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Fair warning. This post contains lots of rage, venom and other similar adjectives. That being said, I'll now elaborate on my new-found hatred of City Folk and New Year's Eve. Earlier tonight, we noticed lots of cars showing up at my next door neighbor's house. Looked like they were having a party. Random neighbors had been firing off fireworks around the neighborhood, so we would occasionally go our and check on the horses. To their credit, the horses were very relaxed about the fireworks.
Fast forward about an hour or so, and all of the sudden, we heard a crash. I jumped up, and ran outside to investigate, and discovered the horses running hell for leather around the pasture, and some kids jumping over the back fence toward the creek. I yelled at the kids to get the hell off of my property, and went over to check everybody. There didn't seem to be any injuries and nobody came up lame, so I proceeded to walk the fence line. I'm glad I did, because I discovered that the gate between the front yard and the pasture was open, and had a horse-shaped dent in it. Zhi and I managed to get it to close, and used some of the spare chain we had to tie it closed for the night. Tomorrow, I'll go see how bad the damage is, and whether or not I need to replace the gate. At this point, the assholes who'd whipped my horses into a frenzy attempted to sneak back towards the pasture. Since they were all wasted, they were about as stealthy as a brick lobbed through a glass window. This time, I watched the horses while Zhi ran over and yelled at them again.
That seemed to work, because they all made their way back over to the neighbor's house, but at this point, there was no way in hell I was going to go back inside. I spent about an hour trying to get the horses calm, and kept watch for more drunk stupid people. While I was debating on calling the police, almost on cue, 6 Williamson County Deputies showed up and began dispersing the party. I don't think I've ever been so glad to see a police car. Zhi and I took turns keeping an eye on things while the crowd dispersed and the vast majority of them seem to have gone home now. I'm freaking exhausted at this point, but I don't know if I can sleep. Thanks a lot, City Slicker Assholes.
It's been a bad day, and I'm not much in the mood for clever grammar, witty quips, or italics, so this is going to be short, and to the point. I rode Ziggy today, and in my warmup, something just didn't seem right. So, I called Zhizhu to come out and watch Ziggy for a while. Long story short, he was off. Of course, I immediately dismounted, untacked and cold hosed all 4 legs. It looks like it's something in his back end. He does have two little cuts just below his fetlock on each leg that are swollen, which might be the problem, but I'll be setting up an appointment with the vet.
If you are reading this, that means that you are reading the second post of the day. Let it never be said that I am not a man of my word! But why two posts, where one would suffice? Especially when I have chronicled the events of three days in one post several times before? Well, yesterday was a really good day as far as riding, and horsy activities go. Today was different story. Not that today was necessarily bad, rather, it was what I refer to as sub-optimal In the spirit of maintaining a positive outlook, the good news is that I A) Kept Zigs between me and the ground, B) Zigs didn't seem off at all, and C) There is more progress on the job front. More on that as it develops.
For tonight's ride, it was my intention to continue to build upon yesterday's progress, which didn't go the way I planned. For one, I was very tense, which was making it nigh impossible for Zigs to relax, so it was quite the vicious circle. I found Zigs to be very heavy on the forehand tonight, and he kept drifting WAY to the outside on my circles. On top of that, I was transfixed on his head, because I'm telling you, if I do not look at it, it will disappear. It happened to my sister, once! Really! Well, ok, it wasn't actually her it was more like a friend of hers, and by friend I mean acquaintance, and by acquaintance I mean some guy she met at school, and, well, Ok, fine, that's not true.
So, to go down the list of problems and analyze them, I'll start with Zigs being heavy on the forehand. After talking to Saga's mom about it, and reviewing it in my head, I realize that I was not sitting up straight, which made it nigh on impossible for me to sit on Ziggy's butt and get him to step under himself and come through. I quite handily compounded this problem, by wondering why Zigs wasn't doing what I was wanting, when I should have been thinking about myself, because after all, Zigs' behaviour is a mirror of my own. So I don't forget, I'm pasting the advice Saga's mom gave me below:
"When you feel like things are going all to hell, stop thinking about your horse.
Think instead about where you are going.
10 m circle here, trot transition here, walk here, another 10 m circle, halt, change direction, figure 8, serpentine, ANYTHING to get you thinking aout something other than the horse. You'll start to relax and so will your horse, and before you know it, he'll be going beautifully"
As far as drifting to the outside goes, that one's easy. I didn't have my outside leg on him, and my outside rein didn't have enough contact. Really what tonight boils down to is that I was so nervous about the prospect of him being "off" (he was fine by the way, he actually flat out galloped over to his stall when I fed him after), that I pretty much just didn't ride. Of course, the usual work stress and being tired from this weekend were probably also contributing factors. I'll be trying again tomorrow, and hopefully, I'll actually be able to add pictures. That is, assuming that my computer finishes importing them . There's over 1000 pictures on the card in the camera. Unsurprisingly, it's taking a while to download them all. I should probably do a more in depth analysis of tonight's ride, but I'm literally falling asleep at my keybarod, and since I don't want to arrive to work tomorrow with a case of QWERTYitis, I'm going to go ahead and go to bed.
First of all, I'd like to make a request. Can 2009 be over? Like right now? I'm just throwing that out there. Not that I think a new year would necessarily make anything better, but it would at least be a new year. And that counts for something, I guess. Anyway, as you have likely surmised, it's been a rough couple of weeks. The long story short is that events have occurred (as I suppose events are wont to do), and these events have simultaneously brought to my attention several personal shortcomings, as well as precluding my participation at the October Horse Trial. On top of that, work has been a particularly tasty pile of suck for the past few weeks.
Fortunately, things are on the horizon that can improve the situation, if they come to fruition. Cross your fingers for me, would you?
Now that that personal stuff is out of the way, let's get to horses, shall we? There's not really much to report on the horse front, as I really haven't been able to ride all week. I will be fixing that this evening once it cools down. I think tonight, we'll go for a hack around the neighborhood, and I might do some cantering around the yard. I'm not going to work on anything in particular, I just need some relaxing time with my horse... More later.
