A hunter/jumper trainer is leasing space at the saddleseat barn where last weekend’s show was held [Report]. Not just any h/j trainer but one who had taught Previous Horse and with whom I had hoped to continue on Rodney. Back when, I had talked with him about shipping in &/or what it would cost to come to our barn. Needless to say, that never happened.
If all had gone according to plan, I would have been shipping to that very barn and jumping over those very jumps. This did not pass unnoticed by the screaming monkeys in my head on Saturday.
I am enjoying my new life. Still, it was hard to watch remnants of my old life, wearing boots & britches and riding Thoroughbreds, passing through the crowd while I was wearing jodhpurs and holding a Saddlebred.
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I hate the way I look in photos and I loathe how I ride in videos. However, So you’re feeling too fat to be photographed . . . by Teresa Porter points out that we are our own harshest critics. Our friends & family are interested in what we have been doing and how we look right now. To that end, I present my latest saddleseat video. This is the horse I rode at the show four days later [Report]. We did not look anywhere near this good in the show ring. (Thanks to Images by Ceci for the tweet on the article.)
In my mind’s eye, my hands are up around my ears, Casey’s head is in my lap, and we are zooming around like the Five Gaited Class at Louisville. In reality. we have adequate animation for a low-grade Academy class.
In the video it looks as if I am hauling on his mouth. In truth, I have – from a dressage perspective – nothing in my hands. Heretofore, my hands have been light to the point of ineffectiveness. All my life, instructors have told me to shorten my reins, take a hold of the horses mouth, pick up a contact. Now, I’m told my hands are just fine the way they are, even to lighten up on occasion. (Although not so much at the show.)
Hubby arranged this from a hunter perspective, grouping the gaits together. In reality, every saddleseat session, lesson, class, etc. goes the same way: enter on the right rein at a trot, canter, reverse, repeat, line up, with a bit of optional walking sprinkled in. Yes, the horses know what comes next. They get excited. This appears to be the point. The practice is diametrically opposed to the dressage/eventing wisdom of never schooling a full test lest the horse anticipate the next movement.
This post is dedicated to the friend who asked if I was going to blog about my next lesson. Here ya go.
The worst dressage test I ever rode was on the same horse who gave me the best dressage ride I ever put in. Odd, isn’t it!
In his second-level work, “Moses was very good at canter-halt, not quite so good at halt-canter.” My favorite canter-to-halt story happened years back when I rode a friend’s horse in a sidesaddle flat class. George was the perfect Victorian-style horse, if he were pulling a milk cart. A fine ladies hunter he was not. He moved through the other competitors like an elephant moving through a coalition of cheetahs.
Since it was a pleasure class, we had to hand-gallop. George was not amused. Since it was side-saddle, I had my legs to the outside. The judge was to the inside in the middle of the ring. I thumped for all I was worth with both legs. George lumbered into a fractionally faster canter. When they called, as they inevitable do, for a halt, I merely stopped kicking. George locked all four legs and screeched to a stop. As the Thoroughbreds adjusted to the loss of velocity, I dropped the reins, sat aboard my immobile mount, and looked smug. FTW.
The wittiest use of ancestry in a horse-name I’ve ever heard of was a racehorse I encountered when I worked at the track. His sire was The Axe II, and his dam was Top O’ The Morning. They registered him as Splitting Headache. Also creative was Prince John X Platinum Blond: Stage Door Johnny.
In the comments for What’s, I told the story of Previous Horse’s well-deserved barn name. I’ve blogged about Rodney’s various names [Square One, Contest Winner]. Mathilda is named for one of my Dungeons & Dragons characters. There have to be serious geek points in that.
Click over to find out how she jazzed up an uninspiring stable name.
Upcoming
I may have a new blog to announce soon. A friend just asked for some advice on starting one.
A while back, Hubby and I traveled to Shanghai. Our group was taken out to dinner by an friend of mine who had married a Chinese woman. He claimed to know very little about local customs, but he sure knew more than we did. He enjoyed spending the evening playing Old China Hand.
I know how he feels. My blog may not have taken the blogosphere by storm, but I’m happy to dispense whatever advice I can muster to anyone who will listen. I love playing the Old Blogging Hand.
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Title: on the information superhighway (there’s an old term), everyone is local. I, for one, think that makes right now a cool time to be alive.
Third show in the winter series last Saturday. Same ribbons, reverse order. The bad news: I was a basketcase about riding a horse other than Sam. I had ridden Casey the previous week to good effect. There was no reason to think I would ride all that much worse at the show.
Casey is a special butterfly around the mounting block. Many ASBs don’t stand still for the rider. Casey’s particular wrinkle is that no one can touch his reins. Not the person on the ground, not the rider getting on. Get on, walk a few steps, then pick up the reins and you are good to go. I got the first part of this message but failed to retain the second part about riding him normally once we got going. I also knew that if you took a death grip on the reins and continued to pull, Casey would object rather vehemently. This all came together in my show-addled head as Must. Not. Touch. Reins.
I larked about the ring with my reins luffing like badly-managed sails in a high wind. Casey threw in a few canter steps, flipped his head, and asked, ‘Excuse me, isn’t there supposed to be a rider back there? Am I on my own out here?’ Either other riders had worse rounds or I was awarded horsemanship points for sitting through it all. I won.
My instructor was prepared to give me a sternly raised eyebrow over my riding, only to have me take the class. It’s hard to argue with a blue ribbon.
Second class, second place. Some canter steps, probably a bad diagonal in the confusion. My eyebrow-raising move for this class was to forget my gloves. I left them sticking out of my pocket. They sat there, waving at the crowd as I lolloped past.
Lesson for the day. The riding ability is there. My mental game is completely shot. In retrospect, I feel okay about riding in Beginner. The three blues (first place for you foreigners) were good for my ego. The three reds (second place when you do the ribbon colors in the correct order) meant I did not dominate the competition. I am assuming the marbles are recoverable rather than lost. Therefore, if I ride in the Winter Tournament next year, I would like to skip Intermediate and move straight to Advanced in order to practice patterns with an eye to cantering at National Academy Finals 2014.
I say if to the next Winter Tournament. I have every intention of staying with saddleseat, at least as a diversion. Even if Rodney and potential New Horse are thundering along, it would be good to keep new things in the mix. However, I could die, the king could die, the horse could learn to fly. Which is by way of an old family joke about a fellow who arranged a year-long stay of execution to teach a horse to fly. Which is by way of saying Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.
My next scheduled show for 2013 is the 26th Annual ASAC Horse Show in Clemson, SC. This will be the start of the show season for the big-time horses and riders. It will an open show with performance classes rather than a fun show for lesson students. It will be at held a show facility rather than at a local barn. In the Academy division, that means shirt, vest & tie rather than collared shirt/sweater. Adult Walk Trot will not have a beginner/intermediate split.
I appreciate everyone’s high opinion of my fighting spirit [Greed comments]. Walk Trot is gonna be enough of a challenge for a while. I still have a lot to learn about riding saddleseat & showing saddlebreds. Might as well learn it at a trot.
Saddleseat posts, including reports from shows 1 & 2.
Speaking of ribbon placings, Wiki has a colorful chart showing the international differences.
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If you are ever short on carrots, try a slice of bread as a treat. Mathilda loves it. She’s always been a carb-chowhound. Last time Hubby used bread to pay the mare toll, he was feeding a slice in pieces. When he went to give some to Rodney, she stole the rest of the slice from his coat pocket. Rodney still isn’t sure that bread is on his list of approved food substances.
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I have in my hot, little paw the DVD of Season 1 of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (MLP). I’ve posted before about the nonacceptance of MLP fans, even within the science fiction community [Plea]. This is a rant of a different color. I don’t consider myself a MLP Fan. That’s because I don’t qualify, not because I’d be embarrassed to be one. After all, I happily admit to being an AFOL (Adult Fan of LEGO) eagerly anticipating two LEGO events in 2013.
If I was a MLP Fan, what would I call myself? The general term of use is the masculine term Brony (bro + pony). Female fans are Pegasisters (Pegasus + sister), at least technically. As best I can tell among MLP Fandom, the use of Pegasisters is less prevalent. Is this because the term is more awkward? No argument there. Is it because male terms tend to be inclusive (mankind) while the female terms tend to be specific (womenkind)? … and mildly degrogatory? Consider the difference in connotation between king-size and queen-sized, or between master and mistress. Could it be that “brony” gets more play because no one is uncomfortable with grown women playing with children’s toys? The infantilization of women is beyond the scope of my ranting ability. I simply devolve into froth. Until corrected by those more knowledgeable, I would chose to call myself a brony, due to the inelegance of the female term.
I spend more time wrestling with this than you might expect. At the fire department, I am militant about the usage of the term firefighter over firemen. The men of the department don’t understand, but they know to expect the fisheye from me if they slip. At one meeting we were running a practice scenario where an ambulance had to come by to pick up the firemen. To which I asked, ‘So, you’re just going to leave me sitting by the side of the road?’ Eye rolls all around.
Conversely, I don’t get my knickers in a twist about the term horseman. I’ve had people call me a good horseman and been flattered.
The difference?
Horseman is pronounced closer to horsem’n, without the emphasis on horseMAN. Simplistic but it does make the term less of an irritant.
Then, there is not a good blanket term for horseman. Horseperson is awkward. Firefighter is better language than fireman. That’s what we do, we fight fires. A fireman could be the stoker of a steam engine on a locomotive. Philosophically, I would prefer a gender neutral term for horsemen (& bronies). But I’m not gonna fuss over it.
The biggest difference between the horsemen and firemen is that women are accepted in the horse world more than they are in the fire service. A few summers ago, my department made a guest appearance at a day camp. We marched in wearing turnout, looking like a like of khaki snowmen (there ya go again). We announced our names. When folks heard my dulcet soprano, I could feel the startlement and saw a few craned necks.
Yes, there are woman in the fire service. A good friend of mine is a career captain. (My newbie volunteer enthusiasm amuses her.) But coed is not the default standard, even less so down my way. Therein lies my problem with the word firemen, the attitude behind the usage. When people stop being surprised to see a woman in turnout gear, I’ll stop railing about terminology.
BTW, why is everything I do so gendered? Surrounded by women in the horse world. Surrounded by men in the fire department & at BrickFair. (With notable exceptions in all cases.) But that’s a question for another day.
The Sunday Stills challenge for this week was circles. Given the organic nature of stuff at a barn (horses, wood, mud), I thought I’d have a hard time finding circles. Boy, was I wrong.
Virtual Brush Box 