Juggling The Options

I need a new word. This situation is the diametric opposite of a problem.

General Conundrum
With everything I/we want to do with horses, how do we decide what’s next?

Do we go somewhere or work at home?

If we ship, do we lesson, or school on our own?
Milton at Stepping Stone Farm? Long-line or ride or combination?
Jumping at Falcon Hill Farm?
Schooling at Full Circle Horse Park?
New place?

What is the weather?
Who has the best footing for conditions?
Who will be around to teach?
Is it a weekday or weekend?

If home, which horse? What order?
How much light do we have?
Do we have any interesting obstacles for Rodney?
Ride in the ring?
Walk laps? Ridden or in-hand?
Hill work?
Ground work?
Long-line?

Should I go off to an ASB lesson and give the home team a day off?
Does the obstacle barn have lesson horses?

And so on.

This doesn’t even include driving. Wait until that gets back into the mix.

General Rules
Go somewhere every weekend. Until such time as we can fully school at home, we need to keep moving.

Rodney goes somewhere once a month. Given the trouble we had getting him back on the road [Trailer Training], we want to keep him used to traveling.

Specific Conundrum
Last Sunday, we had a decision to make:

Take Milton to SSF. Work on cantering & trotting small jumps. I’m hoping to line up another jump lesson soon, and boy do we need practice. OTOH, one more session isn’t going to make much difference in our lesson.

Take Rodney to SSF. Get him acclimatized to working away from home. This one’s gonna take time and repeat exposure.

Specific Rule
The dressage series that Milton and I did last year [Maintaining Our Firm Grip On Last Place And That’s Okay, For This I Cleaned My Tack?] starts soon. We decided that until Milton is done with the first FCHP show, ties go to Milton.

Leading to a new general rule,

Whoever has the next event – horse, rider, or driver – gets first priority.