Blog Spotlight: GetMyFix.org

Each week, we shine the spotlight on a deserving equestrian blog. Today we honor our favorite sassybritches hunter-jumper site, GetMyFix.org.

Let me just gush here for a moment: I LOVE GetMyFix.org. I’m not even an h/jer, and I love it. The author, Carley Sparks, is hi-lar-ious.

The site content is all over the map, the map being all things hunter/jumper. There’s news and videos and fashion and interviews and other assorted ridiculousness, and it gets updated often so it’s worth keeping on your daily radar. Here’s your mandatory screen shot:

Let’s let Carly introduce herself and her blog:

My name is Carley Sparks and I’m a horse-o-holic.

Some people abuse alcohol or chemicals. My drug of choice is of the equine variety. I’ve been hooked on horses since my first terrifying gallop through the woods at Webb’s Holiday Acres Children’s Camp. I was 8. Not a day has gone my since that I haven’t ridden or thought about riding.

Like all addicts, I suffer for my addiction. Horses have been hard on my body, my marriage and, most notably, my career.  At 17, I took a job at The Gap instead of going to university. Six months in I traded that minimum wage sales position for a lower paying gig in a barn. Then, less than a year later, moved across the country for a working student position with Canadian show jumper Hugh Graham. For even less money.

I eventually gave up grooming and earned a university degree (it took 6 years instead of the usual 4 because I insisted on working in a barn throughout). Thanks to those efforts, I now make my living writing—usually, about horses—which pays at least $50 more a week than working in a barn. You might have read some of my work in the critically acclaimed* HorseCare magazine. Or in Horse Sport, or maybe The Ottawa Citizen.

My husband says I am squandering my talent and should write about things that would enable me to actually afford a horse. That kind of logical thinking makes me want to stick a pencil in his eyeball. In any event, it’s clear that I can’t shake this habit. So like the addict I am, I’m going to exploit it. Deal it. Maybe even overdose on it.

This blog is devoted to all things hunter/jumper—new developments in training and care, amazing moments in sport, inspiring horse people, and the ridiculous and nonsensical elements that inevitably accompanies all of the above. Basically, it’s for all the issues that respectable magazines won’t pay me to cover. Like, does tuning really work? Is it really a sport if your hairstyle counts toward your score?

I hope you’ll help join the discussion (that means you have to comment…you’re going to comment, right?). And help feed the addiction.

*My mom and a stranger she met on the ferry to Salt Spring Island really liked the magazine. Really, really liked it.

Go Carley, and Go Riding.