When Life Gets Crazy, Go Ride

I've been very sick for several days. When you're sick and something enormous happens, like a new administration taking oath and office, you get stuck in this sneaky spiral of not being able to escape your couch and subsequently not being able to escape social media without great effort, especially when you feel that you must keep on top of what is happening. 

It's not good for your sanity. 

I've never been good at successfully coping with stress. My coping mechanisms have always been unhealthy at best, and extremely destructive at worst. Currently, I've been in some kind of flux between taking a lot of cold medicine to pass out and forget about everything, and drinking a lot. I don't understand what is happening to the country I thought I knew, and I don't have a healthy way to deal with it. So, I drink. It's not good for me. I've been here before. I go through this periodically, where I drink every day in an effort to escape some of the reality I'm not able to process. But I've been really focused and happy since we moved into this house almost two year ago, and it hasn't been an issue. But it is now.

If you think I am being whiny, or a crybaby, or a snowflake, or whatever, then I envy you, because you're in a position where you aren't living in fear. If you aren't afraid, then I don't know how to explain to you why I am afraid. To live in fear is to exist in this perpetual waking nightmare of stress, and tension, and uncertainty. It's exhausting and overwhelming. 

So, I drink. I drink because I can't figure out how to process an incredible amount of information that makes no sense to me whatsoever.

And, I ride.

Riding is infinitely more healthy than drinking, or self mutilating, or any of the other coping mechanisms I could be making use of at the moment. Riding is my chance to get away from people for a bit, and get away from my phone, get away from the radio that is always on, get away from everything. Riding is my chance to focus on just my horse, just myself, and just the movements between the two of us. With dressage especially, there is nothing to consider but you and your horse. There is no terrain to consider, no obstacles, no jumps. Just you, and your horse. Everything else can fade away. You feel every movement, and you adjust things, and play with others. I experiment a bit with Dylan, trying out different ideas that have been mulling in my head, like how it will feel if I drop my stirrups another hole, or if I weight a seatbone differently during a lateral movement, or if I raise or lower my hands just a little bit. A horse like Dylan responds instantly one way or another to everything I do, so I get immediate feedback. He is easy enough to ride that I can make these adjustments while still sitting very quietly. And when I am quiet, he is quiet. When my mind is quiet, his is quiet. 

And as such, everything else can fade away, even just for an hour. For an hour, I don't have to think. I can just feel. I can escape into this very private, very personal world where just my horse and I exist. When the whole world seems to be imploding around me, just for a little while I can feel connected and whole and sane. 

As always, Dylan reminds me that when life gets crazy, I should just go ride. In my youth, whenever I had a bad day I would make sure not to ride, as I had no real ability to separate my overpowering emotions from my riding, but these days are different. These days, I go ride in order to escape from my emotions altogether. These days, riding is as much therapy as anything I have ever used as a coping mechanism before. These days, riding is a true escape. 

If you're feeling like me, go ride. I promise you'll feel better. I know I do. 

Crawling Out Of The Abyss

Man. I started out writing SO MUCH this month. I almost felt like I was participating in my own little kind of NaNoWriMo. I felt really good about everything.

And then the election happened, and like many of you I got totally blindsided. I felt like I got hit by a truck, and it took all the wind and the words right out of me. I've been trying to come up with material to write about all week and I just don't even have the heart right now. I feel really, really down and I feel worse about it every day. 

Yes yes, I know I'm a crybaby and all of that. I hear you. I've heard you all week. I won't talk about the double standards of whining for 8 years about Obama taking guns away. I don't want to talk about it at all right now, not here anyway. I started to write out a huge blog post about why I'm concerned about my future, but I stopped. I couldn't finish it.

So, I'm trying to get my words back. I have a show this weekend. I need to find my words again in order to talk about that. 

I'm trying. Bear with me. I'll get there.

Doing Everything By Yourself

This is mostly just a whiny, gripey kind of post, so bear with me while I get it off my chest. I don't have a lot of things to whine about but this one really gets to me sometimes. 

A lot of you have these big support systems which help make everything possible for you. You have friends, grooms, and spouses that are there to hold your horse, pick some poo, take video of you, and do everything else that makes a show, or even daily chores, doable.

I have nobody. And sometimes that really just sucks.

Obviously I do have Future Hubs, but he is not a horse person and he is allergic to hay. I don't think he even knows how many horses I have, and they live in our backyard. I don't mind this - I've dated horse people in the past and sometimes it was entirely more volatile than I could handle, and I've also dated super-whipped people who just did whatever I wanted to do or told them to do, which also kind of sucked - but sometimes I see you guys posting about what amazing horse spouses you have, that go out and feed for you and set jumps for you and go to horseshows with you and do all of this stuff, and I am jealous. 

Or you board at a facility and you have a boatload of friends to help you. They're there to hold your horse, take videos, lend a hand, and give you some moral support when you're jittery. And you'd do the same for them. My only horse friends all live super far away, and none of them are anywhere close enough to help me on a regular basis. Part of this is obviously because the horses live at home, and nobody would actually have incentive to come here unless they lived here, but part of it is that I'm really antisocial and not very good at dealing with humans. I'm a bad friend-maker. And so, I continue to do things alone.

Most of the time, this situation is great. I love my horses and I love to be left alone, so it's a win-win most of the time. But once in awhile I just wish I had somebody nearby to lend a hand when I needed them.

Case in point: Today. I wanted to go to the Haras Cup this weekend to spectate. I REALLY wanted to go! What a fun little weekend trip that would have been. Of course, this meant I was going to have to hire a pet sitter, because even though Future Hubs is home, he doesn't do the horse thing and couldn't really do anything anyway with his allergies. The pet sitter ended up needing to bail for work related reasons. Then it turned out Future Hubs also had to go to a wedding, so he wasn't going to be home on Saturday night. So if I was going to go, it was going to be a day trip. 

A day trip with 8+ hours of driving. 

And 8 hours is a literal day.

I really wanted to go anyway. I wanted to say screw it and just hop up and get to it. But reason won out. I stayed home.

This is probably the 10th time this year I've had to make that decision, to just stay home because I had nobody to help me. Hell, I even missed an entire summer vacation because of that this year. 

I made the choice to keep my horses at home with no other support system other than myself. I LOVE keeping them here and I would not for a second trade ANY of this for being stuck a single day at a boarding barn again. But on days like this, I get frustrated and annoyed. It is SO HARD to do this all by myself. I have a lot of things riding on my shoulders and I only have myself to rely on at the end of the day, which means that sometimes the things I REALLY want to do just don't get done. The trips I want to go on just don't get taken. The shows I want to spectate at just don't happen. 

Something will have to give next year. Something will need to change. I am going to show and I am not going to show much locally if I have anything to say about it, so I will need to hire somebody to come feed with regularity. I have a few people I can pull from, which is good, but still.... the principle of it is kind of a huge pain in my butt. 

I know some of you are stuck in this same boat. What do you do to manage everything all by yourself? How do you manage to ever get away, or to show, or to take a weekend trip, or even to just have your animals attended to when you have nobody to help you? 

Rant over. I feel better for having gotten it off my chest. I'll figure it out I'm sure... but of course, any suggestions are always welcome and appreciated.

In case you were wondering, I have 6 cats

When Mind Over Matter Fails

In my last post, I talked about using the power of mind over matter, and powering through some of my physical tiredness to get everything accomplished during the day. It's largely a mental game... I'd even say it's almost 100% a mental game. I make decisions about myself, about what I am going to do that day based upon how my body feels, and it's up to my brain to sort through those feelings and decide if I need to take care of my body, or I need to push through it and get it done.

But there is a flip side to this. Powering mentally through my days requires my mind to be strong, and healthy. I can make these choices, if my mind is fully functional. But like everyone, I fight my own personal demons, and sometimes these fully override my controls and take me for a completely unwanted ride. I often struggle to cope with utterly crippling depression, which is largely related to my poor stress handling skills, how much sunshine I get a day, and how hormonal I am. Throw these things together at one time, and it's not much fun. This past week in particular, it has been pouring on and off, and I barely saw the sunshine all week. As a solar powered human, this is crippling.

The rain also creates a secondary problem for me. It completely dropkicks my schedule into oblivion. When I am working in barns or in dry covered areas, the weather is not an issue, but there are many places I go that have nowhere to work in the poor weather, so we have to move appointments around. Doing the dance of a thousand reschedules, is what we call it. Last week alone, I missed three heavy days of work in a row due to the weather. We were supposed to be leaving for vacation in Colorado this week. I was frantic and overwhelmed, because I had nowhere to put these people and no time for anything whatsoever.

So, on the days when it was really bad outside and I couldn't work, I stayed in bed. Literally all day, sleeping. It rained for hours on Thursday, dumping a good 4" of rain on us, so I didn't ride. I didn't work anyone. I didn't do anything. I slept. Overnight, it dumped another deluge which brought our 24 hour total up to 10" of rain. Everything was flooded. Everything was a mess.


There was nothing for it. I cancelled my vacation. I opted to stay home and work instead of go enjoy myself camping in Colorado, and I've been full steam ahead ever since.

I've never had to do that before. I've never missed a real vacation because of work. It's a very weird place to be in and I'm not really sure how I feel about it. It was the only choice to be made, so there isn't much to be upset about. It's just... it's weird. I never wanted to cross that threshold, but now I have.




Finding the right balance to life is hard ya'll. I don't think anybody ever really gets there.... it is surely something you just work on, constantly, all the time, your whole life.

Pax and Future Hubs: at 4 weeks, 3 months, 6 monhs, 8 months, and now 16 months. Currently going through an attractive wiener dog stage

Anyway. That's where I've been all week. Just been trying to slog through the mud and the rain and the creeping darkness that I sometimes can't escape from. I've barely done anything but work and sleep, just trying to survive and get it all done.




But the sun has been out for a few days. I dragged myself out of my torpid stupor this afternoon after work and hooked up my trailer. Dylan took his piece of carrot, and followed me back up to the trailer to be groomed and readied. Once there, I tacked up - saddle, bridle, boots, helmet, gloves. I left behind the baggage of the week - still waiting for me upon my return, but not needed for the time being. For now, it was just Dylan, and myself.

Dylan, like many horses, can either be extremely light or extremely heavy and strong depending on how well I am riding. If I am soft and light with the contact, he is soft and light in the bridle. If I get heavy, he leans right back as hard as he can. If my seat is sloppy and flopping around, he is more than happy to run around the arena on his forehand at high speed, but if you sit up and engage your abs, he is completely controllable off your seat alone. He truly has been making a much better rider out of me, because I am free to experiment with all of this, and he already knows and can respond appropriately when I get it right. I am at my best when I am free to think about what I am doing, and then try it and see how it works. Then I can take what worked, and try to make it better. And better. And better.

With Dylan, I am free to think. I have a better awareness now of my individual seatbones than I ever have in my life. I have a better understanding of my core. I looked in the mirror today when we were doing walk work, and saw my right leg, and it was just as pretty as it's ever been, sitting in the best spot it ever has. My left leg will never do that, but it can get close.... it can get better, and it is getting better.

We had an excellent ride. I'm still experimenting a little bit on how best to warm this horse up, and I don't have one concrete warmup I like more than others. Today I chose to walk on a loose rein, then pick up just my snaffle rein only and do some stretching and walk half pirouettes. He was so light and responsive after some back and forth repetitions of this, and maintained it when I picked up the curb rein. He maintained it in the trotwork, and in the canterwork. He felt so easy, and so light, even though he hadn't been worked in a week. I felt so much better.

I'll be riding a lot in the next few days, and intend to break those rides down into more detailed ride posts. I was feeling a bit dried out and uninspired to write over the past week, but a good ride was just what I needed to feel refreshed and ready to get back to life as I am used to. Sometimes you trip on your own feet, but as long as you can find your way back upright again, it's all right.

What Does It Mean To Be A Trainer?

Gail from Journey to 100 Miles posted an interesting read today about natural horsemanship, and specifically about mustangs and the Mustang Magic/Makeover. Her post got me thinking about every Mustang I've ever worked with, including a new one I saw today, and what exactly it means to be a horse trainer.

I'm not a horse trainer, not in the riding sense. All I am is an adult amateur that hasn't managed to kill myself yet. I've trained a few horses to do a few things with some moderate success, but I don't consider myself to be a trainer in any way - or at least, I didn't until I started thinking about it today.

My living revolves around the fact that I am underneath horses all day long and need them to be cooperative and polite for me. I can't always rely on my owners to do the training for me, because for various reasons they may not be able to or know how to help teach their horses to stand quietly. It expedites the process when they can help between appointments, but for the most part these horses all eventually learn the order in which things get done, and we understand each other. They know what I am going to do, and I know what they are going to do. I expect them to stand relatively quietly for me, and they expect me to be polite and not manhandle or scare or hurt them in any way. We operate on that mutual respect, and it has created a lot of really nice, polite horses that are easy for me to work on. 

A number of these horses were horrible beasts to start out with. I no longer take on bad cases (not knowingly, anyway) because I was badly injured last year trying to work on a feral donkey, but I used to take on troublemakers with regularity when I was a bit more foolhardy. I started recognizing patterns in these horses, namely that they were acting out for a few specific reasons:

1) They didn't understand what was expected of them

2) They were frightened and sometimes were anticipating something bad was going to happen

3) They were in pain somewhere and were trying to express it

4) And a few rare cases were just ill-tempered jerks for no apparent reason, but these were the exception rather than the rule

It got me thinking critically about how to help these horses understand what was expected of them. It also gave me a distinct feel for when a horse was acting out because it was in pain vs. when it was frightened vs. when it just didn't know why it needed to be doing something. 

Far and away, the worst horses I have ever worked on have been the Mustangs that have come out of the Makeover programs. I want this program to succeed, but I feel like surely these horses must be completely rushed through the training process. My owners were all told that the horses was "perfect for the farrier," and once the horses were home they all found out that this was not the case. These horses were born out on the range (unless they were born in a holding pen, which sometimes happens), and were all living a nice happy life until the day that a helicopter chased them all into a holding pen. There, their herds were split up, they were run into chutes and branded, and sorted out into holding pens until the time that they got run onto a trailer and shipped off to some gung-ho trainer who has 100 days (or less) to make the horse into the best and most broke trick pony you've ever seen in your life. And they do make them do tricks - like leap into the beds of trucks, or through hoops of actual fire, or other completely stupidly pointless tricks like that. The best tricks win the competition. (Except for Elisa Wallace who is just awesome and who uses actual horsemanship to win instead of tricks). 

100 days is not even four months. Some of these horses go through complete and total hell trying to get ready for the competition. And they tend to come out the other side acting extremely, extremely body protective. Inevitably, nearly always, the first time I work on them they act like total beasts. They rear, they strike, they bite, they kick, and they try to fall over onto you. Sometimes they act fearful, sometimes they act playful, and sometimes they act angry. But they all act out, and sometimes it takes hours to get them done the first time. It sucks for everybody. 

You thought I was kidding about the fire

So what to do you do? Well, every one takes a different approach, and the approach has to be customized to also fit the owner. It gets complicated because you have to be able to read both the horse *and* the owner, and tailor what you do to match both of them. You have to know when to hang on when a horse is leaping around trying to yank his foot away, and when to let go. You need to read if the horse is going to kick you when he's pulling the foot away, or if he's just pulling. You need to be able to feel where in his body his soreness is coming from, and if you can alter anything to fix it. Is the horse yanking his foot away because he's insecure about not having access to all four legs, is he yanking his foot away because he is bored, or is he yanking his foot away because he is sore and can't stretch the limb that far for any length of time? And what will the owner say when you pinpoint these things - how do you go about telling them? And even when you read the situation to the best of your ability, you have to know that sometimes you are wrong and the horse will completely surprise you. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen. Even just today one of the young warmbloods I do went completely stiff legged and keeled over on top of me at high speed. She is usually a bit tricky to do but that completely threw me off guard, and off balance. But in time she, like all the others, will learn what is expected of her, and she too will stand quietly. Eventually, even the traumatized Mustangs turn into solid citizens. 

All of these things got me to thinking, what does it mean to be a trainer?  I know plenty of people who have hung their $20 training ride shingle out and claim to be trainers, but whom I wouldn't personally consider a proper trainer. I always equate a real trainer with someone who professional teaches horses to be ridden/driven/worked in a specific discipline and get compensated for it (and succeeds at it), but perhaps it means something a bit more than that, Perhaps it just boils down to teaching a horse to do a specific skill for a specific reason. Perhaps I *am* a trainer and I just don't think of myself as one, because my "training" isn't really intentional or deliberate - it is just organic and happens as things go along. Or perhaps it is something completely different. Are you a trainer if you teach a horse to do a trick? If you teach a whole lot of horses to do the same trick? If you teach them a series of complicated tricks and then win blue ribbons doing it? Or something else?

What do YOU think it means to be a trainer?

The Hard Questions.

Having very old animals is one of the most wonderful and heartbreaking things I have ever had to go through. 

When I lost my old greyhound a year ago, it was soul-crushing but also necessary. She was very ill with kidney disease and she went downhill very fast in the end - it was the only humane option and therefore the choice was easy.

This year, I am facing losing both my very old Twiggy the corgi, and my very old Darby too. Both of these descisions are weighing heavily on my mind and heart right now, because neither one of them are easy to make. Both of them involve locomotive failures and not sickness. It's not like I haven't gone through this before - both Metro and Gogo were chosen euthanasias because of lameness issues. Both of them were much younger though - the idea of them having to face a long lifetime of crippled limping sealed the decisions, as I felt it was unfair to both of them. Both Twiggy and Darby are very old and lame, which means I know the decision is looming.... but when to make it? When is the right time?

The old corgi is my companion of about four years. We found her running on the freeway several years back, drying up from nursing puppies - her pads were super soft, like she had never really been outside. We think she may have been a breeder dog who got too old and got dumped - we never found an owner, and fell in love with her while we were looking, so she stayed. She used to be my work buddy, always riding along in my truck with me. About two years ago, her arthritis got to be bad enough that even a half day of work was too much for her, and she'd be pretty lame the following day. Up until about 6 months ago, she was still able to go for little 1/2 mile walks once or twice a week. As of late, she is now struggling to rise from her bed in the morning, and a lot of the time I have to help her stand. She's very lame and pain meds don't control it well anymore. Her back and her hips are very bad and there isn't anything we can do about it except keep her comfortable. Some days, she is great - still manages to lope around the yard, still barks at the big dogs when they play, still has her voracious corgi appetite. But some mornings, I can't get her out from under the bed. Today she didn't even lift her head when I called her to go outside - I thought she was dead. It was only after I turned the lights on and looked down at her that I was able to make sure she was still breathing. 

I made an appointment for her once already, but she rebounded so well in the week leading up to it that I couldn't in good faith put her down just yet. Now though, I am facing that decision again. I'm not ready but I'm also not willing to make her suffer longer than she already has. 

Only the cutest corgi you ever saw

I'm also not sure what to do about Darby. I took her on knowing full well that she was going to die. I took her on knowing that she is crippled in all four legs, and that she is never going to be sound or normal again. What I didn't anticipate happening was how much she really has bloomed at our place. She really filled out - she looks fantastic! I've never seen a horse of her great age look as good at she does. Good food has taken ten years off her life visually. She absolutely sparkles in the sunlight.

But she is not sound. She gets around well enough but she never really recovered from when she tanked so badly in the spring, right before I brought her home. If her feet get wet or if she packs anything in up against her soles, she is dead lame. She grunts and groans with every step when she is sore. Some days she looks really good, but a lot of the time she doesn't. On her worst days, bute helps her get along. 

I think about how lame Gogo and Metro were when I euthanized them. Neither of them were ANYWHERE near as bad as her on even her good days. I think about ever letting either of those two get to Darby's level of lameness, and there's no way I would have EVER let them suffer that much. I would have - and did - let them go long before they ever got to this level. There is some level of lameness that is controllable and acceptable to me - like P's lameness, it certainly isn't enough to warrent euthanizing her just yet. She is not very sound if she is in work, but she is able to run and play and go for light hacks - that is definitely a decent quality of life. Darby is not even able to do more than walk, and never has, ever since I have known her.... which actually I think is making the decision more complicated for me. I think that because I never knew Darby when she was sound, I have an altered idea of what comfortable is for her. The fact stands that she is so much better now than she was a few months ago when I first brought her home - and that makes it hard. She has really improved from what she was back then. That makes me want to keep fighting for her, to keep helping her feel good in any way that I can, because she deserves it.

But she also deserves to be comfortable and pain free. She deserves respect and dignity. She deserves the right thing - but what is the right thing?

Darby the day I brought her home

Darby now

I am helped in these descisions by knowing that horses and dogs aren't thinking of what is going to happen tomorrow. They live in the here and now - they only think about what is happening right now, or when they anticipate something in their daily routine. They aren't thinking these existential thoughts, wondering what life is all about, wondering if they are going to feel better tomorrow or in a week or a month. And when they are old and infirm, they pass gently when they die, their old bodies ready to be free of their everyday suffering. I don't know what happens after this life, but I like to think that animals are restored to their full health and vigor somewhere off in the universe, able to run and play again. I don't believe in suffering or making animals live longer just because these decisions are hard for us humans to deal with. 

It's weighing heavily on me and I'm not sure when the right time to make these decisions is. Is there ever a right time? I don't know.

The Joyfully Mundane

Lauren over at She Moved To Texas recently did an anonymous survey that basically asked commenters/bloggers to 'tell it like it is'. One of the anonymous comments was something along the lines of "most of your blogs bore me to TEARS." That statement caught me a little offguard, I'll admit. After all, SO MUCH of what we do as horse people is just that, totally boring and mundane. We feed, and water, and muck, and groom, and then we do it all again the next day, and the next day, and the next day. We do it every day, the same thing, over and over, and that's the way we like it.

Wouldn't it be fun if EVERY DAY we could write about some amazing breakthrough we had? Some incredible award we won? Some breathtaking thing we experienced? That sure would make for an interesting read. But that is not the reality of life with horses, or for that matter, the reality of anything that is worth working for. If we could just hop up on any random horse and go jump around a huge course and win a big check, wouldn't that be great? But that gets pretty old pretty fast. Our daily horse life in reality is filled with the mundane, the boring little details, the nitty gritty same old same old. Every day, we put the best feed that we can into our horses. Every day, we care for them to the best of our ability. Every day, we try to be good riders and good caretakers, and do our best to improve little by little. Some days, we regress. Some days, we drive away from the barn in tears, because we had such a bad ride and we feel like we'll never get better. Some days we're soaking wet from the rain, or lathered in sweat from the heat, but we're still out there, doing the same thing, over and over again. We keep on trying, and trying, and trying. 

And if we're lucky, one day we'll be at a show, or at a ride, or a clinic, or somewhere that is important to us. And we'll do well. We'll even do great! We'll leave that ring with huge smiles on our faces, a tremendous feeling of pride welling in our chests, because we know exactly how many hours it took to get to that point. We know how hard we worked, and how much it took. And all of those hours - hours full of the mundane, and the boring, and the same-old-same-old - will culminate into one grand and glorious experience. It isn't just the final outcome (ribbons, awards, praise, etc) that makes us so hungry to keep on plugging along on the same path. It is the entire journey in its whole. There is no sweeter victory than one that is hard-fought for. Then, and only then, can we write those posts that are truly 'reader worthy'.

But it takes a lot of boring, boring, boring posts to get to that point.

That's why I blog. I'm not here to put up ads, and do giveaways, and spin great and magnificent unbelievable tales. I'm here to tell a story. I'm here to tell MY story, and all of the facets of it. I'm here to chronicle that journey, even if all I do in a week is trot down the same road, and work on the same bending exercise, and do the same set of obstacles until they are perfect. That is pretty boring stuff to read about, but that is what we do every day, and every week, and every month. We have short-term and long-term goals, oh yes! But they don't come true in one day. We chip away at them, little by little, over and over. I'm not here to sugarcoat, or gloss things over. This story is raw and uncut, and I share the good parts as well as the bad. There are of course some omissions, certain things I don't blog about on principle - we all have our rules about that. This blog is about O, and P, and the things we do together. It's our story, and chronicling it is important to me. It may not always be interesting, but it is always real. And it is always, always, important to me.

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 Speaking of All Things Mundane And Boring, check out my SUPER AMAZINGLY SHINY CLEAN HARNESS. I spent my Wednesday evening watching Harry Potter, drinking tea, hanging out with Mo, and carefully cleaning and polishing my harness. BOOM! Boring stuff. But polishing your harness to a gleaming shine is one of those little details that is important, one of those habits you have to instill in yourself if you want to be serious in the show ring. You have to take care of your leather, no matter what discipline you do, and it becomes even more critical with a harness - if anything breaks on a harness while you are under way, you are so very screwed.

After a few hours (geez who knew this sport involved SO MUCH DANG LEATHER?), I had a very sparkly harness. I dabbed a bit of brass cleaner on a few choice spots to see if they'd shine up nicely, and they shined up mostly ok. I don't think my harness, which is a very old and very lovely Smuckers, has ever really had a seriously good cleaning and oiling. It was looking a bit dry and sad, even though I clean it regularly at the barn. All of that leather comes in contact with all of that sweaty horse, so it just gets dirtier and dried out that much faster. 

Alas, I made the sad discovery today that there is no proper way to properly wrap a driving bridle. (Even that linked bridle isn't wrapped just the way I like it. Because I really am that anal about things like that, even though half the bridles in my trailer are haphazardly tossed up on their hooks uncleaned and untidy.) The saddle and blinkers on my bridle have patent leather and are just awesome. I also washed my harness pads, earbonnet, leg boots and bells, just because why not. I'll need to do it all again before our show, but it was worth it to see just how nice the leather looks with a good cleaning and polish.

 I also converted all the patterns from the upcoming show into images, so you can see them! I officially sent in my entry as well, so it is going to become a real thing. Ahhh!

I'm so excited!!!!!

Barrel-ssage

I had a bunch of very interesting and thoughtful comments on my last post, all of which I appreciate. Alicia made a particularly interesting comment that really gave me some food for thought. What she specifically said was:
"Try less to think about putting a round peg in a square hole. Make the hole round. Seeing as the horse is round already, why change the horse, just change the demands. So you want to be an eventer. Be one!! Instead of 'making' O do eventing, make eventing work for O."

I really like that way of looking at it. It's very easy to feel frustrated when you're in dressage tack in a dressage arena and nothing is going right.... BUT take away the tack and the arena and give the horse something else to do, and things are very different. To say that O is a tactical ride is the understatement of the century. Complicated things shut her down. Slow speeds frustrate her unless she is completely relaxed. Her evasion of choice is to get strong and run away at every gait. She absolutely excels at the combo of curl your head to your chest, completely ignore half halts, and bolt. When she is frustrated or confused, she fights me every. Single. Stride. Most dressage rides, it is all I can do to just get her walking quietly with four or five steps of relaxed trot on a straight line, and that's all we can do. That usually either comes only immediately in the beginning of the ride, or after two or so solid hours of sweating, cursing, and fighting each other tooth and nail.That pretty much sucks for both of us, all the way around. Neither one of us works well when we're upset like that.

When we're out going down the road, or when we're working the barrel pattern, I have a different horse. It's not necessarily on the trail that she is good - and it's not necessarily in the arena that she is bad - it's mostly just on the hardtop road going in straight lines that she does her best work, which boggles me a little bit. It took me a little while to figure that out - I thought that being out on the trail itself was what made her happy enough to relax, but in reality I don't think it is relaxation. I would not say she is relaxed so much on the trail as she is vigilant and interested in her environment, enough so that it gives her something else to think about. At that point she goes, "yeah yeah human you can manipulate me how you want, I have more important things to think about here." This of course still can go too far - if something is genuinely scary, she is still going to get tense and bolty. If she has seen the trail a million times, she is just as full of evasions. If she has never seen the trail at all, she sometimes gets a bit too spooky to relax. There's a formula to it that I haven't quite figured out. Pretty consistently, however, she gives me awesome trotwork on certain stretches of the roads around the barn. And if I can get her relaxed enough, no matter where we are, she's always pretty darn good.

One place that she is consistently good is on the barrel pattern. She gets it, it's automatic for her, and she can therefore relax because she knows exactly what is going to happen. She gets plenty fizzed up about it when I ask her for some speed, but the rest of the time she gets so mellow that she lowers her head, stretches out over her back, takes a big sigh, and breaks to the walk around every turn. Except for the turns of course, everything she does otherwise is perfectly acceptable dressage-type work.

It is extremely tricky to have a horse that is either 100% chill because they are doing the same repetitive thing in the same place, or 100% batcrap bananas because they are doing the same repetitive thing in the same place. You're never really quite sure which horse you're going to get that day. Doesn't matter what tack, what she has been doing before you rode, what you did yesterday, what kind of a mood you are in when you get on. There doesn't really seem to be a connecting factor, which is tricky.


The one place she is consistently good however is on the barrels. She never fights, never evades. She sees the pattern and heads right for it, and takes herself through it with no muss or fuss. She just gets it. And this is something I can DEFINITELY use to my advantage.


So therefore, I need to have a different plan. I can't just waltz into an arena on any given day and say, "we are doing dressage today!" I need to just let that go for now. We need to be doing things that give her enough confidence and relaxation that she becomes malleable. She needs to learn to be in control of her own body, that she doesn't have to haul on the reins or fall in or gallop off every time the balance changes.We need to take dressage and forget about the idea of making it dressage. It is, after all, just training the horse to carry itself properly, no matter what tack you use. We need to be doing something she enjoys, with a grander scheme in mind. We need to take dressage and disguise it as something else.

We need to do some barrel-ssage.




Because, let's be real... every time I look at this horse and the way she moves, all I can think is, "this horse is way too pretty of a mover and too cute of a jumper to not be an event horse."

Even when she's having a minor tantrum about something ("I SLIPPED AHH!"), she's still so pretty.

The day I can canter this mare quietly on a loopy rein in a circle is the day I start believing that anything can happen. I don't know how long it will take to get to that point... but that's where we need to go.

You wonderful wonderful blog readers are the best.... you're always there with words of encouragement even when I feel like I am about ready to give up. I'm NOT ready to give up on this horse eventually becoming an event horse... I need need to completely 100% change my tactics and go about this in a totally unorthodox way. The tried-and-true methods for producing horses in my past are just NOT working on this one. It is time to try something totally different!

Thinking The Thinks, Part II

A little more introspection tonight, and I've come to realize a few things. Mainly, my biggest problem in ALL of this nonsense is just... ME. I'm the real issue here. And now I need to figure out what to do about that.

This post is probably going to be horribly depressing and boring, and also largely about me and not horses, so skip over it if that's not your thing.

I'm a little upset to see that I recognize this kind of strange state I'm in, when I really clear away the excess and take a good hard look at it. I was 16 when 9/11 happened, and I had such horrible PTSD from that experience that I spent a few years in a terrifying spiral - honestly it's a miracle I'm still here, I tried to kill myself so many times that statistically I should have succeeded at least one of those times! 

I got better eventually. I'm not really sure what fixed it, god knows it wasn't all of the therapies and doctors and hospitalizations that did it. Mostly I think the horses did all of the heavy lifting for me emotionally, and eventually I just sort of got better. And I was good for a very long time.

When Gogo died, everything changed again. Everything that I thought I knew - every pattern in my existence - completely fell apart, and I was cast out into the strange vast unknown, into a world I didn't understand and had no idea how to navigate through without my best friend there beside me. And I'm still, 2.5 years later, just not right. I'm not a fighter anymore, I'm a complete defeatist. I throw my hands up after every mildly bad ride and say, "she hates to do XYZ thing, I don't want to do this anymore, I can't do this!" I don't strategize and mull things over and learn better ways and tackle things again tomorrow, I just give up. I throw myself randomly at other sports and try to see if things will stick, but they never really do. I eat garbage food and sit idly on the couch for hours, because I just don't care. I gained probably almost 20lbs (I'm not fat but I'm definitely not the muscular, fit, trim little bird that I used to be). I'm stagnant and lifeless a lot of the time. I panic about trying to get back into the sport that Gogo and I once loved so much, largely in part because of the success she and I had together, and how I'm so terrified that it will have lost all the magic for me now. I can't even do a 20m circle without feeling defeated some days, or even trot a crossrail sometimes. More days than not, I find myself wondering why the hell I'm even on this planet, and what the point of it all is.

I'm not anywhere near as bad as I was when 9/11 happened, thank god, but it's a very similar state of being lost in this shocky kind of state following a really tragic event. I feel like I've completely lost everything that I once knew about myself, and now I still have no idea who the hell I am, where I'm going, or what I'm doing here and why.

How do you get your motivation back when you don't see a point to anything? It's not a very fun place to be in. And I don't have an answer for it really.

The sole consolation here is that I know a lot of you know largely what I am going through - you've lost heart horses too, and have new horses who you love and adore, but you just kind of feel like you're floundering and not picking up where you thought you were going to. I know you know how I feel, and I know how you feel in turn. And it sucks. It sucks a lot.

The good thing about all of this is that I know full well that I can't sit around and say, "oh well, O just hates to do dressage, or she has bad jumping form, or her tummy is going to be too sensitive for endurance, or she's too slow for barrels," etc etc, all the things I tell myself after a terrible ride... those are all excuse that *I* make in order to be LAZY. I am just giving MYSELF a reason to mope around at home when I say those things. I can't blame her hotness, or her past experiences, or anything else, because she is a product of her environment and training, and that means that I haven't been giving her the kind of rides she really needs to improve. This is a talented, fun, wild little mare, and if I work hard enough I know I can get there with her. But I have to look myself in the face and ask the hard questions of what I am going to do about this weird funk that I am in. How exactly am I planning to get out of this, what steps do I need to take.... how do I get my listing ship back upright before it sinks?

It's a weighty kind of thing to think about.

But, it is reassuring to understand, "it's not the horse, it's me."

 Dressage *is* for every horse. Every horse can do dressage. And every reasonably sound horse should do it. It may not competition-worthy dressage, but all basic dressage is is making a horse supple, responsive, and able to carry itself lightly and easily through its work. It doesn't have to be in a dressage saddle, or in a snaffle, or in an arena. Dressage can be in jeans and a barrel saddle and a hackamore and out on the trail - and we do that often! And that to me is quite satisfying, because I feel like we can really get some quality work in that way.



One thing is for sure though. I recognize this pattern in myself and I will not fall down the slippery slope again. I know where it leads. I'm not doing it again. I'm getting out of this funk before I slip any deeper into it.

The question really is, where do I begin...

By the way, I found some more pictures of the hunt, and O being of course perfect:

Can you find us in these shots? Look hard, we're in all of them!

And yes, that is a barrel horse in a western saddle with his owner in jeans and a sweatshirt, and a rope horse in a rope saddle. Because that's how we do in Texas.

Thinking The Thoughts

 I know I've gone over this topic ad nauseum, but I still need more time to put it on paper and try and wrap my head around it. What am I, and what is O, and what are we, and what are we doing, and what are we going to be doing in the future?

I know what I need to help me redefine myself. I need some goals. I feel adrift in the ocean and unless I know which way to point the boat, I'm just going to be floating out here forever and I'm never going to see that island on the horizon that needs to be reached.

I've had a lot of time lately to think about All The Thinks, and namely they are all about what my specific long-term goals are for this mare. I have still been struggling a lot as of late with the neverending identity crisis I am going through (am I an eventer? What am I? Who am I? WHAT IS LIFE ALL ABOUT) and I am still trying to squirm my way out from under the Eventer label that I can't quite seem to let go of. I don't know what I am if I am not an eventer... until now I have never known how to do anything except event, really. I've never wanted to do anything except event until now. If it wasn't for O not really wanting to *be* an eventer, I think I'd still be carrying on eventing without a hitch. And if I really think long and hard about it, if O's riding career were to end anytime soon, I can't see myself continuing on in any one of these chosen new sports that I have been dabbling in. I'm not going to go out and buy a barrel horse after this, or an Arab for endurance, or something like that. You know? I think I would go right back to eventing if I could, although some days I can't stand the idea of ever doing it again. I don't know.

Basically it boils down to whether or not I am more vested in my horse or in my chosen sport. Plenty of people have told me to just get rid of O, to find a horse more mentally suited to the sport, and I do get where they are coming from. But when it comes down to it, I'd rather have this mare over any other... I care about her way more than I do eventing. For whatever reason she came into my life, she's here to stay.

In short, this journey is exclusively about this horse and I, and what all we can achieve on this planet with the time that we have together.

 And really, if all of the stars stay aligned and we both stay sound and happy, I think we can achieve quite a lot. I really do.

(Further introspection: it kind of feels completely right to have a horse with no particular label. I'm the ultimate 'so, what are you?' label-less kind of person, as much as I had no intention of being this way. I *want* a label, labels are comfortable, labels are relateable. I spent a lot of my youth floundering around trying to assign labels to myself, but nothing really ever stuck and I never was at home with anything really. Even now, into adulthood, I don't have any good terms to assign to myself, and I feel naked a lot of the time. I'm not a lesbian, I'm not straight, I'm not bi, I'm just kind of into transguys, and girls... what does that make me? Dunno, there's not a label for that. I'm into performance barefoot horses, but also into synthetics, and sometimes not even adverse to steel... what does that make me? Not really a trimmer, not a farrier... there's not a label for that either. Queer folks don't welcome me, farriers don't welcome me, trimmers don't welcome me. Once Texans find out I am not into Jesus and don't want a gun in every room of my house, they don't welcome me either. And on the horsey front, endurance people want nothing to do with me, barrel racers keep asking "so, you ride English usually I assume?", h/j folks look at me like I just escaped from XC/a zoo... and so on. You get the picture. We just don't fit in anywhere.)

Here we go with the break down... breaking things down into bite-sized chunks is kind of my specialty... or else I think I'd choke on it all.

So, we've already established that with A Horse That Does Everything, you should Do Everything, right? I love having a horse that I can literally put on whatever tack I feel like putting on and going and doing whatever I feel like doing that day. That is really awesome. And looking back where she was a year ago - unrideable and borderline dangerous - we have REALLY come far.

BUT, for the sake of progress, for the sake of bettering myself and bettering us as a team, I need some overarching long-term types of goals to aim for. If I don't have some real, concrete goals, I flounder. I've always operated on goals, and now I don't have any, simply because I just don't know what I want to be doing. This leads to a lot of tire spinning... a lot of me feeling like I am wasting time and not getting anywhere at all.

Things I want to do with this mare: Endurance, barrels, jumpers, foxhunting, maybe some team penning, some poles and some breakaway roping. Maybe some combined driving, some eventing, some dressage, if we ever really get to that. Maybe anything else that looks interesting and we decide to try (hunter paces, polocrosse, hell whatever we want really.... this horse can do it!) 

Things I want to specifically focus on: jumpers, barrels, endurance. (Which is interesting, because those are all disciplines that I once would have written off as some combo of stupid, abusive, and pointless. Different times, different times.) Those are things I think she could particularly be good at. While it is fun to play around and do All The Things... it's really fun to do Some Of The Things and excel at them. Or at least, work very hard and better better at them. You know?

I need to come up with some goals (i.e. what do we want to accomplish long-term within each sport, and why). This is going to take some more introspection.

 I'll think on that some more.






Pretty thing isn't she! A cloudy grey day doesn't keep a muscular little mare down... days without sun are annoying to me for multiple reasons, one of which being that the sun brings out her super glossy coat and the yucky grey clouds hide the shine.

But, she's still gorgeous.


Pmare is looking much better too... varying in degrees of soundness, but her weight has improved. She is just as much of a crotchety old goob as always... I lucked out catching both her and one of the kittens making goofy faces at the same time:

 I'd really like to get her back under saddle and going on short trail rides, but she's just not sound enough for that right now. Her stint away from home really worsened her ringbone... if she hasn't been moving around before I go to pick her feet, she has trouble picking up all four legs. Once she gets moving, everything warms up and she does better, but she still has quite a lot of pain in her left stifle and that is definitely worsened with work. She's quite fine and healthy for a pasture pet, and gets around great, but probably isn't a candidate for much more than that at this point. Poor old gal.

Dressage Fail

Sigh. For two seconds, I thought I might have been making some real headway with O in her dressage work. But.... I suppose I was wrong.

I go through this about once a month, or once every other month.... I get super excited about dressage work/eventing work, buckle down to polishing out dressage work, completely fail, decide she has no real future in dressage, get to doing other things with her, marvel at how well she does other things, get bored, try to do more dressage, completely fail again. I'm a halfway decent jock and have a lot of tools in my toolkit for dealing with evasions and problem horses of all shapes and sizes. But O... O is easily the most difficult critter I've ever sat on.

Some days, her dressage-esque work is en pointe. She relaxes over her back, stretches out, and takes a nice contact. Sometimes, we literally can only trot for about 5-10 strides before she careens out of control again, and we can only go in straight lines along the fenceline, but it feels like something of a victory. Sometimes we can put together a whole walk-trot test. Sometimes. Maybe like, once every few months or so, we can do it. Sometimes we can canter, and the canter is good! But, once we canter, the trotwork totally falls apart, and I have nothing again. The more we canter, the worse everything else gets. 

For every good dressage ride, we have several terrible ones. She came to me a year ago with every evasive trick in the book - that's why I got her for so cheap, after all - and she uses them all at the same time without any particular warning. Ignore your half-halt, curl behind the bit, and take off? Her specialty. If you put your leg on to push her out to the bridle, she takes off. If you release her in front so that she can stretch out to the bridle, she takes off. If you half-halt her to stop her from taking off, she curls behind the bridle and takes off anyway. The more she zooms, the more she wants to continue to zoom. And you just can't wear her out... you just can't. An hour into our ride today, I was so fed up with her zoominess that I just let her gallop on to get it out of her system.... she galloped for at least 15 minutes full out, after a full hour of a completely horrible ride already. I was jelly in the saddle at that point, and she was still galloping as fast she could round and round. She was churning along so fast that I had no brakes anymore, and had to engage my e-brake and pull her around into the fence to stop her before I completely melted into a puddle and fell off. Did she quiet down after that? Of course not. I think this horse would rather gallop until she collapsed rather than put in quiet work. She was lathered in sweat and all she wanted to do was keep running. I managed to get her walking quietly for about 10 minutes, with my usual 5-10 trot steps along the fenceline, before finally just calling it a day. What the hell was the point of all of that?

And yet, I NEVER have problems riding her out along the trail, on a loose rein, at whatever speed I choose. She is ALWAYS perfect. If I choose to take a contact out there, and put her to work while moving along the trail? Always, always perfect. Always. Dressage on the trail? It's always good.

But put her in an arena, or confined area, and go round and round in the same setting? She is an absolute hellish nightmare. This is the only time we fight with each other. This is the only time that she reverts back to all of the horrible evasions that she came with. 

If there was such a thing as trail-ssage, we'd be all over that. We'd win everything. But, there is not. And so, like we do every month, I throw my hands up, again. And as I do every month, I beat myself up about it, because I feel like I am giving up. I feel like any horse can do dressage, dressage is good for every horse, dressage is the foundation for all of everything everywhere. I feel like if I only tried harder, if I only figured out some other way of better explaining things to her, if I only keep at it, somehow I surely will get it with her, someday. But I also feel like every horse has their strengths and weaknesses as well as things they enjoy doing versus things they don't enjoy at all. I know a lot of horses who are arena only horses, and absolutely lose their every-loving minds when you take them out of the arena. I know horses who you couldn't get to gallop if you tried, ones that are super happy to just plod around forever. I know horses who can't stand jumping. I know horses who you can't get down the alleyway for rodeo events. And, I know horses who think arena flatwork is the most boring, miserable thing you could ever do with your life... and O is one of those horses.

Is it training? Is is personality? Past issues? Current issues? Some of the above? All of the above? Yes, to all of it, to some extent.

Could we go event and do ok? Yes, I'm sure we could. Well, I *know* we could. But after doing eventing for so long with such a winning horse, just going in and doing "ok" is not what I want to do. I don't want to waste the money just to do "ok." I was horribly spoiled with having an awesome winning event horse in Gogo. Now, I want to go event and win, if I am eventing. I want to do recognized shows, big shows, if I am eventing. Otherwise, I don't want to waste my money. I've already been there and done that. And everything is different now to me, since I lost Gogo. Some days, I miss eventing something fierce. Some days, I don't think I'll ever want to do it again. On those days when I miss it, I get excited about working on flatwork again. On those days when I don't miss it, I am more than happy to throw up my hands and say *&@! it, I don't want to do this anymore.

Do I want O to event? Of course I do. Am I going to be disappointed if she doesn't event? A little, yes. Maybe not at all. I'm not sure. Am I willing to dump her and go find a different horse that is more suited mentally to eventing? Of course not. I'd rather make some other goal for the both of us to achieve instead, something we both love and want to do. 

I've been going through this sort of identity crisis ever since Gogo died. Am I going to keep eventing or not? I thought I was going to. Now I'm not sure. But who am I, if I am not an eventer? Am I still an eventer if I haven't evented in 5 years? Am I going to event with this horse? Am I going to event with a different horse somewhere along the line? What am I doing? Why am I doing it? Where do I go from here? Am I a complete failure, or am I just going in a different direction?

I don't know.

 

One thing that I do know.... it's deathstorm season here in Texas. This one passed us by, thankfully, but I think Pmare was not impressed...

Self Exploration

Phew! I have some catching up to do. I have another post to follow about my birthday, but I better catch upon this one first!


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Little Miss Tre left for her new home this past weekend! After this experience I can safely say I am NEVER EVER EVER doing the buying and selling thing ever again, EVER. It was a horrible, frustrating, money-bleeding experience, and I never want to take part in it ever again. She went to a great place, but not for what I wanted and not within the time frame that I wanted. It was a learning experience for me, but mostly all that I learned is that while it seemed like a great endeavor, it was not, and I am not made of the stuff that horse sellers are made out of. I am never. Ever. Doing. That. Again.

EVER.

Doing this also gave me some good insight into my own workings though, and for that I am grateful. I realized at some point that I am really just a one-horse kind of person. I really like just have one single one to spoil and dote on. It's very hard for me to have two that are both in work at the same time (having one retired one or one youngster plus a working one is a different story, that is doable). I don't know, I'm just sort of... horsey monogamous, I suppose. Only having one means that the one that I have doesn't have to want for anything. Only having one means that I can take as long as I feel like every day, because there isn't a time constraint. 

From here on out, it will just be O, and of course Pmare when she comes home. Obviously, at some point in the (way distant) future, that will change in some way or another (I get rich, somebody dies, something unexpected happens, etc), but not now. Now is a time for conservation instead of excess. Now is a time to focus on building up the things I have instead of trying to reach for outside things. 2014 looks like another huge year for personal and professional growth, and not surprisingly I am feeling a little wiser with every passing day. My 29th birthday was yesterday.... hard to believe I am approaching the end of my 20's. What I know today is certainly far more than I knew at this time last year, or the year before, or especially five years ago, or ESPECIALLY ten years ago. Ten years ago at this exact time, I was waiting for my brand new horse Metro to arrive from Canada, while doting on my old man Quincy. Five years ago at this time, I had just recently moved to Connecticut, and was prepping young Gogo for her Novice debut in Area 1. Two years ago, I had just moved into a house with Future Hubs and was wondering how in the heck I had survived a year already in Texas. Last year, I was about to get struck in the ankle with a rock and have everything in my life completely change for the better. At the end of my 20's, I am seeing that everyone was right - your 20's is a RIDICULOUSLY dynamic period in your life. It is a time for growth, a time for huge decisions, a time for successes, and a time for mind boggling mistakes. A time to really figure out who the heck you are, and where you want to be going with your life. I know that I will change every year - that's just life - but I know a lot more about my older, wiser self now than I did my younger, more irrational self. I am also old and wise enough to know that I am neither old nor wise in reality, and that I don't know nearly as much as I used to think I did. 

Anyway, I digress. 

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The past two weeks has been absolutely insane. I was sick for a week and a half, which threw off all of my appointments, and then the weather tanked which didn't help any of the complexity. I then ran myself ragged trying to catch up with everyone, and finally everything is back to normal. In the interim, I only had time to lunge a few times and go for a quick hack, but hey, at least it was something! This week things have finally gotten back to the normal level of crazy, so I've been happily back in the saddle. 

O doesn't like to do the same thing every day. If she lunges two days in a row, she'll be much worse on the second day. Same thing with flatwork, or conditioning - some combo of being bored and using the same muscle groups makes her much less pliable on the second day. She seems to do quite well if you space out her more intense workouts with either a day off or some very differing kind of work. After our dressage ride on the 1st (a Saturday), she had a day off on that Sunday (when the weather tanked), and then on that Monday we went for a 5 mile hack. We checked on all the new baby cows (so far there are 14 new little squeezy cute beef tips!), trotted over some raised poles, patterned on the barrels for a little while, and then called it a day.

It was REALLY COLD, and I had to practically peel my frozen self out of the saddle. Is winter over yet!?


The rest of the week passed in a whirlwind of business. Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, she had off, and Wednesday and Friday she lunged in the Faux-ssoa. Putting a day off in between the two of those sessions was very helpful, although I did think that on the second day she was a bit less cooperative than she had been on the first. We worked on our usual stretching out, trotting and cantering over raised poles, and relaxation.

(If you couldn't tell from the change in background weather/scenery, those were taken on two different days.)

On Sunday (the 9th), I decided to try a little experiment. I had the idea long ago (meaning, a month or two ago) that I should try a pelham on O for some flatwork. This pelham has a short shank and the same Happy Mouth mouthpiece as the snaffle I ride her in. My idea was that I could ride off the snaffle, and then would have an extra bit of "excuse me whoa there wild animal" with the curb if I needed it. And that was a good idea, of course, but in reality it seems as though O has recently really connected with the idea of a half-halt. She stretched out and took a nice contact, moved off my leg, took half halts from my seat perfectly well, and was in general just fantastic. I ended up tying up the curb rein and just riding off the snaffle anyway, because I had a horse who was listening to my body and just taking a nice relaxed contact with the snaffle. I was also surprised to find that we have leg yields in both directions, really nice ones! I didn't know we had them... we certainly didn't have them before. Not sure when she picked that up, but she did!
She was great. Back to the regular snaffle, because all good dressage-y things come from a simple snaffle and that's how it should be!

She sure did look cute though!


We had another lunge, which looked quite a lot like this (although this was taken a few days earlier):



Awwww good mare.

We also had a fun day of desensitizing with a rope and playing on the barrels. She has started cantering the barrel pattern and is REALLY pretty good at it all things considered. I tried to get a video of that, but unfortunately all I ended up shooting was a long video of the sky. But, at least I got a short clip of playing around with the rope!




Caveat: do not be this lax with your own personal safety unless you really know the horse. I'm being very sloppy about safety in this video because I know this horse and I knew she wasn't going to do anything. Still, that doesn't mean that something unexpected could have happened - practice safety!

You can see that she's not particularly keen about it flying around near her head, but it won't take long for her to get used to that. I am a total goob with rope handling, so I won't be swinging around off of her anytime soon, but this is a good place to start. Not surprisingly, she didn't care about it much. You also get to see some very poor leading skills on my part... I suppose I've been letting her be too lazy with the leading as of late. I will get back on that now that I have noticed her trying to drag along behind me.

Phew, I think I caught up with all of the riding stuff!