Cob Jockey

 The other thing we did with Eva last week was turn her into a sport horse. As opposed to a reiner.

Before

Lisa intentionally left this mane on her because she knew Mary and I would turn it into a good before/after photo, as we did with Aeres and Encore before Eva. And because Mary positively itches if a horse isn't "a bath away from the show ring." So the very first day she met Eva...

It needed to be cut before it could be pulled, but we didn't try pulling. She's sensitive, for all the good parts of that and all the bad parts of that, and sounds in particular seem to be a lot for her. Including the sound of the scissors. Pulling seemed like it would be asking a lot.

(Although as I write this post, I remember that her full sibling Encore also hated the sound of the scissors but fell asleep for pulling so...maybe I'll give that a shot soon.)

This was also the first time I had crosstied her after learning from Leah that she had been crosstied by her friends before, and she stood reasonably still for 20-30 minutes during all this, so I have no complaints.

In the end, not only did she end up looking a lot better, she also has to feel better having all that hair off her neck in the hot Indiana summer.

On Sunday, Mary finally made it down to visit Disco at home! She hadn't seen him in person since her trip to Lisa's in May.

Part of the reason she wanted to come down is she couldn't wait a moment longer to give me my Christmas present, which is a backpack cooler with a tap on it, hahaha. Going to be rolling in style for horse shows next year!

Not that my barnmates aren't willing to help me with him, but nobody gets me and my intentions for Disco the way Mary does! It was great to have her there as a second set of hands, and also to sponge up her baby training knowledge.

Disco: "Who is this lady and what is she doing?"

See in college, Mary and I both took a class in halter breaking baby horses for outside clients, only our year they tried to give us all Mustangs from Ewing...but Ewing had a Strangles outbreak right before we were supposed to get our weanlings. Mary ended up with a sweet little QH foal for an outside client, and I ended up with a 3 year old Mustang straight off the range.

Mary ended up getting her baby, Elmo, not only halter broken but also wearing a Thoroughbred exercise saddle, trailer loading, jumping into the feed cart on command, and ground driving literally all over campus by the time he was not quite a year old. Meanwhile, I ended up able to do almost nothing with my Mustang, who was later deemed not adoptable by Ewing.

So while we both got the classroom education, she is much more experienced with getting baby horses to be solid citizens than I am, so I appreciate all the help she gives me!

We started out in the indoor, where she wanted to introduce the lunge whip and introduce him to the idea of a human having control of and moving his body even when he wasn't on a line. She wanted him to start to understand the correlation between the whip position and being asked to walk, trot and whoa. He was...not fussed about it, lol.

 

We also walked him over raised poles for the first time and worked on trotting in hand with a whip behind him (not that he needs the encouragement, but to get him used to it for future lunging) and he did great with both.

With his baby patience for arena games waning, we put him back into his stall for some grooming time. Mary decided to tackle his mane, which to this point I've suffered from inertia on learning how to deal with. It is THICK and textured and OMG what am I going to do with this, lol.

Ahhhhhhhhh

I'm starting to have mixed feelings on mane pulling (story for another day) so she used a new thinning and shortening comb I just got while I stood next to him (he was fake tied to the wall) and distracted him. 

 

It turned out really good! I'll probably try the same comb on Connor this winter and will see how I feel about braiding that in the spring, which was always my biggest complaint with the Solocomb I used to have.

He really looks like a lot more of an adult with his shortened mane. At least, you can see glimmers of the adult he'll be someday here and there.

I love having my best wingman so close!

On Easter Sunday, I pretty much had the barn to myself on a day with picture perfect spring weather. First I had yet another gloriously amazing ride, and then I turned my attention to cleaning Connor up ahead of our first couple of shows of the season - which his Aunt Mary was delighted by.

First up, a mane pull. 

Before

After

Next, I waffled on this, but I decided to take his feathers off again this year. He'll have enough grown back by October when the next Welsh show is, and we're battling winter scurf AGAIN on the hinds. It'll make it easier to treat, and also will be a little more Dressage appropriate than his sad little wisps are.

Getting better at this, but dang it's so hard on a horse with THIS MUCH leg hair year round

Coming out of winter looking pretty darn good!

Eat your heart out, Mary B!

Bring on show season!

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!

Before

And sometime it's just nice to stand there and feed him cookies every so often for an hour instead of making him do stuff.

Trainer: "Hey, long time no see, are you riding tonight?"
Me: "Well I was going to, then I got here and realized that if I don't pull his mane before Friday, you won't let me ride in the Jean Luc Cornille clinic."

She laughed, because it's both funny and true.  I mean...I wouldn't have let myself ride in the clinic like this either, let's be real:

Uh, yeah.  I have no excuses for this.

So I hosed him and put two fans on him in the wash rack while I got to work. And ended up giving him a full bath and doing his tail too, because Nick's once again traveling for business (he's been working from home for the last seven months), so spending a long evening at the barn seemed like a good move.

This is how we deal with 90F and 99.99999% humidity.

Much more socially acceptable.

He had been a good boy standing for the bath and mane pulling, so I put him in his stall to comb out his tail, along with a ghetto stall guard so he could look at absolutely nothing to his heart's content.  Which he loves to do:

Since my suddenly very busy barn and trainer are short on open lesson times (she typically only teaches private lessons), tonight's makeup lesson involved crashing EquiNovice's weekly lesson!  Thanks for letting me crash!

I took one really blurry picture of her, which she'll probably post to her blog too, because this is what we must do for photos around here.

It was a continuation of and expansion on my last lesson, but now Connor's really getting the message about tempo being set in my core and I can do some serious work on both of our body positions.

Biggest revelations were:
- Putting my outside leg on was instant magic in every direction.
- When she told me to "sit neutrally", it was a good prompt phrase for me to remember to drape my legs around him and check for evenness in both seatbones.  If I expect his back to carry me evenly (this is the point of all this) I have to do my part there too.
- I was bracing with my legs a lot, which made me not really sit in the saddle.  I thought about Sally Swift's "stubby legs" to correct that.  When I did, he slowed down and relaxed.
- When I stopped bracing with my legs, I suddenly understood the whole "asking for the bend from the upper inside of your thigh" thing.  I couldn't apply my thigh to his side with my leg where it normally is.

But let's be real, my biggest accomplishment this week is that his mane is still all on one side 24 hours after being pulled, with no braids or neck cover.  I WIN, MANE!

We moved on to trotting tonight in the same exercise, and it took a while for him to stop being fussy in the bridle and throwing in a hop step every so often, but we got there.

EquiNovice and I also got to bumble through baby half pass together!  It was both Connor and I's first time trying it.  At that same slow but impulsive walk, my trainer had us do shoulder in, ask for half pass, shoulder in, half pass.  I could feel Connor trying to puzzle it out at first.  Surprisingly, he was really good at it in what I consider to be his bad direction, in which I really have to work for good bend.

My crowning achievement.  It's been three years since it all laid on one side!

At the end, my trainer asked me if I had internalized the lesson enough to do things correctly on my own.  I said  "You're seeing me each of the next two days, I don't have an opportunity to do it wrong!"

Boot camp is great!

Thanks to living in Indy all this week, I get to see my horse nine days in a row.  That's a new record, previous record was I think 5 days in a row for the actual 3 day event we did last June.

He's probably going to get sick of me.

"Yep, sick of you."

You'll notice that his mane did get pulled this week though!  Spring has sprung.

Since I'm seeing him so much this week, and since our homework was picky Dressage work, I knew I had to pop him over a few fences yesterday night before our boot camp.  Over the next three days we have THREE LESSONS!  I knew all those subzero nights of missed lessons would pay off sometime.

Awkward Dachshund Stance.

He was so happy.  He's content to think and use himself in Dressage, but when we took the first fence, his ears pricked and he really got in front of my leg.  We didn't do much, since he's getting so many rides this week, but we did enough to remind him that there's more to life than thinking very carefully about where to place each foot.

I also got asked "So what's up with Connor's hairdo?"

Half-pulled here.

So not only do I have an appropriately sized black girth and some black leathers waiting for me at home, I also now have a socially acceptable looking horse.   Everybody party!

After Tuesday's not-so-great ride, I was hoping Thursday's lesson would be better since it was the last one I'd have until my trainer returns from Florida in March, but he was still blah.  Focused this time, but dull.  We decided that Sunday's trainer ride and the wild temperature swings were to blame for his malaise, and we didn't push it too hard.  

A week that included more overtime and an overnight conference in Indianapolis at which I presented about my Tintri SAN to a bunch of Indiana government IT directors has ended, and I finally saw Connor today.  Not only that, but now that we have solved the two simultaneous problems of our email addresses getting blacklisted due to a botnet on a PC somewhere on the network spewing spam email, and some Russians doing a dictionary attack on our public safety software, and two of my domain controller servers contacting Romanian servers for reasons no one was clear on, I think next week might be my first week without overtime in six weeks.

Read: WOO HOO!

Here, have a cute Bitsy photo for surviving that boring paragraph:


Tonight I tried on the horse-sized black bridle that Heidi generously offered to give me (thank you so much, Heidi!), and I do believe it will work nicely after I punch one more hole on the cheekpieces.  He definitely needed a horse-sized browband, this fits much better on him than my Havana bridle.  He's awkwardly between cob-sized and horse-sized as far as bridles go - cob bridles fit tightly/on the last hole in some places (throatlatch, browband) but perfectly in others (noseband, cheek pieces).  I think I'll end up doing a mix-and-match bridle someday.

Heidi also surprised me by including a fantastic Dressage pad, white with black piping, that I don't have any photos of because I rode him with the bareback pad tonight, but it's in perfect condition and a great fit on him!  After getting a $1k+ plumbing bill this morning and knowing we have some upcoming medical bills, I am grateful to have blog friends like Heidi - I think if I so much as received a letter from SmartPak right now my husband would be shaking his head.


Finally, since it was relatively nice out today (read: 40's and not snowing, unlike most of the rest of March...WHY), I pulled his mane.  You want to know what makes mane pulling go a lot quicker?  Having a horse that's missing six inches of mane:

Glass is always half-full, people.

New growth!   I see it!

I know it looks like I didn't do a good job of evening the length, but trust me, when half of it flops over to the other side of his neck like it unavoidably does, and half of it sticks straight out from his neck, it'll look perfect.

I've missed having time to comment on everyone's blogs, though I've been reading on my phone when I get a chance here and there.  Hope you're all still out there and doing well!