Changing it Up

Sigh. It was a good idea at the time to take the horses home. It still is a good idea because I'm so short on money at the moment that it's nice to be able to set aside what I would normally pay for board. But... the whole riding situation is not ideal. My neighbor decided to close her arena for winter. Because it's too muddy. This is the problem with being at the mercy of someone else, but it's her arena and she can do what she wants! I'm just very bummed out :( I'm thinking about asking my other neighbor across the street if I can ride in his outdoor. That's where I used to ride when I was little, but I haven't been there in ages. It's probably overgrown with weeds or deep sand, but it might be better than riding in the pasture if he's ok with it. We shall see...

Super pretty sunset from yesterday evening

It's a little slick in the pasture, especially because nothing is 100% flat. Add in the fact that there's 16.2 hand of leggy Jetta on top of pancake feet and it's not a good idea to ride her outside in the mud. But for now, it's not too awful and it will do for a couple more weeks until it starts raining in earnest (it's only been intermittent the past couple weeks).

Surprisingly, our ride today was actually quite good. I only rode Jetta, despite wanting to ride both. Misty was a lunatic though. It was so funny, because she's NEVER hyper. She's quiet and sometimes a tiny bit lazy. But while I was warming Jetta up at the trot, she was leaping and galloping and bucking and rearing and spinning. It was hilarious. Jetta held it together despite Misty's antics. A few times she wanted to join in and I held her back, but she settled down quickly. Worked on getting a nice trot out of her on a slightly loopy rein. Really pushing her towards the bit, getting a longer stride and driving with the hind end. Some nice leg yields in there too. We cantered and she was very good to the left, we had a quick discussion about how to canter to the right - we are not going to go running around down the slight hill with our nose in the air! That would be a recipe for a fall, which I do not need! But she was really good overall.

For some reason, I thought it would be good to ask for some flying changes. Jetta doesn't do changes. She just won't do it, she'll happily canter along on the wrong lead or even cross canter without a care and gets pissed when I ask her to change. But, since working with Misty and fine tuning her flying changes, I've gotten better about asking for them clearly and being really conscious of both how to hold my body and how to affect the horse's body when asking for a change. And surprise, surprise we got a clean change, one in each direction! I was kind of stunned. It took two tries in each direction. She only changed in front on the first try, but second try was completely clean! Wow. What a good pony! It definitely made my night.

As a reward I let her do a little bit of a gallop up the hill where I like to run and can let the horses open up a little. Galloping a Thoroughbred has to be one of the most awesome things ever. Jetta just has such an insanely long stride and she LOVES to gallop, it's so easy to just let her open up. It's still one of my goals to get to gallop a TB on a racetrack, but for now I'll take my little gallops in the pasture and on the beach. Hopefully a beach trip will be happening over winter break in a few weeks!

Cooling out

Unfortunately my clipper blades weren't sharpened yet even though they were supposed to be done at the beginning of the week. Bummer. But I really, really need to give Jetta a clip so I'm going to buy a new set tomorrow (you really can never have too many blades) and Jetta will either get done tomorrow or Saturday. It's been quite chilly here so the girls both got their medium weight blankets on despite still having all their fur. It was 26 overnight! Too cold!

But the good news is that I took my Vespucci figure 8 in to get fixed. I bought it super cheap, it's quite used, but I love it. The only problem with Vespucci leather is that it's so soft that it stretches quite a bit and the throatlatch was horrendously stretched out. Like, I could probably fit another horse's head inside there with Jetta's, even on the last hole. So I took it in to get it shortened about 4" and it's perfect! I can finally use it in public and it looks quite good on Jetta's long schnoz.

She's too cute. And she got one of the last fall apples as her reward!

Barn Tour Part 1: The Grounds

I thought I'd share a little (well, more like a lot) about my barn. Since it's "my" barn I don't feel bad sharing pics of it and at least you can see the set up and see what I'm talking about when I refer to it!

I love my barn. It's nothing fancy at all, but it has everything I need. I think the only thing I really want is hot water. Ok and for the runs to be covered. And possibly for the tack room to be insulated. And the leaks in the roof to be fixed. Lol. It could still use some work.

A little background:

My parents' property has 13 acres with 3 of it for the horses. It's all fenced in as one pasture. The barn was there when we bought it, though it has been considerably worked on. Originally it had 3 stalls on the wall opposite the entry. Dirt floors throughout. We put in half a floor of concrete when we originally bought it. Why half, I have no idea. Then later tore out the original stalls and put in 3 stalls on the adjacent wall and put concrete in the rest of the barn. It took forever for the stalls to be done. I wanted them forever and they were never completed until my senior year of high school, just in time for me to move out.

Walk down to the barn. I can literally take a minute to go from the house to the barn.

Plain white wrapper. It's rather ugly actually.

To your left of the barn door there is my "wash rack/hitching post" which I basically only use in summer.

Back view of the barn with the runs.

The top corner of the pasture. The horses have their big water tank and you can see the arena at the top of the hill and my neighbor's gorgeous barn.

The main part of the pasture. There's a round pen on top of the hill. Grady is buried in the top left corner under the giant pine tree. There's a creek that runs through the middle into the pond and multiple apple trees.

More pasture. You can see the pond is directly in front of us down the hill.

The "lower riding area". Semi-flat, but gets very soggy in the winter

The "far lower corner" of the pasture. As you can see, that's where my brother likes to go mudding with his truck... My dad just dragged it and reseeded it though. It's always super wet down there.

The neighbor's arena. You can see our barn!

More of the arena. My parent's house is nestled in the trees in the back. Also, you can kind of see how the ground drops away on either side of the arena which I think is a factor in Jetta's dislike for the place. It's like an infinity arena, there's no edges!

Bonus picture: we have chickens.

What Makes it Good

I've been mulling over this post for a little while, but haven't been able to sit down and write it out until now. Recently, She Moved to Texas did a post, then Sprinkler Bandit followed it with her own, on what makes a good blog.

Personally, I know there's many different reasons I follow a blog which range all over the place, all of the ones listed by She Moved to Texas and Sprinkler Bandit are valid and things that I often look for in a blog. Most blogs I follow don't have all of the pieces of what make a "good" blog perhaps, but I still enjoy reading them immensely. What I'm interested in though is: What do you like about my blog? What keeps you coming back to read, why did you follow me in the first place and what are your favorite things that I do?

As I'm nearing 100 followers, a milestone I wasn't really sure I'd ever achieve, especially when viewing my blog through a more objective lens and thinking about all the reasons I wouldn't follow my blog if I was not the writer of it, I'm kind of amazed I have so many readers and I feel so lucky that all of you think I'm interesting enough to read, even if it's just in a "she's kind of a train wreck sometimes and I just want to watch it happen" sort of way!

So I'd love your input! ETA: I know you're lurking there... I just checked and this post has 18 views and 5 comments! Meaning lots of you readers aren't commenting! I want to know, so do it ;)

In other news, I finally made it out to ride. I knew I wouldn't be able to ride Monday so I planned to go before work on Tuesday. But because I had so much homework I stayed at home and did that instead, so I was going to ride for sure on Wednesday. But I still had so much homework that there was no way I'd be able to ride and get things turned in on time... By today I was in a mood: I'M GOING TO RIDE WHETHER OR NOT I HAVE HOMEWORK, IF I FAIL BECAUSE OF IT, SO BE IT!!!

Yeah, I was a little desperate. But, I don't really want to fail, so I allowed myself one hour of pony time.

This is what I found... Coated in mud with wind braids to boot.

It was wonderful. I wanted to lunge Jetta and ride Misty, but time-wise it only worked out to ride Misty. My neighbor told me that she'd put a sign on the arena if she ever didn't want me to ride in there because it was too wet or for whatever other reasons, so when I went up today I didn't think anything of it but started riding around. I figured she'd put a sign on "my" gate that I come through from my barn, but there wasn't one. As I rode, I started noticing that the cones I though were randomly dispersed seemed to actually be marking wet spots she didn't want the horses going through? Then I noticed that the gate on the other side that I didn't come through had red tape wrapped around it...

Jetta behaved herself while we rode

I wasn't sure if that meant riding was okay or not so I went back to my pasture just in case and rode around there. I thought it would be too slick to do much work, but it seemed just fine for Misty (with Jetta it would probably be too slick, but Misty is much more careful!). We did some flat work in the bottom "riding area" and then we galloped! Well, Misty's style of galloping, which is much slower. Still working on the whole "go fast" thing, but it was fun nonetheless. I tried videoing both the galloping on Misty and the galloping and other antics of Jetta. At one point we galloped up the hill toward the barn and stopped just in time to see Jetta take off from the other side of the pasture at full speed, leap the creek/ditch and come galloping up to us. I thought I caught it on video, which would have been awesome, but someone didn't press the right buttons... Cough cough, it could have been me.

Hardworking ponies get apples

It was a much needed ride and hopefully I will get to go again Friday!

Good to be Home

It's good to be home... I guess. Really, the only good thing about being home is getting to see my horses. Oh, and probably sleeping in my own bed. Otherwise, getting back to real life sucks.

I had a great time in SD. Almost makes me want to move to a beach town. Almost.

Cool display of horse shoes in Oldtown San Diego

Happy panda at the zoo

Potato chip rock - we stood on that little thin rock. One of the craziest hikes ever.

 

Sunset in La Jolla

Beach!

While I really, really want to be riding Jetta right now, she's at least going to get the rest of this month off to finish healing. I think she'll be fine to go back to riding and we can start conditioning for our endurance ride. I am determined to check this goal off of my list! I went and visited her today and she looks really good. Fat and shiny for sure, I had to loosen the bellyband on her fly sheet! Her hematoma is almost completely gone (yes!) and her back legs are looking better, though still a little scabby.

I stuffed her with apples while I was home. I missed her!

In the meantime, I get to focus on Jazz and Misty. The plan for Jazz, as I said in my last post, is to find her a new home. Meanwhile, we're going to start rebuilding her muscles. She actually looks quite good when she's moving, but she's lost a lot of topline and butt muscles and gained some underneck muscles just from not having to work over her back. So that's the main focus. I'll probably use her to teach Misty to pony, go for some trail rides, let friends ride her, etc.

Getting our dressage on. Jazz says that she prefers western now.

Misty is going back to full, ADD style work. We're going to do some jumping, work some cows, fine tune our working ranch horse skills, and continue the dressage training.

Untitled

Lots of little things happening this week and I completely lack inspiration for a relevant post title. Oh well.

I decided on a spur of the moment to enter a dressage league show on the 20th. Hope we'll be ready for it by then! It's fairly close and even though I missed the closing date they still had room for me. I've never been to this facility so I'm just hoping the footing is nicer there than at the last place I went to.

I'm just so excited for this spring and summer. There are so many shows I'm hoping and planning to go to, I can't wait! I'm doing a jumping lesson with KO on the 21st after our dressage show and I have possibly two or three shows that I want to attend in May. Hopefully I just don't run out of money - shows are such a drain on the finances.

Short toe, long toe. Looks so much better trimmed now!

Both ponies got their hooves trimmed. Queenie was in desperate need of a trim, her hooves were quite long. My trimmer AC could only come out Tuesday or Thursday this week and since I didn't want to wait, I decided I could squeeze in on Tuesday in my hour and forty minute break between classes right? Not a very smart decision on my part - it's a forty minute drive both ways and trimming Queenie took longer than I thought it would since her hooves were so long, whereas Jetta just needed her back feet rolled with the rasp and her fronts trimmed a tiny bit. Luckily, my twenty minute tardiness went unnoticed for my class so it worked out ok :)

My two girls had the big grassy pasture all to themselves

I rode Jetta and lunged/bathed Queenie yesterday. Jetta was very good. I did Queenie first and so when I left Jetta in the big pasture by herself she stirred up the geldings next to her and pranced/galloped back and forth along the fenceline. It was pretty funny - she was having a grand old time and the geldings were huffing and puffing to keep up with her. She was barely warm when I brought her in :) But at least she got all her excess energy out.

Queenie was also very good. I cross tied her for the first time in the wash rack. I've just been having her ground tie since she was scared of the hose touching her so every time I needed to wash her right side she'd panic. We've been working on that a lot so I felt that she'd be fine for today and she was! She eyed the hose whenever it touched her but there was no spooking. I also clipped her bridle path for the first time. She was perfect up until the point that I thought "Wow! She's being so good for this, I bet she wouldn't mind me doing her ears." Ha. After that she didn't want me touching her poll period so we'll need to work on that a few more times. 

I tried to get a nice conformation picture of her, but taking pictures by your lonesome isn't the best way to go about it...

This one would be my favorite, if her nose didn't get chopped off.

"You want me to pose?"

"Hey look, a penny!"

"Don't I look purdy?"

"Meh. I don't like this whole picture taking thing."

"Om nom nom"

I'll take it! Ears forward and mostly standing normally.

Breaking It Up

We've been doing a lot of dressage work recently and haven't actually jumped since our last lesson with KO over a month and a half ago!

So I decided we needed to take a break from all of the flat work and do some jumping today.

Jetta was pretty good for not having jumped in so long. I set the jumps low, the tallest was a 2'6" Swedish oxer, then a 2'3" vertical and a 2' cross rail.

Fairly well decimated mini "course" - but you get the idea. We did a figure 8 over it

Jetta was very polite about trotting over the jumps though she still has a tendency to launch herself over at the canter every so often. We just rode in the Myler and she was pretty good about coming back to me when I asked though we did have to throw in a circle every so often to slow down.

I was going to set the jumps up higher but by the time I felt that Jetta was working well enough to go higher she was getting tired. She definitely jumps bigger jumps better, we had the most problems with launching over the two smaller jumps, she tends to not launch over 2'9" to 3' but we need more practice on that before we're ready to show at that height.

Exciting moment - we had a flying lead change!!!! This is so exciting for us because Jetta is the horse that won't change to save her life. She has NEVER done a flying change under saddle. Ok, maybe she has once in recent memory (last jumping lesson). But she just doesn't want to. She will canter all day on that wrong lead even being unbalanced. Recently she's started to do flying changes at liberty which she never used to do either. I'm hoping that this summer we'll work on changes and hopefully get her doing them when I ask.

I need to work on sitting up more and keeping my leg on, but at least I felt like I had a better handle on my release this time, though it's hard to give a release when you're launched out of the tack! I thought I almost came off there once...

Tired pony looking for cookies

Afterwards I turned Jetta out in the paddock outside since it was sunny. Her and Tiki galloped back and forth for a while (with me going please, please, please don't hurt yourself silly horse!) then settled down to graze. She's going to be SO muddy tomorrow but I was planning on giving her a bath on Saturday before the show anyways.

Piglet. Getting nice and muddy...

It Must be Love

I think Jetta is in love. I went to get her out of the pasture yesterday, it was her first day outside. I felt like I was going to pick up my kid from kindergarten - I practically skipped the whole way. After navigating the different pastures and finally figuring out where the real gate was, which involved climbing over several fences, oops, I found my baby (easily spotted because of her bright purple blanket which has yet to be muddied). And she was snuggling with someone else.

Of course today I took out my nice new camera and I forgot that I had failed to charge it. So you'll have to make do with cell phone pictures.

Who me?



The cuteness ♥



I can see you...

So cute! There are three other horses in the pasture with her (I believe that they are all mares). There's a gray arab with the prettiest black-lined blue eyes. There's a solid buckskin and an overo buckskin. Jetta is in love with the overo. They are so adorable. They were standing nose to tail when I showed up.

Then when I put Jetta back in the pasture, after scampering away from the solid buckskin (who is obviously Da Boss), the overo and Jetta touched noses for a few seconds and then slowly walked away together. So glad my baby girl has a friend! I was actually afraid that Jetta would be a little monster and beat up all the other horses, but it seems like the solid buckskin has the upper hand!

Yesterday when I got her from the pasture I thought to myself - I'm so glad I have a horse that comes when I call (because it's pretty mucky around the gate). Then today I whistled. Nada. I clucked. She looked at me and slowly walked away. Stinker. But it was ok because we had an AWESOME (sorry I just felt that it needed bold and italics and underlined and capitals) ride!!! So happy right now.