Finding More Explanations

Thursday of last week was TC's second time being worked on by the bodyworker from this post. I've been doing his exercises twice a day whenever I'm down there, but I have been taking more days off from the barn since he moved into his pasture so that I could work on my burn out. So while I'm sure they'd be more effective if I'd done them every day, I was hoping that 4-5x a week was good enough. 

When she got there, I was nervous though. I hadn't seen massive changes in him, but the things she'd found were kind of subtle anyway. Plus, I'd had a setback with the saddle situation realizing that while he loved the butterfly saddle, my back hated it. 

Riding this horse bareback is horrible

Turns out that she did see some progress, so that's good! 

The one thing I definitely noticed was that the clicking in his jaw is now gone. She said that it would go away with his exercises and it FUCKING DID. Amazing. Still getting the vet out for a dental though. 

His right hind was much improved and so we got to work on his left hind. He has a tough time straightening it behind him, meaning that he, I dunno, probably doesn't use it as much as he uses his right hind. He also stands a little weird when he pees and she got to see that. I asked her about it and she said it was all related to his left hind. So now, for the next month, we work on that. 

I seriously cannot sit his trot to save my life without
the structure a saddle provides

Just like in my last post, he got a bit itchy on his right hind leg as he usually does, but for the first time, he also got itchy down his left hind as she worked on him, so that was interesting. I've seen less itchiness from him overall, which I'm hoping is good? 

TC also was a little nippy as he usually is with bodywork. But this time he transitioned between being nippy and yawning a bunch! So that was surprising, I know he's yawned a bit with acupuncture, but it's not his go to behavior. I'll be curious if he yawns more at his next acupuncture appointment (next Sunday!).

Another interesting moment came when he started taking big deep breaths and snorting. She thinks that he's got some issues with tensegrity that leads to some problems with his breathing. She pointed it out to me last time and I've noticed that he really doesn't take deep breaths ever and he's very prone to holding his breath. This time he finally let go enough to take two or three really big breaths and he snorted a lot, so that was fun to see. 

My back gets quite round riding him bareback
because I'm protecting it pretty aggressively with
my abs, too much of a crunch but whatever

She thinks he has some gelding scaring, I guess? I haven't read much about it but I don't doubt there is something going on in his hind legs that the vets don't see other than the surface "he doesn't use his left hind in the same way as his right hind but he's not lame" so I'll run with it. We are just getting his hips and hind legs more mobile and hopefully that helps. 

This time she did also get to work on his neck a little bit. He was VERY concerned about her getting near his neck and the way he reacts makes her think that there is something going on in there that he doesn't want to "talk" about. She finally got in a little bit, but had to be quick and light to make sure he didn't tense up again. I think I'll work on some behavioral stuff in the cross ties for this, teach him to lower his neck on command so I can get him more comfortable being in that posture in general. 

I love this posture though, this is what I'm after
all the time and when we get him confident here,
we will start lifting the front end

Once again, we got a good list of exercises to do. She wants me to continue with all the work we're doing but add in two exercises for the left hind and another exercise for his shoulders. Then she comes back in a month! 

I'm really excited to see the changes. We have a saddle trial coming up from EQ Saddle Science, so hopefully that gives me a solid two weeks with a saddle that fits him (and then I'll either start the buying process or give it back and say thanks but no thanks) so I'm curious to see how much I can start feeling undersaddle. 

Currently we're doing a lot of clicker training with the long lines and bands, trail riding, and then some short bareback rides. I don't really want to use my saddle until it's seen by a fitter. But it's all good because it's giving me more time to do his exercises each day that I'm down there! 

WW: More Hill Climbing

TC and I hit the trails at the ranch last weekend and it was really fun! I love having these trails right out the back of the barn and my only complaint is that there just aren't that many of them. But that's fine, it's a solid 30 minutes of riding you can do before it gets repetitive and that's good enough to keep his stifle happy and to give us some time to breathe when we're in a rush. Hopefully we'll hit the real trails this weekend. 

Looking down on the ranch, the little bay speck in
the pasture to TC's left is Rico!

There's so much climbing up there! 

The first time he saw that bench he was very
concerned but now he's used to it! 

We went on this newish trail! A bit
narrow for him but it was fun to go
on some other trails

Pasture Upgrades

With TC definitely staying at the ranch until something happens that makes me want to move him to a new barn (not ruling that out), we have decided to do a horse shuffle and give TC a new stall, paddock, and now pasture. 

He first went into stall 4, the stall furthest from the house. He went in there because the fencing was the most secure and it was easy to have Riot (stall 3) go up and around TC's paddock to the upper pasture (which is too rich for Sunny and too hilly for Rico). We figured that TC wouldn't do well with cable fencing and it was a temporary situation at first. 

When the pasture was still green!

Now, TC is there for at least the summer and has trained my mom to take him to pasture enough where she's sick of it and wants to give him a pasture permanently. She asked me if I thought it'd be okay and I said absolutely. So we started talking about the logistics and he is now in stall 1! Rico will be next door in stall 2, Riot in stall 3, and Sunny in stall 4. TC keeps his pasture and the others split the rest of the space. 

TC's pasture goes almost all the way to the property line and that plus his paddock and sacrifice area (he's only in the pasture for 5 hours a day because he would get fat) will mean that he has an entire half acre to himself when he's got his full area! This is definitely the biggest living situation he's had since he was four years old living in pasture with other horses. And at that time he had no shelter other than trees, so this is a big improvement I think. 

He settled in SO well. The first day he probably thought he was being turned out and that he was just forgotten about, and he wasn't going to scream at the house to be brought back in. He was not happy to see me come down on the second day to ride him. He's normally a whinny and come over to me horse but he stayed way out in his pasture and only whinnied and came over when I came back out with a carrot. But I think by now he's realizing that this is his life now, no one forgot about him in his turnout, he now lives in his turnout! 

This is almost your semi-permanent home, buddy

I'm really glad I can give him this kind of space for the time that he's at the ranch! At the end of the day, the facility isn't what I need for my sport, so we will not be there forever, but I'm so happy to 1) give him this space now and 2) know that he's happy there so it will always be our home base if he needs time off or if I need to ride him less or if we run into another issue at a boarding facility. 

I know that with all the anti-stall posts going around on social media, there will be a lot of people wondering why I'd ever think to move TC and I do want to remind everyone that I live in the bay area about 10 minutes away from some of the biggest tech companies in the world and that this kind of pasture availability is unheard of. I'm extraordinarily lucky and privileged to have this for my horse for even a short amount of time. So 1) don't judge me if I end up moving him and 2) don't judge people in my area for having horses in a smaller space than TC's giant half acre! 

I wrote about how hard it is to find boarding in the bay area in this post. After going through the house buying process, I have to laugh at my 2019 post about how *insane* the housing market was at the time. In 2021, we had a house that we put in an offer 50k over asking and there were TWENTY TWO OFFERS (we were in the bottom half because of course we were) and it eventually went for 350k over asking. The only way we got our current house is to put in a bully offer for 100k over asking with no contingencies the day after it came on the market that expired 2.5 hours after we made it AND we got lucky that the agent we were dealing with didn't do a lot of work in this area so didn't know how insane the market was. 

Things on the docket this year: hanging
out with the neighbor cows

So, lucky for TC that I've got the ability to get him out there and lucky for me that he's had enough "life experience" as my mom put it, to be allowed to live there. It was made VERY clear to me that he was NOT welcome for the majority of year's I've owned him because of how wild he was. I thought that was hilarious and not at all surprising.

Happy pasture days, TC! Hope you enjoy it! 

To the Vineyards

I rode TC out to the vineyards and back last week! I wasn't planning on it but I didn't go open all the gates (four gates that you can open if you drive the ATV around) to get up the hill. Regrets, because the vineyards weren't all that fun. 

I used to take Rico out there years ago all the time. You walk out down the road about half way, then down the access road, across the busy road (technically 45mph but people go 55 at least), up the long driveway, behind the vineyard and a golf course, and into the hills where there are some nice wide trails! It's a good hour and a half at least, I never went further than that with Rico but TC is younger and sounder so I thought I might try to go climb more hills and go way out. 

My positive IG post about
the trail before all the shit
went down lol

We did not get that far. TC's traumatizing experience started with walking behind the busy winery, where he was questioning my ideas. I should have turned around there but I did not. I was dedicated. We then got onto the trail between the winery and the golf course and that's when we got stopped. 

Let me tell you, I rode that trail maybe once a week on Rico for a year and a half. No one ever stopped us! But that was like six or seven years ago (yikes). This time we got stopped and the man was SO nice. I think he was surprised to see a horse. He seemed ecstatic to tell me that I wasn't allowed back there. I didn't mind because TC clearly hated it out there! 

TC took this to mean that the world was ending, having to stand still and chat with an enthusiastic man. Right as he sat back to stand up (I turned him), the man was like "he is so pretty!" and I was like yes I'm going to die now, goodbye. 

I don't have many pictures from that ride so please
enjoy my friesian trying to gallop and thinking that
he should just put his neck up instead (because that
is the answer to everything)

TC was pretty excited to be heading home and he power walked all the way down the driveway back to the busy road. We were passed by a lot of cars and trucks down the driveway and even when he's amped, he's such a solid horse with traffic. I am way less solid than he is, tensing whenever a car comes near me (I'm like that on the bike too, I don't like being close to cars and I don't like driving close to people who aren't in cars, cars are dangerous!). He has long decided that he knows better than I do about cars and ignores me. 

What he doesn't like, though, is motorcycles and I don't blame him. We were very careful to cross the busy road when no one was around, but as we got onto the access road, five motorcycles passed us at speed directly behind him. You know when you feel the horse start to bolt and you're not even like "hey don't do that, that's not warranted" because it for sure is warranted and you ALSO want to get far away from the motorcycles? That was me, I was like yeah go ahead, let's get half way up the access road so we can get away from them. 

Poor pony!

By the time we got back to the ranch, he was totally relaxed on a loose rein. I do appreciate that about him, he lets things go way more than I do. 

Overall, I guess I'm glad I went out there but I'm also VERY glad we got stopped so that there's no motivation to go out there again. I love those trails but I think TC would agree that it's better to just haul out if we want to go anywhere but down our normal road or up the hills behind the ranch. 

Jumping Lessons

For the last month-ish, I've been taking jumping lessons! 

On this fish

He is the best!

I used to jump a lot, I'm closing in on the point where I've done dressage for longer than I've jumped, but I have actually still jumped for longer than I've done dressage. I grew up doing pony club (C3-TR and A-DR) and lots of local schooling shows. When I was sixteen, I leased Stretch (who we then bought) and did a year of "B" and "A" circuit shows on him. We did the hunters and the equitation, but also a few jumper classes. Nothing fancy, all in the 2'6 to 3' divisions. When Stretch needed some time to recover from a stifle injury, I leased a couple of event horses back to back and evented at Novice for a year. 

Rico and I jumped a bunch after I bought him. I taught him to jump and we did a combined test once, but mostly just jumped for fun. He could jump 4' like it was a cross rail and he and I jumped a single 4'6 oxer, which remains my biggest jump ever (I have no intention on trying to go for that again lol). I frequently schooled the 3'6-3'9 stuff on him when I was jumping him seriously. 

I then worked for an eventing trainer for a few years and in that barn, I was working over fences on lots of different horses, mostly Training but some Prelim too depending on the horse. I evented a young stallion from his first event through Novice and quit before his Training debut. After that, I took on a client's horse and schooled him to Novice, and even entered him in a horse trials before he had a freak accident and needed to rehab. 

This lesson was a tough one but it was fun!

Around 2013, I started to focus completely on dressage with no jumping in my schedule. That was when Rico was gearing up for the FEI levels and I was in graduate school so really had no time for two disciplines. Plus, I wasn't about to jump Rico while he was headed toward the Grand Prix. And afterwards, I started riding TC and never really missed jumping. 

I realized during those years of doing upper level dressage that I'd never found jumping all that fun. There was a certain point where the jumps just got bigger and scarier and my trainers just told me the same things and I got kind of bored. Lessons where the only thing I'd learn is that I shouldn't take my leg off when I didn't see a distance at an even larger fence than the week before were not intriguing. Dressage was super interesting though, as I learned canter pirouettes and piaffe and passage. The upper levels looked fun rather than scary and I really wanted to get to the top of a sport. I always figured I'd jump again eventually, but that always felt like a long while off. 

Flounder and I listening closely

But then I realized in the last few years that I'm getting older. I mean, you know this your whole life but it kind of hits differently in your 30s maybe? I dunno, I'm very much still young enough to do things like start jumping horses again after ten years but I probably don't have another ten years of being young enough to do things like start jumping horses again after twenty years. I'm not quite as stupid bold as I used to be but I'm still pretty bold. 

I had this moment of realizing that... if I wanted to jump again *one day* then I should probably start jumping again now. It really hasn't been that long since I started winding down so the muscle memory is still there theoretically. And I knew that if I could get my sea legs back early enough, I could jump for a lot longer than if I waited any longer. 

He is the actual cutest

Just a couple weeks earlier

I'm lucky to have a super quality jumping trainer as one of my best friends and for her to have the best possible jumping horse to knock the rust off on. You may remember Flounder as the horse I rode in that intro schooling HT that we won despite no preparation. And Kate is frequently featured in this blog. She listened to me talk to her at length about jumping again one day for a while and then offered to teach me on Flounder. 

Kate has blown me away in my few lessons back to jumping. She is such a good instructor (not that I didn't already know that), she and I do the Mary Wanless workshop together each year and her Mary skills are very present in her jumping instruction. She can take something I know how to do in the dressage and show me how to utilize it over fences. For example, using my slingshot to change the way Flounder jumps, distributing weight through my thigh to immediately make me feel more secure, and keeping my bear down on over fences (which my body finds confusing because my jumping pre-dates my bear down). 

She's also great at understanding what I'm going through and walking the line between helping me with some basic stuff without making me feel like I'm a beginner again. In some ways, my jumping skills are still rather well developed. It's like riding a bicycle to an extent. I still have a pretty decent eye, I still have a good leg, I can even kind of still do my auto release from back in the day when I remember to do it. But in other ways, a lot of my high level instruction came in dressage tack and the shorter stirrups make it tough for me to figure out how to do the same things in jumping tack. And I'm definitely rusty! My old bad habits are still present and probably a little stronger than they previously were but Kate is knocking those out one by one. 

These are all from the same lesson, Google Photos
is being weird so I have limited pictures right now!

I'm really excited to continue jumping. We skipped last week due to a clinic and my own insane burnout. But this week we will pick back up and I'm excited to see what Kate has in store for me! I told Kate that my main goals are to get secure enough to do a grid without hands and to school cross country at some point. Even with just a few lessons, I'm feeling like I'll need to make some new goals soon because those are coming up quickly. 

And just to clarify in case anyone thinks I have ideas for TC:

I will not be jumping TC in any kind of a serious way. This for a variety of reasons, but mostly because when I bought him, he had the beginnings of side bone and the vet told me that he was not suitable for jumping due to this, jumping will speed up the development of it. 

It doesn't mean that I haven't done lots of cavalletti with him or jumped him over small cross rails and small logs on cross country, but if I decide to jump for real again, it will be on another horse who is better built for the job. TC will remain my dressage and trail horse! I have no plans to switch over completely, but I am closing in on the ability to have two horses so one dressage/trail horse and one sporty eventing pony (with three good gaits so we can cross over to the dressage shows) sounds like a good time to me. 

Changes in Decisions

I thought I injured my back moving but when I took a day off riding and drove 6 hours, my back was totally happy, which is unusual for the injury. Also unusual for it was to have it hurt while riding. Laying down and riding (with my back brace, on a horse who doesn't lean on the bridle) have been the only things that injury likes to do in the past. 

Google photos didn't upload my recent ones so you
get old photos today

I decided to switch back to my saddle because I was getting dangerously close to spending a lot of money on the butterfly saddle and wanted to see if my back was fine. Sure enough, the moment my butt sat into that old saddle, my back felt great. And it hasn't complained since. 

TC honestly went fine in it too because I put it as far back as I could without it hitting the end of his ribcage (the best thing about having a horse with a longish back and a somewhat short paneled saddle) and stuck it there with a sticky pad. It slid a little forward over the course of my ride but stayed enough away from his shoulders where he actually looked okay for most of our ride. 

So now I feel a little back to the drawing board, but with more information. I don't feel comfortable buying from a company who won't let me demo and/or return a saddle that has a chance to hurt my back. I also don't know why that saddle is hurting it so I can't even ask them to custom make me a seat or flaps or whatever to help me. But I also love how TC goes in it and I think the reason why he goes well in it is because of how flexible it is, which gives him shoulder freedom. 

I just want him to look like this all the time

I've got a few things on the docket. First is to have my bodyworker lady look at my saddle and confirm that it's not too bad a fit further back. I've ordered a TSF girth to see if that will keep it back there in combination with the sticky pad. I've also put in a call to the Sacramento rep to see when she's coming down to do a fitting because she's always been pretty amenable to things like "I want to make sure this thing can be set weirdly far back." 

I'm also going to stop by a saddle shop today (I have to go into work to get my computer fixed anyway, and it's right around the corner) and take anything they have that feels decent to me and that I think might fit him. I'm a bit cautious about finding something now because my bodyworker lady says that he'll be dramatically changing shape in the next month and a half, but if I can get something that can be adjusted by a fitter or even gather information about whether other brands work for my back and that sit far enough away from his shoulders, that'd be helpful. 

Why do horses have to be so complicated?

I'm feeling kind of blah about the whole situation. Like I do care so much about making sure we have the right saddle situation and getting back on track to rebuild Third and then move on to Fourth level, but also part of me is considering giving up on the whole thing and teaching him a bunch of circus tricks so we can run away together. But that's a personal problem. 

Between moving to the ranch, moving to our house, and the generally chaotic nature of my work situation, I'm extraordinarily burnt out. I get like this sometimes with the two jobs and TC, feeling like I can't be good at anything because I simply don't have enough time to dedicate to any one of those things to be good at them. At any given point, I feel like I'm letting down my boss/coworkers, my clients, and my horse. Don't get me started on my friends, family, and I'd never put myself into the mix but I'm definitely not letting myself do . 

I've been brainstorming a lot about what riding means to me and what I want out of riding. I'm sure I'll write some post about it later. Yesterday when I rode I just got up in half seat and galloped around like a child on a pony because I was just so sick of my routine of changing something, taking video, looking at it, making changes in my riding, taking video again, looking at it. With how busy work is (and my broken computer lol that happened last Wednesday and I decided to just take the rest of the week off rather than drive in to have them fix it) and all the moves, I haven't had time to do anything like go on a trail ride or go away for even a day to do a non-horse activity. 

Luckily, we have some fun stuff planned as soon as this weekend and I've decided to take more days off of work at random to go trail riding or spend time with friends, or even to just sit at home and do nothing. My job is fairly flexible about vacation days, including letting us take some unpaid leave if we choose to. My mental health (and the fact that on any given day, I make more teaching than I do working my office job) is more important than one day or one half day's pay. 

We'll figure it out, TC

So hopefully that helps! And hopefully the horse will like other saddles too! And I'll be teaching him some circus tricks regardless because he's such a clown already. 

Crystal Balls and Itchy Ponies

On Monday, TC saw someone I'm going to refer to as an equine physical therapist. I don't honestly know what she'd call herself, maybe just a general bodyworker, but I'd call her a magician if that didn't sound so strange. 

When I was trying to figure out what was going on with TC, Kate directed me to a facebook post by someone in our area who had a saddle fit problem and this bodyworker had given the rider lots of exercises for the horse and the change even just in the first month was shocking. The most exciting part was that the horse looked SO MUCH like TC did. That's what led to me trying the Pegasus saddle, but I also emailed the bodyworker to see if she could come out. 

It turned out that Kate already had some slots for an earlier date, so handed one to me and I kept my original slot two weeks later. The first one happened on Monday and then she will come back out in a couple of weeks. 

Before and after pictures

I have to admit, I really got my hopes up. Luckily she absolutely delivered so I didn't have to talk myself down. I'm still SO excited about it. 

The first thing we did was take some pictures to look at his symmetry. She showed them to me and wow, the horse is NOT symmetrical. His entire body is curved to the right. 

She then evaluated him, reading him like a freaking book. It was a little eerie, to be honest. 

"Is he busy in the mouth?" yes he is, he is nearly constantly fiddling with the bit, especially if it's not his turtle top, the only bit he's not constantly chomped on (he still chomps but not ALL the time). 

"Is he tough to steer?" yes he is, he's absolutely tough to steer, I joke about that all the time but let me tell you, he is absolutely not a normal horse to ride. 

"Does he tilt his head sometimes?" yes in the lateral work, especially the shoulder in to the right.

"Is it tough to get his right shoulder up?" yes absolutely, we've been working on that with acupuncture. 

"Is he hard to keep fit? Do you notice him breathing a lot?" I had to think about that... then I told her that now that I thought about it, I've literally never seen him take a deep breath. When she was done working on his diaphragm, he took a huge breath. 

I tried to take conformation pictures but he was
mostly looking like a donkey

There was way more too, just casual things she'd say, even just to him "you find it tough to push off evenly behind, don't you, those glutes don't fire at the same time, huh?" while I'm sitting there just like, wow, I wish I'd found this person way earlier in our work together. I am going to have her work on my horses forever, she's stuck with me. 

She worked on every part of him. She addressed his head (his eyes are literally off center because of... something, when she got done, his eyes were more symmetrical, I don't want to be mean but he honestly looked cuter afterward lol), his shoulders (the right one is stuck forward and down, left one stuck up and back, no wonder I can't steer him), his back (lumbar moves well, ribcage not so much, sacrum not at all), his ribcage (she noted that he had trouble breathing in, as I said above), his hindquarters (glutes don't fire at the same time, right hip is up and stiff, left hip is jammed down), and basically everything but his neck. He wouldn't let her into his neck. 

She told me that he was hiding something in his neck and that generally, he doesn't like to talk about his issues. This is why my sweet, wonderful horse starts to bite people when you do bodywork on him (it's all very gentle! No pulling, hard adjustments, anything, it's just physical therapy-like exercises with zero force, she says she only offers the stretches to the horse vs making them stretch). He was AFTER us for making him think internally. Do NOT make me think about my body, it's easier to ignore it and be a clown. This tracks with what my acupuncturist and the BEMER ladies say about him! And honestly, he's been the toughest horse to gain influence over undersaddle, he's very protective of his body.

This is the best one so we'll run with it. And honestly
he is already looking better than he did before!

We have lots of homework, twice a day exercises for before and after riding. Then she comes back in two weeks and she will evaluate how far we got and give us more things to do. She says it's good to front load these visits so she can figure it all out. She doesn't yet know the root cause because she thinks it's his neck, which she says directly relates to the sacrum, which has almost no mobility, but as I said above, he won't let her touch it. So hopefully he lets her in next time. 

I'm really excited to see how things progress with this stuff. I like that it's all stuff I can do for him, and then she comes in to evaluate and give us more exercises. 

On a kind of related note, my HSA is apparently going to start costing me money to maintain, there's not a huge amount of money in it, so I figure I'll just spend it down this year rather than pay the fee. So, I'm going to start doing my own physical therapy again because as my horse gets more symmetrical, I don't want to screw him up! 

TC's physical therapist said that the way he looks and acts, she can tell that the way I ride him helps him rather than hinders him, buuuut she also mentioned that he might have sciatica down his right leg (it's always that leg that he's itchy on and I never seem to find his spot, coincidence?) and that's the leg that I have sciatica on. So hopefully as we both get better, we'll help each other rather than potentially giving each other our problems. But it's nice to know that she doesn't think I'm doing any harm by riding him. 

Building Muscle Back

I'm really pleased to report that TC seems to have positively exploded with muscle in the last week or two. I actually thought he was fat but then I felt his ribs and it's like no, actually, the horse is FINALLY putting on muscle for the first time in what may be over a year. 

I've been operating under the assumption that less is more. If he can hold a good posture for only 15 minutes, that's how long he works for and then we go walk. He is also getting more days off too. He normally gets two, but when I'm busy, I happily give him a third off. 

When I teach my riders to sit the trot, I always have them do a few strides at a time in a good posture. Then we aim to get a circle at a time. Then two circles. There is certainly a time when I start making them sit the trot all the time, but if I've got postural issues in riders, I don't force it. Perfect practice makes perfect, and that's true for muscles too. I do the same thing when I've been coming back into weight lifting, doing any heavy lifting with a coach to make sure my form is perfect, not lifting anything that makes me feel any loss of posture. So TC is being treated the same way. 

That neck, that's what it's supposed to look like!

The other thing I'm coming to terms with is that it won't always look perfect all the time. In a ride last week, I realized I'd gotten so worried about how he was holding himself that I backed off in the effectiveness of my riding. 

Because he doesn't have the muscle to hold his posture perfectly all the time, he sometimes doesn't reach to contact. My way of dealing with it is to just kind of low key hold him together with a slight backwards hand and when I did let go of that to push my hands into more of a forward thinking place, the reins would get loose and he'd retract the neck, which was worse, so I didn't work through it. I decided last week that if he wasn't reaching for contact, I had to do whatever it took to get him back to that posture, even if it was a little bit disruptive to him. And sure enough, it's more effective correction that feels loud and ugly (and looks perfectly acceptable) so he can regain his balance and reach for contact again. 

So, I can either low key hold him together, which doesn't disrupt him but also doesn't support him, or I can make a change that might disrupt him a little bit, but then I can more easily get him into a correct posture and things get way better quicker and he goes better. Seeing that made a huge difference in how he went last week and now I'm sure we'll see even more muscle building. 

This picture was the one I saw and thought "huh
something seems off"

And then all the riding pictures, my Third level
dressage horse shouldn't have this neck

With the muscle building, I'm seeing some other things that make him just look way healthier. His coat is downright shiny at this point. He's always had kind of a dull coat, I always thought it was just a gray horse thing combined with a friesian thing (they have courser hair). But now he's on Platinum CJ rather than his smartpaks and within a few weeks, his coat is beginning to shine for the first time like, ever. 

I didn't notice until I went to go get him from pasture the other day and his coat basically blinded me. He was covered in dust and dirt from the pasture but when I pet his shoulder, it was pretty slick. I've tried to curry him every day and my aim is to give him more baths so that he isn't so disgusting (because when he reaches a certain point, the bath ends up taking WAY too long so I end up putting it off). And now it's really satisfying because of how beautiful he looks after he gets his bath! 

This is what his neck should look like... at Training
level! He'll look better when we get back to Third!

Beyond the physical changes in him, I've noticed some mental changes in myself (he's always the most cheerful creature so I'm sure he feels better but he rarely tells you if he isn't feeling great, I've never even seen him pin his ears). I didn't realize how much him looking so iffy was affecting my mental health. In the back of my mind, it was always there that he looked so bad. 

I was kind of embarrassed about how he looked all last year. I was careful what I posted on the blog and on social media, but in person it always bummed me out to take him places and have people see him go. We scored well but what he looked like didn't reflect what I felt like my training and care should. Looking back, it obviously didn't, I clearly put my trust in the wrong saddle fitter (they've done my saddle on and off and it's always been fine and the saddle honestly looked fine, so there was no reason to doubt it). 

But now, I feel like I can kind of relax and let my training and care do its thing. It'll take a while, and I'll continue working to improve his care and training, but I'm no longer feeling like we're blind to the issues. 

Back to the Office! For a Day

On Monday, TC had a day off because I went into the office for the first time in almost 14 months! My last day was March 4th, 2020. All of us are vaccinated now and there was a staff appreciation drive-through event going on anyway so we got permission from the president to come in to work so we could go hang out afterwards.

This pathway is almost always full of people

It was kind of weird! From waking up and actually having to put on clothes that weren’t riding clothes, to reminding myself to not change highways, to hugging my admin assistant for honestly the first time (we didn’t used to hug), to having an in person staff meeting for the first time in over a year! It was so fun though, really nice to see other humans, have conversations with different people, and reconnect with my coworkers. 

The schedule was pretty light. I got in around 9am and chatted with one coworker for about 20 minutes, then another coworker and my boss came in and we chatted for another half hour or so. Around 10 we walked over to the staff appreciation thing to get some breakfast and then my coworkers and I ate outside together until about 11. 

The calendar in my cube was
still set for Feb 2020!

Then from 11 to 2, I worked from my desk for the first time in a long time, realizing that my setup at home is actually MUCH better (thanks to the SO) and the screens felt small and clumsy. Then from 2 to 3, we had our staff meeting, then more work until 4:30 when we cut ourselves loose to go out to a burger place for a drink and some dinner. 

So, all in all, not a huge amount of work got done, but we were all really happy to be together! It also made me feel better that my coworkers had adjusted to work from home life in the same way that I did, just getting the work done and shifting their schedules around to allow for hobbies and hanging out with family members (or in my case, the horses!).

Wandering about the campus, it's weird with no
students!

Dinner was fun, I did not get a drink as I basically stopped drinking alcohol during the pandemic and have decided to mostly not drink anymore, not that I drank much in the first place. After dinner, I headed out to the new house to keep working on stuff. I'll post about what I got done pretty soon! I'm excited to share what is going on with the garden, with Nicole's help, I've gotten it rather well started. 

All in all, a successful day! I have to say, I'm SO glad that this was a one time thing. I don't know how I feel about working in offices in general, but I certainly don't want to commute to work. For now, we are not going back to the office any time soon, so that bodes well for me and my refusal to commute to anything but my horse.