Moving the Strings and Other Little Things

On Wednesday, TC had an appointment with my farrier to get his first set of shoes! My plan had been to ride him in between my lesson in the morning and him getting shoes, but my farrier was over an hour early so instead I just gave TC the day off.

Which means that I basically have no blog post for today. But I've got a bunch of little things that don't warrant their own posts to talk about. First though, shoes!

SHOES! I can't believe how good his weird feet look. From this
angle the left front almost looks normal (I swear they're the same
shape, it's just the angle)

Shoes
TC was GREAT for the shoes. I mean horses get shoes all the time, so I knew he'd be fine eventually, but he handled it a lot better than I thought he would. He stood still, didn't try to pull his foot out of her hands too much, and he LOVED his shoes. It was really cute actually, he had one on for a while as my farrier had to shape the other one (horse is a size 4 and needs a fair amount of banging on the shoe to get them wide enough for him). He kept standing on his shoe with the left front, then pawing or holding his other foot in the air like SHOE THIS ONE PLEASE.

The funniest bit came at the very end when he had to walk out with them on. He walked like he was wearing shipping boots at first. I let him just hang out for the rest of the day so that he could get used to them. We'll see how he moves in them today! He better be sound forever and move beautifully given that I just doubled my shoeing costs.


Fall Plans
I texted my trainer friend from my old town and asked if she was going to the show at the end of October so that she could give me a lesson there. I told her that TC and I were coming up so I could coach and TC could be an NC horse. I meant a non-compete horse, meaning I'd pay for a stall and a small fee for using the facility, and we'd not show at all. But trainer friend gave me a bit of shit thinking that we were going HC. She said I should just show because she's an enabler like that (five minutes after I got my Silver medal, she started talking about my Gold).

I KNOW I could probably show him this fall and score in the mid to high 60s at Training. I know that. But there are a few reasons why I don't want to. 1) I don't want to hate showing and if he's a piece of shit I totally will hate showing. 2) I don't want to put bad scores on his record (honestly I want his average above 70 at Training if I can swing it). 3) I have to buy a LOT of stuff before showing (new jacket and show boots = not cheap) so would rather not hurry and do that given my summer has been tight.

Put my other shoe on, woman!

Then we're also going to hopefully be an NC horse at SVE in November (depends on if I can get the facility owners to let me use the covered round pen there), where hopefully Peony and Kate will be, along with several of my barn friends and students. If my own trainer comes, I'll save my lessons for the show and make him ride him there. If not him, then I might grab a lesson/training ride with a trainer up there, since she's a fabulous rider and comes highly recommended from a friend. And Kate has volunteered to be my crash dummy too, so that's awesome since she rode him beautifully last week. OR I'll do all three. Horse can get used to more riders while I'm willing to hand him out, eventually he'll be far enough along where I'll get real possessive.

Sooner than those though, I'll be taking him down the road to the local show facility with my trainer, and I'll be taking him over to my parents' house just to hang out one day.


Progress
I'm getting frustrated over our progress recently. It's not that we're not making progress. Because we are. It's more the feeling that I just want this to be over already. I want to school in the court without worry and I want to ride him around the ranch on a loose rein and I want to just love riding my horse ALL the time and not just in specific areas at specific times in specific weather with specific people (or, preferably no people) around me.

This is totally unrealistic and mostly stems from me being envious of people with 4, 5, and 6 year olds who are super quiet and fun around the ranch. He's been back to work for maybe 70 days now. He can't be turned out or cantered very much. He's going through that evil five year old phase. And sometimes I do need to just suck it up and push myself a bit more fear-wise because I probably could be doing more in the court and more around the ranch.

In four years I won't look back on this time and feel frustrated that it took so long. I'll be like yeah that sucked but look where we're at now! It's the same way I feel about his rehab. I remember writing those posts about how long it was taking and how scared I was of him coming home. And now he's home and all I can think about is how long it's taking to get to a point where he's quiet at home. And soon he'll be fine at home and I'll be bitching about how bad he is in new places, how long it's taking to get a change on him or a pirouette.

I have to stop moving the strings (inside family joke- my dad helped dig out what he thought would be a small basement at his parents-in-law's house and my grandfather hung strings to show how far he wanted the guys to dig- every day the strings were moved back and the small basement turned into a huge two bedroom apartment). I have to let myself enjoy him right now even if there are horses who are a year or two younger than him doing so much more. Whatever. My horse is awesome too, it's just taking us longer a completely reasonable amount of time to get through this given what we've been through.

These guys are SO CUTE

Talking to the Vet
I emailed my vet to see what he thought about turnout. There are 24x24' turnout paddocks that TC can go into each day and I want to see if we can do that at the beginning of October. Either before or after another ultrasound (ka-ching but you know, ponies). I desperately want him in the big paddocks, but he needs turnout first. With a big paddock, he can't be brought in and I can't change my mind if he races around. And he's going to race around.

I want to let him race around because then he'll be happier and less bolty, he didn't bolt at all (like maybe three times in nine months) when he lived in pasture. But I also don't want to let him race around because what if he gets hurt? So the vet needs to give him the okay for that. I'd rather have him go lame and me think oh well I was just following vet's orders vs if I just dump him out there, I'll feel worse. I think I'll feel terrible either way though... But my vet is quite conservative so that's good.

Haven't heard back so I'm still waiting.


Lesson
I had another lesson with my friend's trainer on her horse. It was really great! Even though it was another solid ego slashing, which is good for me even if it added a bit to my feeling down about progress with TC (which again is totally unfounded). I'm happy to report that I didn't fuck up as many changes as I did before (I didn't practice because I didn't trust myself to not fuck them up on my own) and I'm starting to get used to what feels like counter bending the horse into the change.

We also worked on my previous weakness- half pass right. It's my left leg. It's TOTALLY my left leg. I found that in the Tanya Vik clinic when I was riding leg yields off that leg. Once as I really worked to get that leg working, the half pass was a million times better. Later that day, I rode a client horse and worked the hell out of the right leg yield so I could force my left leg to work properly. I'll be doing that on TC today.

All it made me want to do is take (dressage) lessons on TC. But my lesson budget is small until I can take TC out of training with my current trainer, who is very reasonable for part training and VERY good to ride with, but it's not free. But I think it's important to take a lesson with a dressage trainer once a month, it doesn't add that much to my training costs but it will at least send me in the right direction position-wise and dressage-wise. And we'll see when I get an office job (if, ugh, still waiting on that), I bet I can throw more money at training forever a while. All I want to do is take dressage lessons every other day!

She (he?) is the cutest little thing, reminds me so much of J that
I totally just want to steal her

Hopefully today's ride goes well on TC's new shoes! It will be weird to pick them out for the first time. I think I have a lesson with BRH trainer, and my goal is to ride Training 1 in the court if he's good out there. Because I posted about it though, we probably won't get to that. But I'd love to have a baseline (maybe we can video it) coming into fall. I can judge it for myself (despite, you know, not being a judge, but I'm pretty good at guessing) and then judge it again in the spring!