and Abby playing in snowstorm that dumped 8.75 inches in one morning.
enlarge (62728 bytes at 640x480) enlarge (58511 bytes at 640x480) enlarge (56376 bytes at 640x480)	2009.Feb.27 frame# 589 frame# 1704 frame# 714 Riding Cowgirl back from mailbox on snow covered lane Both hands are on the camera. Cowgirl has made it to Level 3, and becoming very trustworthy. Meaning, I could ride her bridleless, if the neighborhood was safe to do so.
enlarge to 640x480	2009.Oct.27 frame# 1380 Riding up Nf2154000 in Colville National Forest during snow flurries, after ½ inch snowfall in morning, now melted on ground. Autumn colors in larch (aka tamarac) trees.
enlarge (64621 bytes at 640x480)	2010.May.20 Stewart riding Cowgirl
The story is only half over. As this page ends, only the focus on horses ends. As horses are good for the inside of a person, next I focus on what is not good for the insides. Continue to part 2.

About Me and EHS Index
About me, part 1 How it started	About me, part 2 Searching for EM Smog in Rural Outdoors Meter Evaluation Features to Look For Specifications Emissions More Meters Evaluation in Urban	Indoor Equipment Evaluation part 3	Health Links part 4 Aaronia Spectran graphs Spectran version 4 evaluation

If you enjoy the photos on my scenery and horses pages, and wanted to see the movies from which they came,
Now available on DVD
Lambert Creek Horseback

explore trails from the saddle, plus Horse Play, Weather events, and more

Copyright notice: All photographs on this page were taken and scanned personally.
You are free to download these graphics for personal or non-profit use only.