Busy Life

My summer schedule has really taken off. I've been so busy! My hope is to post every day, but it wont happen for a few more weeks. My sister joined the army and will be leaving for boot camp soon. My evenings have been taken up with doing various family activities before she leaves. I expect that once she is gone I will have more open evenings. Good luck to her!

Monday morning I had another jumping lesson. I did the "circle exercise." Basically, four jumps on a 20 meter circle. I had to try to get the same striding between each jump. It was REALLY hard!! I've been told that jumping is dressage with speed bumps. That may be true, but no one told me how hard it is to do dressage with speed bumps!

I've started working full days at the library (summer schedule), so both monday and tuesday I worked full days. I had my lesson monday morning, and rode Isis tuesday evening. So today was my first day back at the barn all day. I rode a horse I've never ridden before. A teeny weeny, 3 year old, dun paint mare with blue eyes. Her name is Boots. (Reminds me of Dora the Explorer) Val does some western training, and this horse is a western horse all the way. This little horse's owner is a 13/14 year old guy, kind of chunky. Anyways, he thinks he's a western cowboy - and it shows. Unfortunatly, it doesn't go over well with Boots. If I rode her with a loose rein and just let her work she was really good. I couldn't get nit picky on her. Val told me not to worry about bend or correctness, but to be happy if I could get her to walk/trot/canter where I want, when I want. This normally goes against my horse training nature, but considering who will be riding her, I'm not sure there's much point in frustrating the poor thing. She actually was quite nice.

Other than that, life has been fairly normal. I rode a couple horses this morning, went on another trail ride this afternoon with Grady, worked, worked, worked, and rode Isis this evening.

I hope to put a more detailed update on soon.