Thunder and Rain

It has been raining again, which is wonderful!  I really like the shorter, more regular rains that we have been getting lately.  :)

Anyways, besides that, Lady did not get much time over the weekend... seems to be a trend!  o.O

Monday:  I cleaned out her feet and got a knife in there to look at how everything is. I need to rasp the walls down yet this week (last week, actually)....

Today, I didn't do nearly as much as I had planned, but I might be glad of it since I turned the horses out and got my tack inside before the rain started again.

Since we skipped the jumping on Friday, I introduced her to that a little on the ground. She was less than thrilled with my trot planks and hay-bale-jumps and felt a lot like she might bolt. I chocked it down to her being nervous with the dark clouds and impending doom of rain and let it go after she went mostly straight down the center of both trot planks and actually jumped the hay bales, and didn't run me over or explode around me.

Tacked up, and thoroughly reconsidered my decision to ride. Her head was high and while she was sort of doing everything I asked, it wasn't really with much mental attention or any sort of suppleness. I decided to hand walk her up to the arena and see how she did. It was okay, so I finished tightening the girth and moved her away from the shed, which she found particularly terrifying.... due to the odd wind and weird storm pressure in the air.

Since I have been wanting to get better at calming and controlling her from the saddle instead of bailing every time something goes wrong, I went ahead and mounted. After a lengthy check of her obedience to bending her head and listening to the reins. Of course.

I also shortened my stirrups one hole as an experiment. Based on a little research and studying pictures from my ride last week, I determined that I could go a little shorter without losing communication. In fact, the only thing that was lost was some of the ease of mounting. Maybe I don't want a bigger horse!  O.o

Anyways, we walked off and did a big loop of the arena. On the way, we encountered the resident killdeer mother who has been rather upset lately about our presence.

The loop went well... she was fairly responsive and we even had decent corners!  From there we maneuvered through some cones and other bendy lines and she was still good, so I decided to go ahead and do the trot. I'm still trying to stay on the rail with the trot so that I can work on my balance without having to worry too much about her. She was quite lovely, and I even managed to post for about 10-12 strides without bumping her. Success!!
She kept on with her wonderful-ness, and my posting just got worse. Sigh. But I could not have been more pleased with her behavior.  :)

Since I really have been wanting to gallop her again, and we need to start on it anyways, I decided to go out on a limb (figuratively!) and ask for a canter. The result was good and bad.
Bad: canter did not happen. Instead, we trotted super super fast, and I bounced along for the ride.
Good: no bolting, bucking, craziness, nothing from her! She listened to my confused rein aids and came back down to a nice walk as soon as I asked.

I'll stop now, since I've rambled on long enough, but suffice it to say that I was super impressed and pleased with both her and me. More her than me. :)  And since I didn't get pictures, you have to tell me what your favorite color is.

Mwahaha.