• you put a gun rack in your pickup truck to carry dressage whips and riding crops (for Parelli people, carrot sticks and rope hackamores).
  
• you realize that finding a horse shoe truly is lucky, because you've saved ten bucks.
  
• your six-year-old brother tells everyone that he's going to be the "ring steward" at his aunt's wedding!
  
• every time you drive past a road construction site, you think what nice jumps the barricades would make.
  
• your husband does something nice for you and you pat him on the neck and say "Good Boy!"
  
• you get up at 5 a.m. every morning while you're in college, drive 10 miles to the barn, feed, muck stalls, ride, and rush back to your 10 a.m. class smelling like a barn without complaining.
  
• your mother, who has no grandchildren, gets cards addressed To Grandma, signed by the horses and the dog.  Or your horse gets carrots from your Mom with a card addressed to My Grandpony and Signed Grandma.
  
• books and movies are ruined for you if the horsemanship references are incorrect.
  
• your horse gets new shoes more often than you.
  
• on rainy days, you organize the tack room, not the house.
  
• you find yourself analyzing leg and foot conformation on your friends, and think how corrective shoeing could improve their way of going.
  
• you run your tongue over your back molars and idly wonder if they need to be floated.
  
• when you leave work feeling stiff, tense, with a stomach or headache; all those feelings disappear the moment you go through the first gate at the ranch.
  
• all your stock has four legs.
  
• you grump at your husband for eating so much of the apple crop, for fear there won't be enough left to last the horses until next year.
  
• you're buying clothes, and you choose them on the basis of whether you can wash horse slobber and manure out of them.
  
• you'd rather stay up with a friend's sick horse than babysit her kids.  BUT, you will babysit a friend's kids while she stays up with a sick horse, even though you HATE babysitting.
  
• you go on a diet, not to be more attractive, but to be a better rider.
  
• you spend more on that six-year-old jumper than you've EVER spent on a car!
  
• you get your income tax refund and the first thing you do is head for the tack shop.
  
• every time you go to the stable it takes three hours, and you can't imagine where the time went.
  
• a non-horsey co-worker asks how your horse is and you think: 'She's not doing very well since I just changed to a milder bit, but I want to give her a chance to get used to it,' BUT you say, "Fine," because you know if you say what you are REALLY thinking, by the time you're done, your co-worker will be sitting there with a blank look on her face. (Of course, the Parelli-savvy horses wear snaffle bits or no bits at all!)
  
• you save every horse magazine you have ever bought.
  
• you drive by any field anywhere, and look very hard for horses.  This includes trips to foreign countries.
  
• you teach your sisters to post on the arm of the couch before their first riding lesson.
  
• you don't have to be asked by your non-horsey family what you want for Christmas anymore, because they now get their own horse catalogs.
  
• you find yourself eying the rag rug in front of the kitchen sink and wondering if it would work as a saddle blanket.
  
• your toddler's first sentence is, "Mommy go to barn?"
  
• you coax your horse into the trailer with a carrot, give him a bite, and walk out finishing it yourself.
  
• you dress like a lawyer on weekdays, and someone who NEEDS a lawyer on your days off.
  
• you plan your pregnancy around the show season, so you can send your horse to your dressage instructor for training during your eighth and ninth months.
  
• you show up in city clothes, dressed for appointments, and when you get there people reach over the breakfast table to pick alfalfa out of your hair.
  
• no one wants to ride in your car, because they'll get sweet feed and hay in their socks and purses, and that's o.k., because then you'd have to rearrange all the tack to make room for them anyway!
  

(SOURCE: I received this article in an email from a friend; I don't know who originally wrote it.)