Thursday, December 10
Dec. 11th, 2020 04:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gottawonderA nice day temperature wise. This last few weeks has been very warm for this time of year, and if that isn't nice I don't know what is. We seem to be moving back to more appropriately seasonal temperatures, and that's okay too.
Cleaning for the family. Someone has been working on Mount Laundry, because it seems a bit better (I think it's the teen-aged girl). She's fun. I get a kick out of her singing and chirping almost while she's making something to eat. She dances around and sings because she's excited that it's food time.
A good lesson at the riding barn. Before the lesson I had some time (I couldn't go in until the other riders were done), so I did some of the very "light touch" massage with River. It's really interesting how he responds to it. Horses show "release" by blinking, dropping their heads, relaxing their ears, licking their lips, and yawning or deep breath. River does a LOT of this when I do very light touch massage, especially in his neck. There are certain points that if I hold my hand there, he really "releases" and seems to go into deep relaxation. In the lesson we went a little further with the yielding in halter, laterally. We moved up to trotting in hand with the "liberty" or "pressure free" style of leading, using body language and energy rather than just dragging him around. Then we used the yielding to pressure from the halter work, and translated that to bridle.
I had made R a leather medicine bag (my relationship with leather is evolving, and I feel a little strange using it, but I have TONS of it from before I became a vegetarian, and I've been trying to decide if it makes sense to use it, or sell it, or what. For now I guess I'll use up what I have, and go from there. I doubt I'll buy more leather, but maybe I'll recycle some? Not sure if leather works for me anymore). I had a sense that she might use it for her crystals. She seemed pretty happy with it. She gave me a hand held massage tool for River that is a rubber glove kind of, with rolling balls. He seems to like it.
I came home and had a quiet evening of mostly just napping and social media.
