Weekend Update

Saturday night was another late night at the barn as I was determined to get both horses ridden after work.

Since it was after dinner and Phantom's stomach wasn't controlling her brain, she was back to her normal laid-back self. We were able to have a sane ride which was mostly spent on a longish rein since we are still working on trot sets to get her fitter. She seemed good with the two minute intervals so I plan to move up to three minutes on our next ride. I know, that's crazy talk, right?

Barn kittens are just too darn cute! Phantom's fly mask was a great toy.

Cisco had some bad moments and some good moments. The good thing was that the bad stuff was at the beginning of the ride - actually, mostly the groundwork before I got on. He was pushy and distracted through the groundwork so I threw him on the lunge line. I'm pretty sure that some extra energy was the cause of his lack of manners. After a couple of sassy canter transitions he chilled out a bit and was really good to get on.

As we were in the arena by ourselves, the scary end of the arena became scary again. Le sigh. I stayed down at the safe end for a while to try to get him to relax before pushing the issue. He was fussy with his mouth again - I need to get his teeth looked at to make sure that's not the problem. It's probably just where his tension manifests though.

Carefully selected screenshot looks good (it would look better if I was sitting up more).

Eventually, I decided to push the scary end issue. Since we had managed to school the corners in our last ride I'm pretty sure that the corners aren't really that terrifying. At least until the next time they  make noises in the wind. Then I expect to start all over again. But right now, I know we can do corners.

So I repeated the same exercise of riding straight into the corner and halting. This time I added a shallow serpentine down the long side to try to keep him thinking a bit more. The first few times he was hesitant as we returned to the track leading into the corner, and thought about turning the other way. And then the moment finally came when he thought about turning left away from the corner, but changed his mind and totally took me right into the corner. That was a great feeling.

The video, however, tells the truth. Le sigh.

The canter was nothing to get excited about - it was a bit too zoomy to be able to much with it. But he picked up the sticky right lead right away and trotted very politely after the canter. Definite progress from a few rides ago.

I was hoping that the calm version of Cisco that had been around all week was going to continue for this ride. That wasn't the version that I started the ride with, but he ended up much closer to it than I thought we were going to. So overall I was pretty happy with the ride.

Proof that we can go into the scary corners on a loose rein.

My happiness ended when I got home though. I parked the car in the garage, and got out and heard a hissing sound. Sure enough, when I checked in the morning, my back tire was flat. And when Pony Grandpa and I went to change it later in the day, we discovered my front tire on the same side was also completely flat. No idea what I ran over on my way home from the barn, but I had a hole in one tire and a hole and a screw in the other one. Yes, I am that lucky.