Spread Thin

This last week has been so busy and I have some fun stuff to share!

Trask is now officially my lease horse and we moved to a new barn! I'm so, so excited to be at this place, it's AMAZING. When Alanna moved Emi home, I stole her place at NDF. I've boarded at the last barn (we'll call it SS) for over three years and it was time to move on. While I'm excited to have Trask at NDF I cannot wait to move Jetta here. She's gonna love it!

It is so beautiful here

I'm still spread pretty thin though. Jetta is still at the old barn until I'm done with finals (exactly one week until I'm 1/2 of a vet!) then I am moving her home to my parent's barn to foal. She'll have a nice big 12x30' stall with an attached run and a big paddock to hang out in. Once baby is born we can turn them out in the big 3 acre pasture where there's lots of room and hills for baby to roam.



I'm still riding Vante a bit just cause I enjoy it, not that I really have the time for it with finals approaching, but oh well.

Things I'm not gonna miss about the old barn:

• Struggling to get the hay in the loft, especially since the hay elevator is permanently broken
• Having to buy hay because I don't want my horse to eat straw
• Parking my trailer in a swamp underneath an awful tree where birds nest and poop on my truck and the beetles breed and infest my truck and trailer. And I have to use 4-wheel drive to park and pull my trailer out of the swamp

Swamp after a couple days of "drying out". Mud up to my ankles... Vs. my new parking spot!

• A wash rack with no warm water
• The slickly lined poop mountain (aka manure pile)
• A stall that I pay to get cleaned daily that often looks like it hasn't been cleaned in 3 days

• Not being told my horse is out of her supplement
• An open tack room where all of my tack is covered in a thick layer of dust and my things regularly walk away
• An arena where it is deemed a miracle when the ground gets worked
• Passive-agressive text messages from the barn owner
• When my horse gets turned out in 80+ degree weather with a blanket on and no shade
• Not being allowed at the barn before 9am or after 9pm
• Not being able to see a dang thing when it's dark out because the barn lights are so dim... you know it's bad when the farrier has to use a headlamp and you basically never really get to see your horse in the light for months at a time during winter 
• Tiny grass-less "turnout" paddocks
• Not a single pitchfork is missing less than 2 tines

Things I'm going to miss about the old barn:

• Outdoor arena (though new barn has a big pasture we can ride in and set jumps in once hay is cut!!)
• Round pen
• Absolutely nothing else 

I can't decide what I'm most excited about at the new barn... the fact that I can ride before class some days or get to the barn late when I have a busy day? How absolutely beautiful and well-kept everything is? The fact that I get to park my trailer on actual gravel? That I can access trails right off the property?

Trask learning to pose

We get individual tack lockers at NDF so I'm still figuring out how to organize mine. I pulled out an old saddle blanket rack I have for saddle pads, but I'm not sure if I'm gonna keep it. It only has one saddle rack, but I have a free-standing saddle rack that will hopefully fit. I got some awesome aqua-colored plastic bins at Target that I'm going to use to store boots/polos and other random things. Plus I have my plastic drawer thing and a bin of sheets that I think will fit. I still have a ton of stuff to move from the old barn, but the new barn has a storage room where I can stash my bin of winter blankets and other odds-and-ends.

Current configuration of my tack locker... still need to cram a bunch of stuff in!

I cannot convey how perfect this new barn is and how excited I am to be there! I was reaching my breaking point at the old barn so this was amazing timing.

Happy boy