Blog :: Horses and Riding
September 2007
No news is good news
I’ve been spending a lot of time on EBay and the local horsey classified site lately. Of course, I think all horse owners do this to some degree, but I’m not just window shopping. I’m budgeting.
See, remember last year when I said I’d own a horse by now? Obviously that didn’t work out. What has worked out, however, is phase one of the buy a horse plan: the loans and bills I marked as “must be paid off” prior to buying a horse…. are almost paid off. I can estimate the date they will be paid off, in fact, and it is very soon.
That’s one hurdle (almost) overcome.
The next hurdle is determining whether my monthly budget can afford board, farrier, average vet bills, etc. My trainer and I will be having a talk about that soon.
Meanwhile, EBay and the local ads are helping me determine how much I should have saved up to buy the tack and equipment I didn’t keep from the Super Saint. I have a couple bridles, for example, but I’m going to need to buy a saddle. Sure, I could put it on my credit card… but the whole point of this last year is that I don’t want credit card debt.
We’ll see. Part of me is looking at my budget and dancing around the room singing “I’m buying a horsie! I’m buying a horsie!” The other part of me has the checkbook in a death grip and is moaning “A horse will drive me bankrupt! A horse will drive me bankrupt!”
Reality, of course, is probably somewhere in the middle. I’m not buying a horse now, but I’m one very big, huge, gigantic step forward to buying a horse… say… next fall.
I know: you’ve heard that before. The difference this time… well, maybe there won’t be a difference. Maybe it will turn out my budget just isn’t enough. Maybe I will spend the next year trying to find a way to make my budget BE enough.
Or maybe it’ll all work out and this time next year I’ll be horse shopping.
Definitely time to have that talk with my trainer. I wasn’t sure, last spring, that I was going to get to this place anytime soon so I have to say—even if it turns out my budget just isn’t enough to pay for monthly expenses, it feels pretty darn good to be at a point where my trainer and I can have this conversation. And, obviously, I wouldn’t be setting it up if I didn’t think my budget could handle it. Here’s hoping I’m right.
August 2007
Do you know these books?
I’m feeling nostalgic today. Anyone know the title/author of these children’s books?
1 -
The book is set in England (probably published in England), I think, with a girls whose parent(s) (maybe mom only?) runs a sweet shop(?). One way or another she ends up riding a chestnut horse named Quest. They compete cross-country, I think.
2 -
The horse’s name is Farfalla or something similar. I think Farfalla is right, because I just looked it up and it means Butterfly, which is what I remember this horse’s name meaning. There’s a race involved. I don’t remember the setting, but it’s somewhere in Europe. I’m very fuzzy on this one, but I think the angst of the story was whether or not the horse would be selected to compete in the race and, if she was, whether or not she’d survive it (much less win it).
3 -
A girl is out riding when she and her horse are hit by a tractor trailer. I forget the rest. No… that’s the Horse Whisperer. The book I’m thinking of predates that. Hmm. The girl has polio? Stuck in bed for a long time? Her miraculous emotional recovery is aided by her horse, who she finally rides, possibly in some sort of emergency situation? Maybe I’m just making up a story I wanted to read now.
May 2007
Pardon my silence
I’m too tired to really explain, but I’m working fourteen to sixteen hour days with one thing and another (job plus barn plus other stuff, etc) and that’s going to continue indefinitely, so… I’ll be back, I promise. I’m hoping “indefinitely” means “until next Saturday,” but we’ll see. By the time I get home at night, I just want to go to bed.
So here’s a blanket thanks to people who are stopping by, and to people who haven’t killed me yet for being slow on Horse Bloggers updates, and a specific thank you to Rising Rainbow for looking up the model horse stuff for me— I really appreciate it!
Other updates coming… eventually. In a week? I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and I’m pretty sure it’s not an oncoming train. Aw. I exaggerate. Of course it isn’t a train. The train hit me last Friday, and I lived through it. I think. (No, nothing bad. Just work. You know how it is. I may get my wish to go gray before thirty after all.)
March 2007
You won’t believe this
Normally my lessons are in the early afternoon, well before the kids get out of school. One of the trainers might be working a horse during my lesson, but mostly it’s just me in the arena. Today, however, the schedule was a little crazy and I ended up riding with a couple of other riders in various stages of warm up, cool down, and actual lesson-ing. I’d forgotten what it’s like to navigate, especially when everyone’s on their own plan. But I survived!
That isn’t even the important news.
I was riding someone new today—a mare I’ve watched others ride and thought she’d be a lot like Project Pony. I finally got to ride her today—and she is a lot like Project Pony. Not quite the same personality, necessarily, but she wants the same sort of ride. It was really cool.
And that still isn’t the important news. How much better can it get, right?
We were doing trot work. With the horse I usually ride, we mostly work at the walk. Every once in a while I get on a different horse for these sorts of trot lessons, and it always amazes me how much all the walk exercises make me a better rider at the trot—and that’s due, I think, to the fact that all the work we do at the walk is very technical and correct, so my aids and body control are constantly improving—which can’t help but improve things at the trot.
I had another “ah ha” moment, where I realized what is true at the walk in a leg yield (stay centered and subtle—there’s no reason to throw my body all over the place and over-exaggerate all my aids) is also true at the trot. If the horse is leaning and cutting in, shifting my weight to the outside is just going to throw her more off balance. Staying centered and asking with lighter/more subtle aids will allow her to regroup, center, and respond. It becomes a conversation, instead of a shouting match. And when we’re both balanced, we can have a much bigger/more forward trot and have *plenty* of time to make any corrections that might need to be made—whereas, when we were both careening around like mad women, even though the trot was slower there was no time to to make the corrections.
But the really important news, the thing you won’t believe:
One of the trainers had set up a diagonal gymnastic for her rider and then, because we all know how I feel about jumping, dropped the poles to the ground so my trainer and I could use the line without any sort of actual jumping. But still: there were standards all over the place. There are monsters in those standards, you know. They could eat me. Except they didn’t! I finally got my head around the fact that even though the standards were there so other people could set the gymnastic up as actual jumps, we weren’t going to do that. We were just using the poles to help create impulsion/energy. I could—and did—ignore the standards. Go me! (That’s one “well duh” moment for mankind, one lightbulb moment for Halt Near X.)
Oy, Rising Rainbow!
Cute colt! Super cute face! Congratulations! (Blogger seems to think it needs my Google account information, and I’m too tired to figure out why… so I’m hoping you swing by here and see this post.)
Rough start—I hope things are going well? How many more do you have this year?