Day 24 – 30 Day Horse Challenge – Your best riding friend

Well this one comes at an opportune time...or I made it that way with my neglectful posting habits. My best riding friend is actually leaving this weekend to have an amazing horsey summer working as a wrangler at a dude ranch. So jealous! Uh, I mean happy for her, that's the one.

We actually became friends last summer while I was teaching at Gentle Giants. She and her mom are both horse-crazy, and they live not too far from me (but over an hour away from Gentle Giants--yikes!). I really feel like I found my horsey family with them since my family is not really very into animals, but I go over to their house and their three big dogs shower me with kisses while we all chat about what's going on with our riding, and until recently, our horse searches. She and her mom were leasing a Friesian for a few months, then decided to go out and buy a 4-year-old draft cross, much to the chagrin of their trainer out in VA.

His name is Champagne Wishes & Caviar Dreams, AKA Wish

They've had him since March, and he's green, but such a quiet, nice boy. They let me ride him a couple weeks ago, and he essentially has the mind of a draft but he moves like a warmblood. Not a bad combination! He's at a really nice private farm with fancy synthetic footing in an outdoor arena, plus trails and an XC course in one of the paddocks.

So I'm sure she'll be sad to leave him all summer but he'll still be around after she comes back from her wrangling adventures...which she is writing about on her new Tumblr, East Coast Wrangler.

I'll miss tack store runs and getting crepes in Georgetown with her this summer...I guess I will just have to make bad decisions at Saddlery Liquidators' Memorial Day sale by myself!

P.S. -- The Fix-a-Test today went great, and Midnight's owner took video for me. Super tired after 12 hours at the barn though so I'll save that writeup for tomorrow.

In Which Byron Proves His Mettle as Boyfriend of the Year

Over GChat:
Byron: What you're telling me
Is that someone actually hired a horse psychic
Me: oh yeah.
Just for fun
Byron: Oh
Me: yeah
they do it occasionally
Byron: of course
Me:Just for fun.....
and the horse chiropractor...and the horse masseuse...and the acupuncturist....
not to mention the dentist, vet and farrier
Byron: I could make arguments for the chiropractor, masseuse and possibly acupuncturist

Stationery Contest Over at She Moved to Texas

I wanted to let you all know about a fun contest going on at the She Moved to Texas blog:

He took the REALLY long spot.

It's for fancy personalized stationery!!! All you have to do is follow the instructions on her original post. There are two more days left in the contest. Good luck to you if you enter, but I hope I win--I seriously identified with her when she said her "inner east coast preppy girl loves classy, personalized stationary." Because that's actually who I am. And I find the horses' expressions on these things hilarious--kind of like "AAAHHH HERE WE GO!" I know they are supposed to be fancy but that's what I think when I see them and I love it.

Anyway, like I said--best of luck, but not really. It's every stationery aficionado for him/herself out there.

(Mostly) Wordless Wednesday

 Finally DONE with his mane and ready for the clinic!

Progress got slower around here...

DONE! It only took a month. (This is his War Horse face.)

Looking so peppy with his short hair!

The evil poles and XC jumps along the drive

A friend of mine put her awe of this jump well: "I would eat dinner off of that."

And just because.

Day 23 – 30 Day Horse Challenge – Critique a famous/well known equestrian’s jumping round of your choosing

Okay, okay, I know, I know. I'll get back on track with this blog challenge thing. As I mentioned though, I didn't really feel like doing this question so I got off track the night I intended to do it...blah blah blah. Anyway.

Rather than answering the prompt, I'll share a video I found of Intro Test A--considering that's practically all I'm thinking about in my horsey life right now.

I'm quickly learning that walking down the centerline...halting...turning...circling...are nowhere near as simple as I assumed they were. And Midnight has a lot of tricky little evasions he likes to do, like trying to sneak his way into a trot when I half-halt at the walk and getting all twisty and wiggly when I slow the walk down as I prepare to halt. Probably the trickiest parts of the test for us right now are getting the size of the circles right,  and getting enough "forward" to stay straight on the centerline at the walk, but still keeping it slow enough that I don't have to take 5 steps to halt.  In my lessons I've managed to put in some good tests, but also some pretty abysmal ones. So lets hope that there are no dogs running around, haunted bits of grass, or anything else to distract us on Sunday!

By the way, the schooling show never happened :( It got rescheduled for Mother's Day (for reasons I cannot determine; it made no sense) so I couldn't go. I spent my Sunday weeding and mulching for my mom!

Strange dream

Ok, I just woke up from a dream where Midnight and I were at Rolex--not competing, but taking a lesson (because that happens). I finished my lesson and ran into the blogger of The Jumping Percheron (http://jumping-percheron.blogspot.com) who actually WAS competing. She was warming up on Klein so I told her how much I love the blog and rode for a little bit in the ring she was using, which was right next to the one I just took a lesson in.

Cantered Midnight for a little bit...then our trot was ATROCIOUS. Worse than anything that's happened in real life--he flung his head up, my arms went flying up and out (think airplane arms) and I looked like a loon. So I tried to get it back and once I got a normal non-head-flingy trot I stopped.

Klein's owner had left the ring to talk to someone, and my dad came up to me with a helmet that had a paisley green helmet cover in his hand that somehow I knew belonged to that blogger. He was like, "Look! We can take it home!"

But I said, "No, you can't just take other people's helmets," and he tried to convince me it was like a Rolex souvenir but I went and put the helmet on a table by the arena.

And that was my dream. Interpretations welcome. I was going to post it as a comment on The Jumping Percheron but I can't decide if that would be creepy or not. I had to put it somewhere though because it was just so oddly detailed and ordinary-feeling.

P.S. I'll put in a real link to her blog later but the Blogger iPad app sucks and doesn't have the capability to link from what I can tell. It is in my blog roll at the lower right though.

Day 22 – 30 Day Horse Challenge – The importance of riding in your life

The importance of riding in my life...well, does it say something that when I got out of bed this morning, I nearly fell over because my ankles felt so weak and ouch-i-fied (the uneven ground of the trail race did not agree with them), but for some reason it still seemed like a good idea to  get dressed, go on a 4-hour adventure driving around Virginia attempting to replace my Charles Owen, and then on to a riding lesson to prep for the clinic?

Giant Dover jump in front of the Chantilly, VA store

From where I stand currently (well, from where I'm laying down currently in bed begging the cats to come love me) all of that says horses are so important in my life that I abandon all parts of my common sense that don't relate to the barn.

I started riding when I was 11, at the beginning of middle school. That's a difficult time for anyone, and I was a very shy, awkward kid. But riding became especially important to me during my parents' divorce at around age 13. Their relationship was never good so I had always sensed they would get divorced, so in some ways it was a relief, but even after the divorce into my high school years, there was a lot of enmity between my parents and situations where I'd get caught in the middle as the older sibling.

When things were really bad I would count down the days until my weekly lesson and that would always make me feel better. It was the perfect combination of quiet comfort and challenging myself to improve. It was something constructive I could focus my energy on, rather than getting in my own head. And of course a good canter or jumping round can cure a lot of emotional ills...as can just spending time quietly grooming or enjoying the smell of the tack room. I grew to enjoy doing things slowly, correctly and fairly.

So  my love of horses grew out of how intense my need for an escape was then, but it has blossomed into an area of my life where I feel accomplished and proud of myself, but still like I have a lot of room to keep improving. I really can't overemphasize how lucky I feel to have been around horses for half my life, and to have such a wonderful, talented horse right now that is (sort of) mine. It's an area of my life where I feel like I know what I'm doing, or at least I know where to look when I don't. It's  really comforting to have something so comfortingly predictable when you are 23, and plopped into the "real world" of work, money and relationships without a roadmap.

Anyway, that was just an avalanche of cliches and sappiness...but I'm sure many of you feel the same way.