First Day, First Ride

First ride of the new year on the first day of the new year. Well, the first ride in the last six weeks fell on the first day of 2020!

I chose wisely and selected Cisco to be my victim. No lunging required - I just hopped on and off we went. He was feeling good, which meant that he spooked a little at a couple of things, but not the "I'm getting the hell outta here" type of spooks, just the "ooooh that's new" stare and fall away. If I had any sort of strength whatsoever, I probably could have just made him move off my leg and not fall in. Alas, I'm still getting over the flu and have little energy or strength.

Thus I was happy with the first ride back. He got better as the ride went on and kept everything together for the ride. Well, mostly.

He did have his badass moment. We trotted over some skinny trot poles, that had wing standards and planks leaning against the standards. Cisco trotted the first two poles, then leapt over the last two. I lost my left rein. That allowed him to drop his nose and hump his back. For a whole three steps. At a slow canter. And then he walked. Crazyness.

I also tried a new bit for Cisco. He definitely didn't hate it.

Sadly, I got no video footage of my ride. The Pixio got the best of me today and wasn't tracking. This was the third time that I used it, and I've changed the setup each time. This time I had set the tripod up in the middle of the arena next to a wing standard. I don't know what went wrong, and I tried a couple of things post-ride while dragging my horse around with me and couldn't get it working properly. Tomorrow I have some extra time so I'll get everything set up before I grab a horse and hopefully get it all figured out.

My decision to not ride Phantom was wise. I haven't had a chance to let her loose in the arena for a good play over the last few weeks. I knew that she would want to express her enthusiasm.

It had to be on the lunge line unfortunately. I much prefer to let her loose to get her sillies out. But I wasn't going to be able to get the arena free in time for me to make the Star Wars movie that was planned.

After her clip job she kind of looks like a shorn llama that had it's body trimmed and legs left. She has very floofy pants.

As expected, there were hijinks. Mostly of the self-imposed rollkur/tighten the back/suck back canter kind, which generally resulted in Phantom turning and halting while staring at me with her head and neck straight up in the air. There were also some bucks, a rear, lots of porpoising, cantering on the spot and galloping disunited on the circle. At least she's polite enough to do it out on the end of the lunge line and well away from me and doesn't really yank me around.

Hopefully Phantom got everything out of her system and she'll behave decentish for a ride tomorrow. I'm not overly optimistic about that, but she just needs to keep her shizz together for about 25 minutes and I'll be happy.