Blanket Season

Well it's that time of year again. Blanketing! I ventured into my blanket box to see what I had - what needed to be cleaned, what needed to be repaired, etc. A nice surprise too - I have a blanket for Tuxedo! An extra blanket left over from Katy. It's a 81" so even though Tux measures as an 84" it will still fit him nicely. Good timing too. The big bi-annual tack sale is this weekend (yay! can't wait) so I was planning on finding one for him there. I think now he just needs a neck cover since he'll be fully clipped and maybe a scrim for after workouts... I have a cooler that I use for the other horses, but it's a 75" - a full 9" shorter than his body... haha that would look pretty silly. He has an 78" stable sheet just to keep him clean which exposes about 4" of his hiney, but at least it keeps him clean!

Who knew I had so many blankets... I certainly didn't!

Grady got his light weight turnout sheet on today. I like to keep him blanketed so he doesn't have to expend his energy staying warm and the fall/winter weather has officially arrived... it's been pouring the past couple days. Yuck. Jetta's fly sheet went back into the storage box. I don't think she'll be needing that for the next 10 months, sigh. Her lightweight turnout and stable sheet went into the washing machine a few minutes ago. Now that just leaves Jetta and Grady's mid-weight turnouts and Jetta's mid-weight stable blanket that I have to take to the laundromat's to get washed. Ugh, I hate doing this. I live in perpetual fear of being chased out of the laundromat with a broomstick for bringing in my filthy, hairy horse blankets. But in my defense, I do run a stiff brush over them to get the chunks of mud off and most of the hair off, so...

All prepared for the rainy weather.

In other news, Jazz went to her next lease home. I'm very pleased with the new lessor, she reminds me of the last lessor so I know they'll be a good fit! It's kind of sad, but this time the lease is for 6 months, so if she doesn't renew it, I will have her back in time for summer! Then I can ride her for a while, give lessons and let friends ride too.

Jetta was good today. She's no longer in heat thankfully but the poor girl doesn't have a very good owner. I rode her twice last week maybe after five days off and then give her four more days off. Despite that we managed to get a perfect walk-canter transition today! We did one transition in each direction and then I was going to fine tune it to the left but she ended up getting all anticipatory so we worked on getting her in front of my leg in the walk like I was going to ask for a canter, but then I didn't. Then we had to work on some trot-halt-trots because she kept getting too strong and then ending up on her forehand. She got the message to rebalance and we finished with some haunches-in which are improving a lot. It's hard for her to straighten her neck out and get that little bit of inside bend, but we're getting there. Down the inside long side we had some drama llama going on because the mini in the last stall sometimes has one of those dog fences up so he can see out of his stall and he was poking his tiny pink nose over it and Jetta lost it a bit "OMG what is that thing?!" She feels 17 hands when she puffs herself up like that. It's pretty amusing when a 16.2 hand horse is terrified of something that's barely 42" tall. We had to go make friends afterwards with it and Jetta almost fell over when it whinnied at her. Silly horse.