Exhausted!

Well yesterday was certainly very interesting.

Me and my roomy woke up at 6am to get out to the barn where we were holding the show at 6:30. We set up all the concessions and show office and fixed up the arena a bit.

People started arriving at 7 and everyone was getting checked in. We started right on time at 8:00 with the intro classes. I started out doing concessions, but was soon relegated to the task of helping park trailers, which in my opinion was completely unnecessary and very boring. Somebody had already gotten stuck before I got down there in the mud that was very obvious to see and had a makeshift fence around it (just step-in posts to show the muddy areas) but they very clearly thought that they could drive through it. And they didn't have 4-wheel drive. Sigh, the guy driving was not at all pleased, but hey, I wasn't the one driving! Eventually he was able to back out and we didn't need the tractor to get him out. After that, it was very, very clear that you should not try to drive in that part of the field. Also, most people arrived early so there was only about 1 trailer coming every hour or two.

Eventually I convinced someone to change jobs with me and I scribed for the judge. It was so much fun! It was also really, really nerve racking trying to write all the comments plus the scores and not mess up, but I got it down really quickly and only made a couple mistakes. I enjoyed scribing because I got to see what they judge thought of them and got a better feel for what she really thought. Her side comments were kinda funny sometimes.

I scribed for a couple hours then switched again, but I refused to go sit at the end of the driveway because there weren't any trailers coming, instead I just kind of walked around and helped everyone who needed it. Then I went back to scribing for the rest of the show. I think I probably scribed for about 9 hours total. But is wasn't that bad.

By lunchtime we were an hour behind schedule. Yikes. I didn't feel too bad, because hey, it's a horse show and they are so very rarely on schedule. But then we got more, and more, and more behind. All in all, we finished three hours behind schedule. I felt really bad, but it wasn't something that could have been fixed in the way we managed the show. The girl that did the scheduling for ride times gave each ride 5 minutes which was definitely not enough. We used the large dressage court (well, really it's the standard size) so some tests took 5 and a half minutes, not including disobediences, errors and the judge writing comments. The ride times should have been 7-8 minutes, but at least now we know and I can tell you that we will never make that mistake again!

I was so glad that the weather was nice! While we did make a big mistake with the ride times, everything else seemed to go right. It was warm and sunny but not too hot, we had awesome prizes, no one fell off or got hurt, no one had to be unstuck with the tractor, no loose horses, we made our money back with the concessions. Pretty good! Scribing was super fun, I like riding for this judge because she's generous and reasonable with scores, she takes into account the surroundings (for example a horse got turned out during someone's test and it ran around and bucked causing the horse to stop dead still and stare. They were allowed to re-ride the movement), and she puts very detailed and helpful comments down. It was cool to see "behind the scenes".

We ended up finishing at 9:00pm (instead of our scheduled 6:00pm) and headed home! Luckily the barn owners are letting us come take everything down today so we didn't end up being there till midnight!

While we did have 5 (I think) people scratch at the end because it was so late, there weren't many people that were ticked off. One person earlier in the day was pretty rude, we had tried to accommodate her by scheduling her early in the day right after lunch, she was riding 3rd level, and we were an hour behind schedule and she was mad. I would hate to think of how upset she would have been if she had to ride at 8:00 at night in the dark (though luckily, the outdoor arena had lights!). One of the owners of a horse that had gotten ridden by a trainer at the end of the show was so nice, she came up and told us all that it was a great show and that we did a good job. It made the whole day, all 15 hours of it, worth it!