Dressage Fest Pt. 2

Aaaah, I'm still very busy. I had an awesome jumping lesson monday and did my first 2'10" course that felt smooth and well ridden all the way through. Yay! Isis also has been doing well and Grady had Monday and Tuesday off. I have been going through the training for tutoring this week. There's a manual and lots of homework, so I've kind of been doing school before school. But that's ok, I'm enjoying it and it's getting me back into the mindset. I've been going to training sessions also, which is interesting. I worked through two chapters of the manual earlier today and have my homework done for those two chapters. I'm going to work on more tomorrow after the training session. I also got some hours added, which is nice but squeezes my schedule a bit. I think it will be ok though, and I'm pretty confident that my fall schedule will work out. I hope to finalize everything later this week.

Anyways, so to summarize the rest of the show... It was a great time. We went out to eat quite a bit (way more than I would normally) and everyone is super fun to be with. Lots of laughing and joking. Lindsay is young enough that she can join in and act the part of a college age person!

Sundays classes didn't go as well for anyone. Grady was tired and grumpy by then, and although I felt the tests went alright, we were with the low scoring judge so we didn't get that great of scores. Here's what I didn't understand though: For our first circle to the right someone started their car and started to move RIGHT next to the arena. Grady caught it out of the corner of his eye, spooked, bolted, did a rearing pirouette thing, and turned to the left. So not only was our circle bad, we also went off course. But we got it together right away and I felt that everything else went very well. I was expecting a 2 on that circle and decent scores on everything else. But instead I got a 5 on it (what the heck) but I also got fives on pretty much everything else... So I'm really not sure how one justifies a 5 on a terrible, off course circle but then gives fives for everything else too. *shrug* Oh well. Even though the scoring sucked I am super, super proud of Grady and extremely happy with my new barn and trainer.

I wish I had time to go into more detail but I'm working through more tutoring homework and am hoping to also clean my boots tonight SO I think I'd better leave it at that. There are lots of fun details that I could add such as funny jokes and Wim Foekema (fricking AWESOME Grand Prix rider) trying to trip me as I'm carrying a bucket of water... Hopefully next time I'll have more time to add those sort of details.