Secret Webdiary...

Well, so much for "there isn't supposed to be an audience for this blog"... Passed 1000 views a couple days ago -- and I thought I'd take a look at the stats Blogger kindly provides. Pretty cool actually.

Such is the power of the internet. People I don't know (this is an assumption, since I don't know anybody in the Czech Republic, Australia, Italy, Canada, or the UK) have somehow found their way to my blog.

Back to important matters of the day -- the mosquitoes are back! And worse than last time... I guess I will avoid posting more nasty pictures of the bites all over my legs. It turns out that the mosquitoes must be biting me through my clothes - pretty sure of that, since I never ever walk around naked... It's almost gotten to a point where we feel like "We need to be outside....10 more minutes?"

We had a discussion about Classical Conditioning today during class-time. There are a couple different names for Classical Conditioning. It's also called Pavlovian and Respondent Conditioning. To put it basically, it's learning by association. An animal (or human) learns that one stimulus predicts the presentation of another stimulus, until the association has been formed and the first stimulus starts eliciting the same physiological/psychological responses as the stimulus it is associated with. One of the examples that we used in class is my newfound fear of bushes. What is the association? Bushes = Giant swarms of mosquitoes. It only took a couple times of experiencing a cloud of mosquitoes rising from the bushes and attaching to my arms/face for me to start wanting to avoid bushes, and when I can't help but go through them (to reach the fence along the road, to dump manure out  in the dung pile, etc.), I can feel my heart start beating faster in anticipation of those nasty buggers.

We also discussed one of my new positive associations that I developed here at Mustang Camp too. I love donkeys. I had never before really had an opinion of them, but now seeing a donkey makes my heart melt a little and just writing this makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. It's going to be sad if we have to see them go, but they're pretty well prepared to start a life with humans. All 4 of them are now happy to act as couches and let us lean on them while we scratch them, and I can drape myself over Gertie's back and put a significant amount of weight on her and she just stands there and makes snoring sounds while she enjoys getting her belly scratched. My sweet ladies are also going to be in for a treat once we get the electric fencing put up so we can let them hang out in the yard and graze down all the weeds :) Right now we can't let them out because the fences aren't good enough for them -- they're small, so they can sneak underneath much more easily than the horses.