Saturday, December 26, 2009

Winter Break is Finally Here!

Fall semester is finally over and winter break is here! Finals and the holidays have been keeping me quite busy, but now I will have some more time to write and keep things updated. Anyway this year Rutgers decided they hated us apparantly and had finals right up until the day before the Christmas Eve, so of coure who had exams on the last 2 exam days? Me. One last Monday and one Wednesday. I survived and now I can rest until Spring semester starts in mid-January. I have lots of fun things planned for break though that I am looking forward to like catching up with family and friends and a few short trips, plus the MD Horse Expo is always the weekend before I go back to school and is one of my favorite trips of the year.

Anyway so on the horsey front I will give you the weekly riding update as always. So last Friday my friend K and I went on a trail ride. They had been predicting a heavy load of snow for the weekend so we figured it would be quite some time before we got out on the trails once that happened. I was of course aboard my trusty steed Satin, but K rode a friend's pony Cindy instead of her pony Smokey since he just got his shoes pulled. We couldn't do too much since it was cold and there was a lot of ice. We had to navigate around the ice which was pretty gross, but we made it and did some exploring. We found the back of this semi-abandoned farm I guess you would call it. It is part of or at least used to be part of the farm of someone who trains Standardbreds. They had no horses and the barns were falling apart a bit or it so it looked. We got onto the track and I wanted to take a little canter around at least part of it, but then K spotted someone and said we should turn back, so we did. We picked up a trot which turned into a canter, but Miss Satin of course was not content to just do that and was chomping at the bit...literally! I had to hold her back to keep her at a fast canter rather than gallop, though I guess it was really more of a hand gallop LOL! She was hopping up and down as she often does when I hold her back. She is quite energetic for a so called old lady haha. On the way back we did the jumping trail and when we came around the bend after Satin spooked left which was unusual for her since she very rarely spooks and I heard and saw nothing. As we progressed though I saw the source which was a group of middle school aged boys hanging out in the woods behind someone's house on this big pile of wood and next to this rather large hole in the ground. It was kind of strange and like typical adolescent boys they started cracking dumb jokes and making fun of us for riding horses. I got that all the time when I was that age, but as I got older people and boys included started to think of it as cool more than strange. K was calling back to their comments as she is younger, older than the boys but only a couple of years. I ignored it knowing it was not worth it and would go away eventually. Anyway all in all we had a nice ride.

Good thing we went because the next day it snowed 20 inches! I went out to the barn to help with the Christmas cookie baking we do every year. We made like 4 or 5 different kinds of cookies including gingerbread men. I ended up getting snowed in there over night and stayed at my barn manager's house. We had fun baking and watching movies and what not and at night went out in the snow a little to check on the horses and see its progress. The next morning when we went out the snow had finally stopped it came past my knees and I'm 5'5" The horses were all up to or past their knees as well. I figured we would be leaving them in, but D was determined to get them out. She and Da our barn maintenance guy plowed out the gates so we could open and close them. Da had been plowing the driveway and farm all night so we could get around a bit. It was still deep in parts though. Anyway then D decided we would ride out whatever horses we could as to avoid having to walk through the very deep snow a million times. She rode out one gelding who had not been ridden in a year and a half due to advanced uviitis (sp?) in both eyes and is going blind. He was good as gold though. We had fun riding a bunch of them out bareback. Then I took a bunch of pictures of them all running and playing in the snow. They were very cute and I will try and put some of them up a little later.

So this week we have pretty much just been riding bareback in the snow since we can't do much of anything else. We have kept it pretty much to a walk since its icey where its plowed down and deep everywhere else. Christmas Eve we did some trotting and cantering in the snow which was fun and I gave Satin a nice hot Christmas mash. Then I rode this mare Patty around for a little bit.

Right now its pouring rain, but at least its melting the snow! Hopefully tomorrow it will be better and I can finally ride. As always I will keep you updated!

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