gottawonder

Today I am grateful for:

Lovely weather today. Snow is melting a bit. It will take a long time before we have bare ground, but it is a beginning.

The outdoor animals are shedding a LOT now.

I did some laundry and vacuuming. Every time I vacuum I fill the fairly small cup on our little machine to the absolute brim with hair (mostly cat).

I was able to go to the barn and see River.

R was there working with Phoenix, and she wanted to ride him while I had River in the arena to get Phoenix used to having other horses moving around him. Phoenix did well with the extra distraction, and trotted out in a fairly relaxed manner (very good for a green horse with only a few rides).

River did well. He is still inconsistent with the turn on the haunches while ridden. Sometimes he does it correctly (big release), and sometimes he wobbles and backs up a bit, or tries a side pass. I have to say, it's confusing to me why we are still at this point after working on it so much over the whole winter.

He CAN do it, and I keep working on being clear with my cues, so where is the confusion coming from?

We worked on the Liberty pattern on the ground, and it is improving. It does require me to jog the entire time, and it makes me sad to see how out of shape I am in spite of all the work on the ground I am already doing. I don't run a LOT in the grand scheme of things, but generally my ground work is a lot of walking, some jogging, and even jogging backwards. You'd think I could jog for about two minutes without gasping like a beached fish, but no.

I came home, and washed my riding pants by hand and man, were they dirty. I hardly ever bother washing them because, well, they're riding pants. I buy black ones for a reason. I don't really get people who wear light colored ones, other than it is sometimes required for showing.

Then I had a nice nap with some superb kitty snuggles.

I learned that the thing we still see older people do, putting doilies or small quilts over the backs of chairs and sofas (my Mom did this) was to protect the furniture from men's hair oil. Older men's hair oil was Macassar oil, but I can still recall men (when I was a child) who wore Brylcreem. Many of the men around our area still used it, because it was definitely still a big thing from their youth in the '40's and 50's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macassar_oil

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brylcreem