What's Up Wednesday

 

Boy am I late with this post! But it's the first night of Passover so I was busy enjoying a delicious Seder with my family. The early days of Passover are the best, when all the foods are novel again and it's all SO delicious. It gets a little old toward the end though. A person can only eat so much Matzo. 

Anyway, let's chat horses! 

We finally had a lovely warm day on Tuesday so we did some riding outside. Which was mostly fantastic. Shiny was THRILLED to be out, but she was still her quiet, mostly well behaved self. It's going to be rainy the next few days so outside will be a little here and there for the time being. But it's nice to be transitioning back out there. Shine was kind of sticky and uninterested in our lesson last week. It was a cold morning, and I truly thing she struggles in the colder weather. Tomorrow should be warm so we'll see if that hypothesis holds up. She was feeling quite sassy for our Sunday Funday bareback ride though. She had me giggling with her oddly fast trot and borderline out of control canter... Ponies are so fun! 

Eros has been wonderful. He was so perfect in our lesson last week. Every once in awhile, we have these days where we just pick up a canter, set the imaginary metronome, and all the jumps just show up out of stride and he stays soft and perfect the entire time. I haven't quite figured out how to make this scenario happen more regularly. But when it does occur, I enjoy every second of it. And that's the kind of day we had for last week's lesson. Will it happen again tomorrow? Probably not. But it might! 
In other Eros news, I think I mentioned last week that we had taken his winter pads off, and I thought he was feeling unhappy without them. So we put them back on this past Friday. I feel like we waited just long enough for him to have kind of gotten used to not having them, and now we're readjusting to having them... But he does feel more sound already. And his weird spooky behavior seems to have gone away again. Still not sure I can blame that on the shoeing change, but it is interesting to note for future anyway. 

Life with Al continues to be a bit of a roller coaster. Kind of literally, lots of unexpected twists and turns... Ha! But overall I do think we're working through stuff right now. Which is a nice feeling! But I did get a little defeated yesterday. I had decided to do Al in the flat lesson instead of Eros, because I felt he was ready, and really wanted to keep building on the progress we'd felt over the weekend. In an effort to set us up for much success, I lunged him in the indoor at the "scary end". He was psycho. Like had to calm him down before letting him continue nuts. But it didn't last too long. After the lunge, I hand walked him a bit since he was blowing and showed him all the things he likes to try and spook at. And you know what happened? Our instructor decided we should lesson outside. Guys. I haven't really ridden him out. There was one day in mid February that we had a short ride out there after a lunge, but otherwise we've only been indoors. Only one of the other horses in the lesson had been outside this year. I was not feeling positive about this. Not. At. All. But I'm not one to quit without at least TRYING first. So we all headed to the outdoor ring. It actually started out really well. Al was pretending to spook a little at one of the sprinklers, but he didn't really mean it, and we were doing okay. After trotting and cantering a bit each way, we got to work on our warm up exercise. We get in line and trot a figure eight, first with a medium trot the whole way through, then we start collecting just across the line we change directions, and finally we add extended trot through the ends. This was great for getting his attention, and he was actually quite good for the exercise. But then we started cantering the ends. Which was also going okay until a couple of borders came out with their horses to hand walk. Al got very distracted and grew about two hands. I decided to take a break and see if I could get him to take a breath and then rejoin the exercise. We did a little more trot work, but I really didn't have his attention anymore, and I wasn't sure I was going to make things better. I'd been using all of my capacity to keep my chicken-ness in check for the entire ride, and I wasn't feeling like I had enough left in the tank to keep the wheels on the bus. So after I semi had his attention and he behaved himself, I excused myself from the rest of the lesson. We stayed and watched though. Figured it was good for him to hang out and relax out there for a bit longer. I probably won't try to do him in the flat lesson again. At least not until I bring Eros and Shiny home next month. (Al is staying an extra month until my trainer gets back from Florida.) Anyway, we jump on Friday, so we'll see how that goes. The trainer at the barn is back this week from Florida, and I would like to have her jump him around for me once or twice. I think if I see him do the thing and it goes fine, I'll be a lot braver... Or at least a little braver. I just need a little help and hand holding. But still, I do think we've turned a corner and things are on the upswing. 

On other news... I had dragged my feet all winter with bringing my truck in for service. I had a feeling it was going to be expensive, and I wanted to get my saddles all paid up first. But spring is here, and I needed to the truck ready for bringing horses home! So I got an appointment to have the oil changed and get the very long list of recalls on it taken care of. If you've read my blog for any length of time, you know that these things rarely go smoothly for me. So, true to form, I kept getting calls from my service manager. Each time they addressed one of the recalls, they kept finding tons of rodent damage. Nests, chewed, wires, a LEAK even! It was getting very expensive, very quickly. Finally, the service guy suggested it might be best to go through my insurance. He estimated that it could be anywhere from $6000 to 12000 worth of damage. FROM MICE! Can you believe it?! So that was kind of stressing me out, but once I made the call to my insurance company it was actually not a hassle in the least. My deductible is really low meaning I'll be spending less that I expected initially. On top of that good news, the claim went through very quickly and the mechanic has already been paid. They also let me know that should the mechanic find more damage, they can file a supplemental claim and it shouldn't be a problem getting it approved and paid. So phew. Glad that wasn't as bad as I expected. But seriously, who would have thought mice could cause so many problems? Needless to say, the war on mice has begun over here. 

And that's it for today! How are things on your end?