Thursday, December 17, 2009

Finals Week :(

Sorry I have been slacking once again. I had no classes this week, but I have finals Monday and Wednesday of next week plus Christmas is coming faster than ever so I have been super busy between studying and preparing for the holidays.

Let's start with the recap of this week's riding. Saturday we had a short hack in the back grass field as the ring was frozen. Sunday unfortunately it poured all day so the pony had the day off. Monday I went to ride ride her bareback in her halter and lead out of the back of her muddy paddock as I do almost every day when her paddock mate decided to come running up behind us bucking so Satin proceeded to do the same. With only a lead to stop her I quickly pulled her head right and did an emergency dismount at the same time before things escalated especially because I was helmetless which is something I rarely do. When I got to the ground I was able to get her to a walk while her paddock mate Jewel continued to run around like a nut. This made things difficult to get Satin out as she would trot forward as Jewel tried to play chase which she never does. Anyway after all that I bring her inside to find she has a lost a shoe so I couldn't ride her. I walked her around the farm to stretch her legs and Tuesday she got her shoe back on. Thank God for my wonderful farrier who is always quick in responding to lost shoes. Luckily this is something that rarely happens with my mare (knock on wood). Anyway so Tuesday we had a schooling session since we had a lesson the following day. She jogged and loped beautifully and we worked on the excercises R wanted us to do while riding one handed. She was very good, but I could feel she wanted to go. Since she behaved so well I decided to reward her by letting her get it out of her system. So I pointed her towards the barrel to do a dash and she loped very slow to the barrel practically walked around it then all of a sudden sat down, launched, and took off like she was shot out of a cannon across the ring. She sounded like a stampede crow hopping and all. It was quite hilarious. So I ran it one more time with the same result except a little faster towards the barrel. Silly girl :) Then we hacked around the property with K and did one or two log jumps which she beasted lol.

So Wednesday we trailered over to my trainer's farm for a lesson. As always we had a great lesson. I can't say enough how much I love my trainer. She is awesome. Satin's walk, jog, lope was great. We worked on a bunch of simple changes doing different patterns, like serpentines, etc. Then we did flying changes, which she did BEAUTIFULLY! She has nice auto changes, but she tends get rushy with them which makes them sloppy and she sometimes doesn't get the back because of that. But, when we do the simple changes first it seems to help warm her up to get perfectly clean, beautiful flying changes. We also did some work with a L shoot that R set up for us and Satin did it perfectly. We then moved on to work on her spins which she has been sloppy on lately. We started with quarter turns and 180s then did a couple of full spins. To the left they were all beautiful, but as usual to the right they were a bit sloppy which I think could be due to the fact that in that direction she has to pivot off of her bad hock. R got on and worked with her a little bit and helped figure out the best way to get her to really pivot on her spins in both directions. She had her doing some really awesome spins! It was cool to get to see her work since I am usually on her. Then I got on and with R's guidance got some of the spins she was getting including some better ones to the right.

Today I just hacked her bareback in the ring for a little bit since she was probably worn out from yesterday's hour and half lesson. Then I rode my friends L's stb Lexie.

On Tuesday I went to visit my friend H and her stb gelding who I refer to as boyfriend. Her back was out so she asked me if I wanted to ride him and let me try him western which is pretty much the only discipline he hasn't done. He took to it as well as all the others and did very good.

Well time to get back to work I have a busy weekend ahead with a Christmas party tomorrow and a day in NY Saturday!

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