More on the Clover

Tennis is another of my hobbies and I played in a tournament over the weekend. Not having played singles competitively (if I ever did) for quite some time, this wasn't the smartest move on my part. I had to play Friday night and squeaked out a win which only meant I had to play Saturday at noon. Ranae was on a girl's weekend and would be home on Sunday morning. There was a horse show at the fairgrounds I was hoping to at least stop by, and, to start my Saturday morning our TiVo took a dump, so I had to figure out what I was going to do about that.

The tennis match was at noon. I lost this one, thankfully, because most of my body parts were hurting and it was hot. It had to be in the high eighties. Anyway, I showered and headed to the fairgrounds. They were doing a trail class, which I watched for about 40 minutes. Boy, those horses move slow. Then, back across town to get the TiVo replacement.

By the time I got home it was 4:30. I gave the horses some hay and went in to get me something to eat. Got Jessie's GW done and tacked up. Instead of going out alone, I was still sore and tired from my earlier exertions, we went out back to do some exercises. After a little warm-up, I set the cone up in the middle and trotted the four-leaf clover exercise. We've done this exercise pretty good at the trot. We've done ONE revolution at the lope in each direction, but that's had to be two months ago (I'd know for sure if I tagged my blog entries). So Jessie has "done" it, but she didn't really have it completely down. With all the loping we've done in the past few weeks I was anxious to see how she would react. She did pretty darn good. We went around three times in each direction. A couple of times her circles got a bit out of whack, but for the most part she turned when I asked her (that had been the biggest problem) and she kept her speed relaxed.

Sunday's ride was nicely quiet. We went out to the big square we erected last weekend and trotted a square and then loped, only this time we did a circle around each corner. By now the few remaining body parts that had not been sore decided to speak up so we headed home. We had ridden a couple of hours and once again it was fairly warm out, so when we got home they got a a bath and we sat in the garden sipping adult beverages.