Moments of Brilliance

Today, I decided to try something different and ride in the morning, rather than the evening, and by morning, I mean around 11AM.  It wasn't oppressively hot yet, but it was getting there, so it was going to be a short ride.  I wasn't in the mood to do anything particularly "structured", so I decided to go for a ride around the neighborhood.  I did a little bit of spiraling in and out the circle, but I had some trouble getting Zigs to not fall to the outside.  I got a few good circles in, and continued to ride around the neighborhood.  This time, on the recommendation of Saga's mom, I threw in some trotting,  He seemed to like that, but I was having the damndest time keeping him from counter-flexing.  I think that was largely due to the fact that the area to our right was heavily wooded, so he was probably keeping an eye out for predators.  I spent about half the time bending him to the inside, and doing shoulder-ins to get his mind more focused on me rather than potential doom from the terrible death-woods.

He also kept randomly breaking into a trot, but I got him slowed down within 4 strides when he broke. When I did trot sets with him, he was rather forward, but when I sat down, he'd go back to walk eventually.  But, to put the title into context, I actually did have a few times where I sat down, and he immediately went back to walk.  Yay for progress!  Since it was pretty hot by this point, and I'd been in the saddle for 30 minutes, I decided it'd been enough for one day, so we went back home, un-tacked, and I hosed him down.  Of course, immediately after I turned him out into the pasture, he went down and rolled.  Nature abhors a clean horse, I guess. ;)  That's really all I have to report, tomorrow, for the first time in a while, I'll actually be riding in a lesson, so I'm sure I'll have more to talk about then.