Nothing to See Here

So what's been going on in the Gray Flannel world?

Not much.

Over the last couple of weeks, I've gotten a few rides in on each horse. On Cisco I continue to work on the homework from my last lesson of using my inside seatbone to get him to step into my outside rein and hopefully fix our lack of straightness going to the right. We get it, we lose it, we get it again. His hissy fits about having to stand on contact have gotten shorter, though the left leg in the air makes at least one appearance per day.

Well, the arrival of my Equestrian Stockholm saddle pad was exciting. Still not the right shape for my saddle though. Sigh.

As in typical horse fashion, when you try to fix something, something else breaks. Thus we no longer have a right lead canter transition. Ugh. It's all related to the same problem - lack of straightness/dropping the right shoulder. I think he's in a pretty good balance and as soon as I ask for the canter everything falls apart and the shoulder drops and he picks up the left lead. The other part of the problem is that the transition isn't overly clean/quick, which allows lots of time for things to fall apart. So I've also been working on asking for many transitions to try to sharpen them up.

And I bought a Bucas Atlantic blanket in the hopes that it would work with my Rambo liners. It doesn't. But I think I can add some tabs to them and then it will be fine. I really like how the Bucas fits Cisco.

Phantom has been getting her two or three rides a week. She's either super relaxed or super bouncy and silly. Her hocks are definitely feeling better since they were injected at the end of August, but I have a feeling that something is going on with her left hind. It's probably just some more arthritic changes (she is 16 after all) as it seems to work out through the ride. At this point I'm about two weeks away from the horses having most of the following two months off, so I'm not going to worry about it until she gets going again around Christmas.

Phantom's tail is now up for the winter. It's too cold now to wash it, though I still need to wash Cisco's.

So yeah, nothing overly exciting. I have a lesson this afternoon. I have to make two cheesecakes for Thanksgiving dinner on Sunday, my work schedule is all over the place (very early mornings, regular days or evenings), I have to clean my house/garage in the next week as my garage door is getting replaced, the fall tack sale that I have a table at is coming up quickly, and my thyroidectomy surgery is in 19 days.

Nothing exciting on the horse front is going to continue to happen. Hopefully.