It's Been a Good One

 Today was a good day. Why?
Well, for starters it was over 25 degrees outside.
And sunny.
You know... the kind of day that makes a girl think that she can take her truck out of 4WD and not die. Loved it.... So I did what everyone really should do on a day like this. I rode. All frickin' day. I'm tired and will probably be sore, but it was a great day!

Tilly was a champ. I rode her first, and there was a beginner in the ring on a wrenglish horse. And Tilly was unperturbed by the fact that she had to share the ring. Yay for this season's warm up arenas, right? We even got some good canter transitions, not the rushy green pony transitions that she can do, but nice calm, quiet transitions. Sigh. There is hope! Now on to lengthenings!

Next up was Delight. I started her on the lunge for two reasons: 1) She's been more relaxed if I don't fight her through the first 15 min of work and just lunge the warm up and 2) Delight felt stiff last time I rode her. Not lame, but not right... Horse people know what I mean.
15 minutes of lunging, scrutinizing every step for some sign of injury or lameness, then I hopped on. Today I did a lot of long and low and round work, instead of the second level stuff. And it seemed to help... Walk, trot and canter all bringing her neck up and then down, then up then down... and she stayed remarkably relaxed. Yippie!

RC is RC. He's pretty much a boss. Sure, his canter needs to open up a little bit, so we worked on medium-working canter transitions. Of course, he chose to be an overachiever and tried to turn the exercise into medium canter-quarter pirouette- working canter -quarter pirouette... It took a few tries for me to really get through to him that I didn't really want him to work that hard. Yet.

I then worked a student's horse for her.. just to ride through a problem. Which was fun.

And then I went home, after 7 productive hours at the barn. And took the poodles out for a walk in the fields to look at animal tracks across my arena. The down side to that brilliant idea is that the snow is two feet deep, and the poodles are 10" and 14", respectively. So now my shed is full of melting snow balls.... Whoops.

At least I have two tired poodles, right?