how about a positive post?

Enough with the woe-is-me-I-just-got-run-over-by-a-horse nonsense.

I gave myself the weekend to heal from my various cuts and bruises related to getting trampled by a horse last Thursday. Today I saw that the worst bruise had turned from blue to green to a delightful shade of puke yellow and thought, "that's good enough; it's time to ride!" Lucy had been out of work since Thursday, so I was slightly apprehensive about what she'd have in store for me. To be safe, I lunged her before getting on. Ohhh boy did she have a lot to say! Buck, romp, leap, rinse, repeat. When she started breathing evenly and stretching down at the trot, I asked her to woah and I got on.

She was LOVELY.

So lovely, in fact, that to finish up the ride, we went through a reasonably tight bending line of a crossrail to a vertical, both of which were on opposing diagonal lines in the middle of the ring (like an "S"). I trotted in, looked left and opened my inside (left) rein, cantered off the first jump, used my outside leg to get her straight toward the second jump, had four fairly effortless and floaty canter strides to the second jump, and over the second jump I looked right and opened my right rein/redirected the bend, executed a nice automatic release and she easily landed on her right lead and softly cantered away.

BUTTER, people. It was like butter.

The best part was that we had an audience. A girl from the local high school had contacted me through the farm website to see if she could shadow me. I was supposed to teach a lesson this evening so I offered to let her come to the barn, learn what I need to do to take care of my horse, and then watch me teach the lesson. She was very excited to be there and she asked lots of intelligent questions and listened to my responses (and even took notes!). She has to write a paper about what she learned so I tried to beef my responses up with some intelligent banter. Horse management is so complex and I wanted to give her the most complete answers to her questions, but I felt a bit bad about rambling on and on (or so it seemed) because of course each answer required background information, and that background information required its own background information. Oh well, I don't think she'll have any problem coming up with a two page paper.

My student ended up rescheduling her lesson but I enjoyed my evening immensely regardless.

I will leave you with a fun photo of Kenny and Lucy that I took early last week:

my cowboy and my wanna-be western trail horse.