Cob Jockey

Mary kept telling me she needed to come down to the barn this week to help me get ready for the show, but our schedules just didn't line up. I told her she didn't need to, but she insisted.

So while I took Nick to a sushi making class for his birthday on Monday evening, Mary drove 45 minutes to the barn just to supergroom the heck out of my horse by herself in advance of the rated show on Saturday.

My amateur hobbyist chef husband's sushi was so perfect the instructor took photos of it. Mine (not pictured) was uh, not, lol. It was fun though!

I showed up a couple hours after she got there to find both my home and show brushes cleaned:

 My okay-but-not-great feather clipping job fixed:

A whole lot of unshedded leg hair removed:

That's allll from his legs!

And his mane pulled to appropriate braiding length, which of course also meant that she had to throw a bareback pad on him and get him a little warm so the hair came out easier. Naturally.

After I got there, we tag teamed cleaning and conditioning my tack. I cleaned it and then Mary brought out her paint can-sized CWD Conditioner left over from her days as a CWD rep. As someone who pays effectively (sigh) $45/container shipped for the normal sized CWD conditioner, the size of her conditioner bucket is eye-popping, lol. It has to be worth a thousand dollars.

"This is my life now"

I don't even know what to say almost, to her coming out by herself to do all that for me! But I did pay her in our first hug in almost two years, since I'm fully vaccinated and she's almost to her second shot. Mary was high-risk for COVID, so we really played it safe, and she thankfully never got it. We hugged for like a straight minute, and I had tears in my eyes. It felt so good to hug my best friend again!

Aeres has had a big couple of days even though I haven't ridden her yet. On Monday, I gave her a thorough grooming and started to pull her mane. Not only did the length need to go, but she's a very badly faded black with orange highlights, which also needed to go.

On Tuesday we finished up mane pulling and also banged her tail. I sent Mary this (terrible) photo and she was like "...we gotta do something about that orange forelock. Like, yesterday."

 

On Wednesday, she got her teeth done. My vet was coming out anyway, and I'd noticed her dropping lots of feed while eating, so I wanted that done before I put a bit in her mouth. "Nothing crazy" going on in there according to my vet, although I think her definition of crazy is crazier than mine, lol. She definitely needed done, so that was money well spent.

Then Wednesday night Mary came out armed with a box of $2.99 hair dye, Vaseline, saran wrap and hair ties.

Turns out she'd never done this before, but she totally acted like she had. First, she put Vaseline on Aeres's star to protect it from the hair dye, then she applied the dye, and then she thought she might wrap the forelock in Saran wrap but Aeres was not having that.

While we waited, we used whitening shampoo on her white socks (OMG. I am reminded that Connor's socks aren't and never will be pure white, sob. Aeres's socks got blindingly white) and threw her on the lunge line in a halter to watch her move for the first time.

Mary's face watching her go was like: 

She has a really nice free swinging walk, overtracks huge at the walk and the trot, and an athletic canter. Objectively speaking, she moves better than Connor does even if she's not as pretty as he is standing still. But what really got us excited was lunging her over a tiny crossrail, which she'd clearly never done before. The first couple times, she just trotted big over it like "WTF do I do with my feet??"

The next time around, I asked her to jump from a canter, and she jumped it really well but got a not-perfect distance, then the time after that, she nailed it. Not only could you watch her think through the question in real time and make adjustments each go around until it was perfect, she was bold to the fence and chill about it, with happy thinking ears.

This immediately got the wheels turning in my head.

I suspect this horse may have gotten a bit burnt out on Dressage at her previous home for a couple of (entirely theoretical, since I haven't been on her yet) reasons. If that ends up being the case, and if she ends up enjoying jumping and showing talent for it, and if I have my best jumping wingman on board to help me with her all the time, I'm not going to say no. Heck, all I've got is a jump saddle at home anyway since my Dressage saddle is with Connor, so may as well just roll with it.

I do know for a fact she is the undisputed side eye champion of the world 😂

Connor grows epic amounts of winter coat, as I've discussed.  And I do body clip him, but I leave his legs, because I don't show in the winter and therefore I don't care about aesthetics, and it just seems kinder to leave some hair there.

But that means every spring, there is one day where suddenly his legs go POOF and all the hair falls off at once, and I think "Oh my god, when did those chestnuts get THAT LONG?!"

The thing is - the winter coat hides them, REALLY well.  His undercoat even wraps around the base of it, making it deceptively difficult to see how big they really are until he sheds.  Here:

That's not so bad...

OMG

Since the first year this happened, I try to stay on top of peeling them back a little at a time over the winter, but they grow too fast and are too hard to keep up with (which is the reason the one above has a horn on it).  So this continues to happen, every spring.

This one looks really small...

...until you realize it's the chestnut equivalent of an iceberg

Does anyone else have that one day every spring where the chestnuts come up like daffodils and make you feel like a terrible groom?  Please tell me I'm not alone!

When I started full clipping Connor years ago, I usually did the first clip around October 15.  That seemed to be about when we had one final nice warm day before the forecast turned sharply colder, and it was the longest I could hold out before cooling him out after rides started taking forevvvvver.

But the past couple years...

#thanksglobalwarming

We just came off of our hottest and most humid October weekend in history, and that's becoming more the norm than the exception.  Connor's genetics did not prepare him for that, and I felt so bad for the little guy sweating just standing around that I went ahead and clipped last weekend.


I mean...at least he dries fast when it's pushing 90 and windy right?


I tossed around the idea of doing a blanket clip this year, but decided against it.  There's a chance we'll be doing some indoor schooling shows this winter, and we know we can keep him comfortable with a full clip even in the most brutal of winters, so there's really no reason to change it.

He genuinely already had a lot of coat going.

Connor's got a good sense of humor about just about everything, but after a bath, clipping and standing for brushing MTG into his tail, he was d-o-n-e with my reindeer games:

"...can I be done now?"

And since he'll be wearing at least a sheet by the end of the week...


...I went ahead and started his winter MTG routine.  Every winter he rubs the top of his tail on his blankets, but last winter I applied MTG to his tailbone and brushed it through his tail every 2-4 weeks.  It was the first winter he didn't rub his tail, so we're continuing that successful experiment this year.

And it doesn't look long in person but after seeing this picture I will probably be trimming it shorter this week too!

Anyone else clipping already?  Planning on a different clip this year?  What's some of your other winter horse grooming prep?

Austen taught me to do these braids a long long time ago (see her video tutorial here).  When you have a flaxen mane against a chestnut body, you have to get really good at braiding, because any braiding mistakes can be seen from a mile away.



I braid with yarn, although those Quick Knot pins Amanda reviewed a while back do just as good of a job.  I'm just way too attached to my zen meditation braiding time to give that up, plus yarn is cheaper over the long run.  But, the braids look just as good either way you do them, as shown by supermodel Castleberrys Gavin:


Even the forelock didn't suck, which like, I feel like I need to go buy a lotto ticket or something.  I am not good at forelocks.

He looks skeptical that I said his forelock looks good, can you blame him?  I've put him through a lot of shitty forelock braids over the years!

Informal poll!  When it comes to braids, are you a bands person, a yarn person, a QuickKnot person, a waxed thread person, or a something else person?

With the clinic coming up on Tuesday, I spent the entire day Saturday at the barn, first for a lesson and then to get a few odds and ends taken care of:

1. Finished mounting the panel the fan is hanging on in the below photo.  It's been partially complete since I put it up in October.


Not shown: added a foam bumper to the upper left corner of the chair rack so it wouldn't scratch the wall anymore.  Not noticeable: did some massive rearranging on the main wall.  I had some refining to do on my setup after living with it for six months.


2. Installed pipe insulation on the bottom of the swinging door to keep shavings out of the tack room.  Seriously could not have been cheaper.  $5 for two 6 ft sections of this stuff from Lowes, and it comes pre-sliced with adhesive on both sides.

When I got to the barn last night, I realized I'd forgotten my bridle at home.  I thought I might lunge instead, and then I saw my mud-covered, hairy, dirty, possibly feral horse:

Who you calling feral?

And remembered suddenly that The Clinic is one week from today.  Honestly with all of this new job stuff, I hadn't forgotten it was coming up, but I had forgotten it was so close.

Ombre highlights?  Nope, just mud on flaxen.

And I thought...maybe taking the night off to do some grooming isn't such a bad idea.

Just...how do they even do this?

Since they'll be in the rest of the week thanks to:

Deeeeeelightful.

I judged that it wasn't a total waste of time to do a first pass on feathers and tail.  So we did that and some mane pulling. 

Unfortunately there's nothing I can do about him looking like a moth-eaten mottled half-seal brown/half chestnut whatever he is right now as his summer coat starts to come in just the tiniest bit:

Or if you DO know of something I can do to make this look better, holla.  Wish he still looked like this:

This was good.

I also started to pull his mane.


It's not the last big grooming we'll do before next week, but we had to start somewhere as we come out of winter hibernation!

Much to Connor's Aunt Mary's chagrin, I am not the World's Greatest Groom.  Mary likes to keep her horses "a bath away from the hunter ring" and pretends to be mortified by Connor's feathers on a semi-regular basis.

Two years ago

But Mary's going to start being proud of me now.  I have a copy of Emma Ford's grooming book on order, and I also clipped for a third time last weekend, which I've never done before.

"...this again?"

I did it because the clinic will coincide with peak fugly coat time.  His summer coat won't have visibly come in yet, his winter clip is still obvious, and the grey guard hairs stand out like crazy.

Sexy grey hairs

With a little encouragement from some awesome bloggers, I committed to the third clip.  I'm glad I did.  This was about the latest I could do it and not significantly affect the summer coat, so I got on it.

Before

After

I...loved it.  I might be doing this every year.
This clip actually turned out the best out of all my clips this year, which is weird because he hasn't had a bath since October and it's the same two sets of blades I've been using all year.  The only thing I did differently was soak him in Vetrolin Shine Spray before I started.

NOW STAY THIS WAY!

My trainer agreed, and in her very British way, said, "This clip looks a lot better than your last clip."  Which translated means "Your last clip looked terrible and secretly drove me crazy but I didn't say anything."  I just laughed.  This is how we roll.  Outside the barn, we're great friends.  Inside the barn, I both try to be the easiest boarder ever and also push her buttons sometimes.  Life's about balance, right?

Everything turned out great, except when my trainer walked by with hay when I was doing detail work with my little clippers and he slung his head around and gave himself that beautiful black clipper mark.  It adds character?