May As Well Event issued a challenge to bloggers, “Let’s see ONE horsey picture for each of the last ten years.” The 2010s Picture Challenge. Links to the responses have been assembled in their own post 2010 Picture Challenge – BlogHop Recap. Some of these blogs I have been following for long enough that I read about the events in real time. Was it that long ago?!
The above was the service-to-reader portion of this post. From here on, I whine. You have been warned.
Whine the First I will confess to being jealous of May As Well Event for coming up with an amusing & successful blog hop/challenge. Successful in this case meaning catching the eye of other bloggers and getting such a high response rate. Blog envy.
Whine the Second Since I enjoyed the others, I wanted to do mine. I tried a few times.
Approach One. Pick photos that represented significant events for each year. Many of these would be the same as those in an earlier photo post [10 Day Challenge], e.g. Mathilda, learning to drive, winning at Nationals, and so on. I could use different photos, but no new information.
Approach Two. Pick photos that summarized each year. All of my years would look the same.
On the left, a blank space that is not a progression of Rodney, and later Milton, leaping boldly over ever higher and ever more exciting jumps, from hunters to jumpers to cross-country. On the right, a series of show photos displaying the ever valiant Sam carting me around any number of venues. This one is from my first ASB show in 2012, photo by MC [My First Show, Sorta]. Multiply this by 10 for my decade. Okay, technically Sam was only 8 of those 10 years. The first two would be the blank all by itself.
In 2020, I am still trying to achieve the things I was trying to achieve in 2010.
The above is my vision board for this year and for every year since 2010. Seriously. From [Repost, BTE 1 of 9: How I Won the Training Level AEC] written in 2010 & posted in 2014, to [Predicting the Future] written in 2020. This page from the USEA magazine is posted on my refrigerator. You thought I was kidding about vision board?
There has been activity. And nice horses. And pleasant diversions. But progress? Not so much. And then guilt. Always guilt. Guilt for not being adequately grateful for all the things that did not go wrong. Guilt for wasting time and advantages and resources. Guilt for having the audacity to say anything bad about anything ever. That hasn’t changed either [A Look Inside My Head 2016].
So I didn’t do a decade retrospective. Why post about a post that I didn’t do? Sentences get stuck in my head, the text version of an earworm. Posting is the only way to exorcise them.
Tomorrow, the adult dance classes resume at The Dance Foundation. I shall be there, standing in the back, looking gormless, wondering which way to go.
Remember when I said, ‘I may never be better than the first time’ [Challenge]? HA. I should be so lucky. I expected my learning curve to be shallow. I did not expect it to nose dive. I got worse with each new dance style.
Variations? It helps to be good at the original first.
Tap? Combines dance with musical expression, an activity that is even lower on my skill chart.
Floor Barre & Pilates? My back is too tight/stiff to tolerate extended amounts of time slithering around on the floor. I actually skipped the Pilates. There is a difference between working your muscles too hard and your body saying, ‘No. You will not do that again.’
Since the teachers change each week, they often ask if I have any dance experience. Technically, I do. I took ballet as a kid and as an adult. I could even name drop at least one heavy-duty dance school name. Instead, I answer the unspoken question, i.e. What can I as a teacher expect from you as a student in the next hour? Let’s all assume I know nothing. That’ll work out for the best.
Has any of this helped with riding? Not yet. Not directly. I’m proceeding under the theory moving is better than not moving.
Predicting a show schedule is as useful as reading tea leaves. Who knows what is going to happen. To me. To the horse. To the expansion rate of the universe. Rodney is currently at bat. Maybe this will continue; maybe not. Maybe Milton will step up. Maybe I’ll learn to keep two balls in the air. Maybe my unicorn Saddlebred will show up. Maybe none of the above, for good or for ill. Who knows.
All of which is going around Robin Hood’s barn to say that the Stepping Stone Farm show schedule has been sent out. Most of the decisions were easy.
No to any shows that involve going away overnight. That’s not where my money and effort are going currently. In addition to the base fee, there is travel, hotels, meals, etc. Plus time away from home.
Yes to any local shows that don’t have a conflict. That means one big show and the three summer fun shows, barring a sudden surge in hunter/jumper activity on my part.
Also no to Nationals. I have the same arguments I had last year [Where I Am Not, Stomping]. If I go, I want to take the time to be ready, and then be able to put the pedal down when I get there. Really, no one should be in Academy for 8 years. It’s a pass-thru division. I can believe this and still compete in it. I am vast.
This plan does not look good for the three driving classes I wanted to do this year in order to qualify for year-end awards [Looking Back ASB Driving]. SSF does not always take a driving horse. When they do, others may have the reins. Nor does it leave me much leeway to qualifying in the riding classes.
All logic and sensible, right? Well, there’s one temptation. Our first show of the year, The Louisiana Carnival Horse Show, held in Baton Rouge in March.
Pro
Have not been to this show. Barn went two(?) years ago. Brought back good reports.
Four, count ’em four, riding classes for me. Two driving classes.
My riding classes are adult only. No competing against kids, even in the championship classes.
In addition to being a fun day in its own right, that many classes would set me up sweet for the 2020 year-end awards. I’d be two-thirds qualified before the season barely started. Add one summer fun show and I’m in the mix. I have no illusions that I will win at the level I have in the past, but it would be nice to have something to pick up at the banquet in 2021.
Never been to Baton Rouge.
Con
The horses available for Academy are new to me. The stress level would be high.
Going away, in addition to the expense mentioned above, involves finding a horse and pet sitter, paying same, and getting the house ready. The latter is not an insignificant task, making sure we have all the right food, separated into individual servings, instructions, emergency numbers, and so on.
How much of Baton Rouge would I really see? It’s not like I would be going to fancy dinners if I have to show the next morning. Maybe a few tourists sights if I could pry myself away from the showgrounds.
All of the above are minor. They could be handled.
The main con is a Full Circle Horse Park show that weekend. I have no more desire to do bad dressage than I did last year [Finishing The Season]. However, there are six FCHP shows this year. I really, really, really would like to be jumping something by the end of them. By this I mean actually jumping a course – maybe stadium in summer and cross-country by the autumn? – not walking over one class of crossrails at the last show of the year. Since Rodney takes so very, very long to acclimate, both on the day and over time, I feel that I need to take every opportunity to expose him to these showgrounds and to show environments in general.
Tea Leaves I
Intro dressage here we come. I don’t know if missing one show would make a difference. But I don’t know that it wouldn’t.
Tea Leaves II
I want it aaaaaalllllllllll. I want attend every one of the shows on a spritely Saddlebred and still be at home to ride my horses. I didn’t say this was physically possible, I just said I wanted it.
Chilling in the arena. Rodney has learned to stand in center ring at SSF. He’s gotten good at watching other horses work. Now he’s learning he can do the same in the sandbox. Who knew?
tldr: Going well, Lots of trailering. Lots of walking.
Rodney. Is. Exhausting.
Because of course he is.
Partly due to the enormous expectations I put on him from day one. Will this be the horse who takes me amazing places? Now I add, will we ever amount to anything? Will it all some day be worth it? So, no pressure.
Partly due to time spent trailering. Right now, riding means loading up and going to Full Circle Horse Park for lessons, more on this below, or to Stepping Stone Farm, for practice, ditto. Our footing is awful and Rodney isn’t focusing at home because he is fascinated by the cows next door.
Even if I were the ultimate Zen rider with Olympic facilities – and no cows – on my doorstep, Rodney would still be the most emotional, anxiety-ridden, complicated, hot mess of a horse in my experience. (Yes, yes, horse-rider similarities have been pointed out to me. I’ve suggested he write a blog post on the subject. End of digression one.) (Milton is a close second within horses I have know. How we ended up with two such fragile flowers is a frequent topic of discussion around here. End digression two.)
Because, mostly, the key to Rodney, at the moment, appears to be saddle time. Lots of long, slow saddle time.
All of this effort and exhaustion is paying off. We are making actual, legit progress in Rodney management. It arrive thusly.
We used the holiday break to ship horses hither and yon, as we do [Weekend Voyages].
Lesson 1, attempt 1. Fail. I forgot my bridle. ??!?!?! I do not forget things. I’m the one who always has everything. Extra halter? Spare show clothes? A string to tie up your sign? Ask the Pony Clubber. I checked everything. My boots. My hat. Rodney’s multiple saddle pads. I filled the treats bucket. I remembered the battery for his warming blanket. And yet I forget the blankity-blank bridle?!?!?
Lesson 1, attempt 2, two days later [Red and Green and Riding]. Success. Kinda. Lesson occurred; it was terrible. No relaxation on the horizon. At one point Coach Brian [1, 2] asked me to trot. I shook my head. Not happening. When we did trot, it was for short spurts. I didn’t avoid the issue. I made Rodney work, but at a walk. I deflected instead of confronted. I didn’t have it in me put my leg on and say trot d*mm*t.
Side note. The way I can tell Rodney is relaxed is that he will stand. If he pops out of gear, he is still anxious. So Coach Brian had me make tiny circles every time Rodney moved off without being asked. Don’t want to stand? Then make circles. Eventually Rodney stood. Although it worked, I don’t like the exercise. I could tell Rodney was standing because he didn’t want to do any more circles, not because he was relaxed.
I finally did something I have never done. I had someone else ride. I asked Coach Brian to get on. It wasn’t a miracle cure, but at least someone was willing to push him forward.
For lesson #2, attempt 1, five days later. Fail. Success. We changed everything. One. I took out the folded saddle blanket [Recent Changes], deciding that Rodney would prefer a more stable saddle over more padding [Not As Good]. Two. We decided he was old enough that “senior” might be a good word to add to his diet. Watching him from the ground, I thought he looked skinny. We think he may be spending so much time watching cow TV that he’s not getting his daily allotment of grazing. Really, he’s that obsessed. Three. We made sure to dose him with UlcerGard before. Four. We changed the warm-up plan.
We know Rodney needs to walk to get his body loose and his head in the game. To insure that he got as much time as he needed, we would warm up in another ring, away from the lessons. When he was ready, we would go over. If that mean we had a 30-minute lesson, so be it.
Five, out of our control but to our advantage. The day was warmer, which helps immensely when your horse is part lizard [Therapy].
It worked wonderfully.
Actually the lesson never happened. But the warm up plan worked great. We walked for 40 minutes, both in the dressage warm-up area and in the covered arena at FCHP. After, we did a few moderately decent trot circles in both directions. Huge improvement from five days earlier.
Lesson #2, attempt 2, one week later. Fail. I bailed. Not enough riding in between. That fine line between having lessons to improve and improving between lessons.
Lesson #2, attempt 3. Scheduled for next Saturday. We shall see,
In between lessons and lesson attempts, we took Rodney over to SSF. We walked. We walked in the covered. We walked in the ring. We walked around and around … and around the circular driveway. We walked through the barn. (This is an ASB thing. They use the aisle for straight-line practice. Took me years to be okay with riding into the barn. I was always taught that was verboten. End digression three.) After, we would do trot sets in the small, contained, covered arena with me using as little rein as possible consistent with maintain the trot and staying marginally straight.
We also took a trip back to FCHP to acclimate for lessons and for – maybe? possibly? – the 2020 show season. We walked the ring road, with Rodney choosing to curl sideways as if he intended to leg yield the length of it. He used to do this at home on our pasture walks. In the covered, he did some nice trotting, including going the length of the long side several times and doing big trots across the diagonal. Finally, we went over to the dressage ring to walk and stand and learn that the sandbox is not always a place of effort and crisis, see photo.
I’ve gone on long enough. That was Rodney’s holiday. How was yours?
Props to my groom, groundperson, & chauffeur, who finds this an acceptable way to spend his free time.
We needed hoofpicks. All of our many, many hoofpicks had gone to live in the Land of Lost Socks. So, I thought I would try the fancy ones, The Ultimate HoofPick . I’ve never felt strongly about hoof picks, with the exception of not liking the homemade version from bent screwdrivers. Too easy to poke a hole in the sole with one of those, I found.
The brush is because Rodney grows gunk in what look to be clean hooves.
Sourcing. I tried to shop local or direct but without success in either case. Hoof brush originally from Jeffers, Legends Trotter (brush).
Have you tried The Ultimate HoofPick? Are you particular about your hoof gadgets?
What does winning mean to you? Awards? Money? Fame? Does it only count as a win if it is awarded by an outside source? If you award your own wins does that mean you are strong or that you are deluded?
Would you choose Van Gogh, hailed as a creative genius but unappreciated in your lifetime, or Fanny Fern, a popular author now forgotten by most of us, Fanny Fern in The New York Ledger?
Would you rather win with a bad ride or lose with a good ride?
Can you come in second & win? Can you come in first and lose?
My love of horse show ribbons & my need for external validation is a matter of record, 2843 posts and counting.
Fanny Fern. Hands down.
I honestly do not have answer to win/bad ride vs lose/good ride. Winning with a good ride would be nice. I remember posing this question to a super-competitive friend. She looked at me like she could not understand why I bothered to ask.
Yup. “Coming second to her was like winning without the blue.” [Perspective, the first part, before I start fussing]
She looked out a front window. A three-quarter ton Ford truck was sitting in the driveway. Okay, it’s going to be one of those days. She put on jeans and made sure she had a pair of leather work gloves with her.
She liked truck days. It was hell on gas mileage, but she enjoyed sitting above the rest of the traffic. Later today, a friend would ask her to move an over-sized painting, or to pick up a few boxes out of storage. On one notable occasion, she hauled a horse trailer from a local rest stop after the owner’s truck suffered a debilitating internal crisis. The gooseneck hitch in the bed had been a give-away. People asked her because they knew she had a truck. She was fine with it. She usually got a pizza for her efforts.
No one ever seemed to notice that she drove different cars.
When a co-worker had surgery on their right knee, they couldn’t drive for a month. She offered to carpool and help run errands. She cruised around wrapped in the comfort and luxury of an Infiniti for the duration of the time she played chauffeur.
On an unexpected snow day, she was driving a Fiat 500. She thought a mistake until she felt how well the little car handled the conditions. It might be a short, squat toad of a car, but the low-slung shape hugged the road admirably.
Another time, when she was feeling kicked in the teeth by life, a Jeep showed up. She’d driven a Jeep in high school. That was a fun few days of flashback.
Most days, her ride was a mid-range economy car, a Honda Civic or a Toyota Corolla. Neither cheap nor fancy. Overall, a generic car that blended in with the rest of the cars on the road.
Except for the color. Oh my, the color. No matter what the model, the color was always the same, one that hovered on the border between hot pink and neon green. Her mother said it looked like a preppy at a disco. Once she looked up the terms, she agreed. At least the color made it easy to find her car in a parking lot when she forgot what she was driving.
The color was what had attracted her to the car in the used lot. It was a Volvo at that point. The color was also why it was still for sale. People raised their eyebrows at the color. The car could change from a Mini-Cooper to a BMW and no one said a word. But the color, that they noticed.
As the make and model shifted, the amenities also shifted around. She was always looking for the gas cap release. She quite liked when heated seats showed up. Technically a luxury, but one she was quite willing to put on her necessity list.
On maintenance or repair days, an America car always arrived. Cheaper to work on domestic cars. Her wallet appreciated that touch.
She had learned to accept what appeared. Thinking that perhaps the cars were manifestation of her psyche, she tried to game the system. Before going to sleep she watched several hours of the Barrett-Jackson car auction, hoping for classic Corvette or a mid-century Cadillac. She did get a car from the previous century. She spend a week belching smoke from a rusted-out 1999 Oldsmobile Cutlass with the exhaust pipe held on by a coat hanger. She could tell a reprimand when she drove it. She never tried that again.
Was she touched by the divine? Hardly likely. The tasks she ended up performing where so small. Deliver this. Pick up that. Take those people there. No racing the injured to a hospital. No last chance dashes to deliver serum to Nome.
An alien probing human culture for avenues of invasion? Again, the stakes were so small. What could they be learning?
She thought of it as the world’s least adventurous super power. Car Girl. Drive Lady. She didn’t need an secret identity. It was sitting right there in her driveway and no one noticed. No Clark Kent glasses needed.
It wasn’t something you told people about. She had asked friends a few times, but they had given vague answers, or seemed not to understand the question. “Don’t you know what kind of car you drive?”
She had tried to see the change. She’d stayed up late on several occasions. Most of the time, nothing changed and she’d gotten no sleep for no purpose. One time, it changed when she went to the rest room. So, she got hard core and brought a yogurt container for her stakeout. She still missed the change. You can’t keep your eyes on something at all times. If nothing else, you have to blink. She blinked. The car changed. It was like a benign version of the Weeping Angels from Doctor Who.
She didn’t feel threatened. She went about her day-to-day life and the car changed to suit her needs, or the needs of others. Weird. Deeply, deeply weird. But not scary.
Also not avoidable.
Once on a work trip, her plane was delayed. By the time she checked in, the rental car agency had one car left. A eight-passenger SUV. Guess what color it was. She ended up driving her team around for the duration of the convention. Everyone said how lucky it was that the rental agency had upgraded her. Funny color though.
Did she question it? Of course she did. The first time, she thought she’d lost her mind. It still bugged her if she thought about it, particularly how no one else noticed. On the whole, she got use to it. You get use to anything after a while.
Virtual Brush Box 