Monday, May 3, 2010

A Busy Weekend

Friday night we had tickets to the rodeo... It was fun except for the second bareback rider got hung up and then under his horse. They said he was okay, but they took him out by stretcher anyway. Those guys are crazy tough.

Saturday morning I had to get more hay. The rain and cool weather has limited the supply. Most farms are just now cutting their second, so I opted for getting more of last year's hay. It looks good.

We rode for about 2 1/2 hours Saturday afternoon. Mostly just the usual haunts, except we went a bit further south. It was a beautiful spring day with temps in the 80's. When we got out to the open field we call the big square, we started loping. My wife's saddle had slipped and she got off to make adjustments, so we just kept loping around while she mad her adjustments. I'd change directions every once and awhile and we kept loping and loping. It felt like at least 10 minutes, which I know isn't a long time, but when I stopped Jessie hardly had any sweat on her. Later there was an even bigger area and we loped around that too.

On Sunday, we went over to the neighbor's roping arena. He is riddled with arthritis and doesn't ride. His arena has a squeeze and two boxes on one end and it's hard to follow the rail all the way around. The footing is good and it's big. We set up some cones so we could do some patterns. I loped Jessie around and around here too and she only got damp under the pad. I think the girl could go on forever.

She still tries to pull me around a little. She wanted to hang out at the gate. We worked on rollbacks and turning into the fence and that helped get her attention back on me. We did the clover-leaf pattern around the cones and then did figure eights to ask for a lead change in the middle. She is good at changing leads. A little of the serpentine at the trot helped with steering before we did the Post-To-Post exercise at the lope. Again I thought it would tire her out, but I don't think it did. I still walked her out for about ten minutes to cool her down.

The rest of the afternoon was spent power washing the saddle pads and cinches and then cleaning and oiling my saddle. Our neighbor came by to work with her horse. She asked me to give them their vaccines, which I did. We hung out and offered moral support as she did some groundwork and then some one-rein stops.

She was having problems mounting. I had taught her other horse the mounting block exercise I had learned on a Ken McKnabb TV show and she asked if I would teach this horse. It took about 20 minutes and "Frosty" was getting good at it. She was very sensitive but smart. It was fun to help her figure it out and to know I still remembered how to do it.

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