Aiden Video
As everyone realizes by now, I don’t take a lot of pictures.
Hardly any, really.
But we have a family get-together coming up, and I was told to bring pictures of Aiden.
“What pictures?” I asked. Meaning: Why are people who are related to me, and who theoretically know me best, acting like I would have pictures?
After a day or two, I realized I was being told in a round-about way to go take pictures. Which I could then bring.
I may be slow, but I get there eventually.
So I went and took pictures of Aiden. They look like this:
This is not a flattering picture. This is not flattering because 1) I can’t take pictures of anything that moves faster than a rock; 2) as far as I’m concerned, there are two types of lighting: off and on, and neither is relevant to picture-taking (cameras have flashes in case the lighting is off, right?); and 3) Aiden is not photogenic.
I mean, sure, that’s Aiden. But that’s not Aiden. That picture makes him look… dull.
Fine, I thought. I’ll go take video.
I put Aiden out in the arena. He went and splashed in some puddles, and then stared at me. Muddy arenas are boring? There is grass? I could be eating?
No problem. I went and got Ro and tossed her in the arena, too. Ro went Wheeee! and Aiden went Wheee—aaaait for me! I can’t run that faaaa… you’re not going to wait? I’ll just stand here until you come around again and… wheeeee—aaaait…!
This is Aiden, as he comes alive in video:
Although I’ll admit that one of my fellow boarders couldn’t believe that was Aiden. She’s more familiar with the da-dum-de-dum laid back, droopy lip Aiden. The one who does things like wander over and try to eat barrels:
If I had tried to actually take these pictures, instead of relying on video, they would have been even worse. I know it’s hard to believe, but I refer you to example #1 above, where I had a non-moving horse to work with and still couldn’t figure out what I was doing.
Ah, well. These are good enough for government work. Or, more relevant to my situation, for family gatherings.
If you’re interested, video snippets of Ro and Aiden playing in the arena:
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In case we were not convinced that she’s a princess…
When I did the initial PPE on Ro, the vet mentioned that she would be a tough saddle fit.
He was referring to her conformation—shoulder blades that go back forever, forward girth groove, short back.
Ro took his comments to heart, however, and decided that meant she could also take a princess-and-the-pea approach to saddle fitting.
Fleece on her back? No ma’am! (I bet she’d welcome something expensive like Thinline, though.)
And so began the joys of fitting not just a green, developing horse, but a green, developing horse with Opinions.
It’s been fun, y’all. For, you know, a given value of fun.
I can’t remember if I mentioned anything about the latest saddle on here or not. I picked it up last summer, when Ro outgrew the Passier I’d had before. It’s an older English-made saddle—bit wider twist, virtually no blocks, very close contact and light weight. Ro liked it, I loved it.
I got a saddle fitter involved a little later than I should have, and she suggested a couple modifications that would take what was a pretty good fit overall and hopefully resolve some of the issues we were having.
Including the fact that this saddle tended to ride forward a bit and end up on Ro’s shoulder blades by the end of a ride. To help mitigate this, she added a point billet. And actually a modified point billet—it’s attached where a traditional point billet would be, but instead of running straight down the flap, she let it angle a bit back.
From talking to her (and I hope I’m not misremembering now), the goal was to provide the benefit of a point billet without putting too much pressure on the front of the saddle, which sometimes happens when the billets run straight down.
I rode in the saddle a handful of times after the modifications were done, and Ro said she wanted none of it.
I emailed the saddle fitter to explain the issues I was seeing, and her response was everything you’d hope for—she got right back in touch, got more information to make sure she had the full picture, and scheduled a follow-up appointment for that week.
One of the biggest questions, of course, was the new point billet: if that was the source of the problems, switching back to regular billets was just going to introduce the old sliding-forward problem again.
Fortunately, it looks like the point billet is just fine. And here again, I hope I am getting these details right, but you’ll have to excuse my extremely technical language here:
When you take a saddle apart, apparently most of the flocking is behind a lining of sorts. In most saddles, this lining helps give structure to the panels. However, in this saddle, the lining is so thin that it’s the reverse—the flocking has to give structure to it.
So when I started riding in the saddle and the flocking started to compress, it actually changed the fit of the saddle pretty dramatically, leading to Ro giving me the middle finger after only a handful of rides. We did some experimenting with shims and some quick test rides and confirmed that Ro was not unhappy with the point billet—the saddle just needed more padding in front.
All the adjustments were made (eventually—it took a couple rounds of tweaking, because Ro couldn’t allow anything to be easy) and we should be good to go now. Of course, it’s been raining all weekend and I have nowhere to ride until the arena dries, but such is life. It’s Texas; it’s going to dry up eventually.
The question will be how much the flocking will continue to compress, and it’s possible (probably likely, given Ro’s opinionated nature) that I may need to have the fitter back out in a couple weeks to do some minor tweaks again, but at least this time we know what the issue is and I can shim the saddle if I need to until things get tweaked back into shape.
If princess isn’t a four-letter-word, it should be.
In other news, with all the rain we have had this weekend, I don’t have a lot of options to get the horses out and let them stretch a bit. I tossed them both into the round pen tonight. Ro, naturally, trotted around like a lunatic because she hates the round pen. Aiden followed along behind her, a little uncertain about why they were trotting around, but perfectly willing to play ball. He is moving much, much better than when I first got him—he still has that nice floaty trot, but without all the exaggerated knee action. I’m hoping all that knee action was just a function of the shape his feet were in, because I like this trot much better.
The Curse, It Is Powerful
Last Sunday, in a fit of optimism, I dropped off entries to a schooling show.
After last year? you ask. (You, and everyone who knows last year’s epic string of failures.)
As I explained to a friend, it’s a new year. I’m an optimist. I’m insane. I’m conducting a scientific experiment to see just how many things can go wrong to keep me from showing.
Whatever the reason, yes, even after last year, I submitted entries to another show.
And received an email this morning saying it was being postponed due to some severe storms that are expected, with a couple options for some other shows I could apply my entries to if I wanted. One date I can’t make, and the other is too far out for me to commit to.
At this point, I’m feeling kind of philosophical about it all. Clearly, I am just not meant to show. Ever again.
My only real disappointment is that I already had a show cancelled on my last year. The curse was much more interesting when it was coming up with new and different ways to prevent me from showing. Technically, I suppose the reasons the shows were cancelled are different, but still. Boring!
Stay tuned, though: it’s spring. Schooling shows, they abound. My optimism, it is irrational.
I am printing out entries for the next show as I type.
Now I know why people like bling
Confess up, people:
The real reason everyone likes blingy markings is because it’s easier to pick horses out in the dark, right?
I had no idea just how much of an advantage white markings give you until I started turning Aiden out and realized he disappears as effectively as a ninja in the jungle.
Good Planning is Good Planning (even when it turns out you planned for something unexpected)
As we all know, the world is ending.
You may pick your poison: economic meltdown, nuclear war in the Middle East, catastrophic global climate change, that whole Mayan calendar thing, etc.
Every once in a while, the news of impending doom manages to permeate even my oblivious mind, and I will Prepare. With a capital P.
Last time this happened, I realized that while I probably have a couple cans of fruit stashed somewhere (useful for eating OR for braining zombies, as you like), my poor cats were not so lucky. I had no emergency stash of food on hand for them.
For the record, I realized this when I overslept one morning and woke up to find them tying napkins around their chins and debating which of my toes to eat first. In point of fact, they think they have a perfectly acceptable stash of food on hand for emergencies and lean times, but I am not so comfortable being that stash of food, you know?
I bought them some canned food. In the event of the end of the world, I would have at least a week before they would attempt to eat me.
And then, you know, life happens, and this weekend I ran out of their normal food. Since I have that emergency stash for them, I thought, why not use it?.
The answer to that question is apparently: because Onyx is convinced she is starving if she doesn’t get dry food—no matter how much canned food she eats—and Mica runs around like she’s on crack after one bite of canned food.
The net result is that I have a wild-eyed kitten boinging around the apartment for all she is worth, and a distressed cat running laps between me on the couch and the full bowl of food in the kitchen, insisting she is going to perish and die right this minute if not sooner.
I suppose it’s just as well that we did a trial run, even if it was driven by my desire to be lazy and not go to the store. Now I know my feeding plan is completely unworkable.
On the positive side, though, I think I have two new weapons against zombies—Mica-on-canned-food will make a more than acceptable decoy, and Onyx-on-canned-food will be a very efficient stalking and killing machine.