Cob Jockey

On Wednesday night, Mary came down. Our plan, which we had been building Disco toward for two weeks, was to lunge him over a raised pole with me on his back to get him to (finally) canter under saddle.

"Keep an eye on the weather, there's a very slight chance of severe weather tonight," I told her as she left.

I'm a trained storm spotter with the National Weather Service - the kind of person who reads paragraphs of Forecast Discussion notes from meteorologists twice a day when they update the forecast just for fun. Total weather nerd. So I knew the risk was minimal to low on Wednesday, and I was aware, but not concerned.

Mary and I lunged him without a rider first, then we discussed the game plan as I got on his back. "Okay, you're going to be cuing everything, I'm just holding the lunge line. As you approach the fence, get in two point, put your leg in the canter cue position and use your voice to ask him to canter. If he canters, great, let him keep going as long as he wants, but it probably won't be long. And bring him back to a trot before the next fence if he gets that far. We'll do it a few times on one side and a few times on the other."

With that, I walked him onto the circle. We got exactly half a circle into it when the sirens went off:

I know you can't hear a GIF, but just before I stop him, loud tornado sirens start, Mary asks what I want to do, and I jump off casually saying "Let me look at the radar."

 

I jumped off and checked the velocity radar scans on my phone. Unlike the usual reflectivity radar that shows precipitation, this type of radar scan shows you whether winds are moving toward or away from the radar site. If they're moving both toward and away from the radar in a specific spot, that's rotation, and it shows up as the confluence of green and red in one spot. If it's strong rotation, that spot lights up brighter and brighter.

During a tornado warning we had had the previous week, I rolled over in bed, checked the velocity radar, saw a weak area of rotation on the other side of the county, and went back to sleep. 

This time, I checked the velocity radar and saw a bright, clear tornado signature heading straight for the barn. "We need to go NOW," I told Mary.

The tornado signature is the confluence of the red and the brightest green color, just down and to the right from the little tornado icon.

 

We rushed poor Disco into his stall, stripped his tack, left it on the ground, left all the lights on and booked it back to my house to get in the cellar.

When we came out of the cellar a half hour later after the storm had just passed, I stepped onto the front porch and heard the unmistakable roar of a tornado to the east, moving away from us. Like low, continuous thunder that didn't stop.

Yeesh.

 

During the damage survey the next day, the NWS found that an EF-2 with max winds of 112mph had passed just two miles away from us and was on the ground for 13 continuous miles. No one was hurt, but unfortunately a couple of farm families lost entire (non-animal) barns and grain siloes. How easily that could have been us! 

 

Red dot is the barn

My night wasn't over, since the power was out, and uh, it didn't look like it would come back anytime soon.

There's a whole row of these things bent over like this one mile from the farm.

 

The farm is on a well, and it only has about an hour's worth of water in reserve before the pump needs electricity to pull more up. Since we have auto-waterers that only keep a very small amount in the stalls and then fill continuously to add more while a horse drinks, this essentially means we NEED backup power for any outage lasting longer than an hour. 

For that reason, the barn owners put a permanent generator in that runs off a house-sized propane tank that sits off in the woods you can see in the distance below.

It's the beige box in the front landscaping.

My BO has always insisted they've never needed that generator in 18 years, that because they buried all of the power lines to the farm when they built it, power rarely goes out for more than an hour, and he does have a solid backup plan to use the water wagon to trailer some over from his house across the ravine if everything really goes to hell.

But I'm neurotic about horses, water, and climate change, so I insisted on getting the generator running last year, which thanks to Leah's husband and my SO (who both, conveniently, work for a diesel engine company and both, specifically, have a lot of generator experience, just usually more on the datacenter scale than the farm scale), we did exactly that last year.

I was so grateful to hear the roar of that thing Wednesday night and to watch the well pump pressure gauge go up when it needed to.

 

I started getting targeted advertising for generators two hours after some frantic texts and phone calls to my boarder and my SO as I stumbled through my first time running a generator, because of course I did.

Thankfully, the power came back on after about four hours, so it ended up just being a good test for the generator and for me knowing how to use it. I am so grateful it wasn't worse.

 

A house near the farm I pass pretty regularly

(Side note: the warning was issued at 8:16pm, and the tornado didn't hit until 8:44pm, giving Mary and I plenty of time to take shelter. Also, the warning polygon shape ended up precisely covering the exact path the tornado ended up taking. All that is to say, the NWS is AWESOME and has made such incredible forecasting advancements in the last 20 years especially, and anyone that wants to defund them is an absolute moron that doesn't understand the good work these people do for honestly pretty low pay given how many lives they save every year. Ahem.)

As much as I hate fall, (not because of anything fall does, but because of what it represents - winter coming), I can't deny that September skies in the Midwest are stunning. The trees are still green, the blue is so deep, and what better place to photograph it than the barn?

No filter on any of these, besides the usual overly aggressive Samsung post-processing, sigh.

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?

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!

Like many of you, we're stuck in a ridiculous heat wave right now, with temps some 15 or 20 degrees above normal.

Post-bath hand grazing

Instead of riding on Friday, we did a bath and hill walks.  Together.  In hand. #fitness

Sitting in my truck waiting on a marathon to pass so I could ride, and watching the temperature on my rearview mirror go up 10 degrees in the 45 minutes I sat there, ugh.

While a ton of photos of 1-1 will wrap up this post below, I only have a few pictures of 1-2 from Harmony because the weather during my test wasn't exactly conducive to photo taking:


This was taken after I had already done my first test.  Most of that fell during my warmup.  Let me tell you, warming up with water dripping down the brim of your helmet in soaking wet clothes is not fun.

It was my first time showing in truly inclement weather, and I was desperate to keep my CWD from getting more wet than it had to.  Yes, I know leather can get wet and be fine, but seriously, I sold half my worldly possessions and rode bareback for 3 months in order to afford this magical piece of French leather.  I can't afford to replace it, so I am going to be stupid particular about taking care of it.

Old photo of the saddle cover in action

So I warmed up in the waterproof rideable CWD saddle cover, and the heavens opened up.  I was soaked through, and the cover was soaked as well, though not slippery at all.  I didn't think there was any way the saddle was dry under what felt like standing water under my butt, but when I pulled the cover off right as I went into the ring, it was dry as could be under there.  So, two thumbs up, CWD!

Such a well-designed object

1-2 was, as it has been most of the year, the second highest 1-2 of the day and maddeningly mediocre from my perspective.  We scored a 66.8%, with a terse judge writing mostly one-word comments that she wanted "more" from everything.

PC: My mom.

The thing is, I agree with her, and I specifically wanted to work on getting him on my aids at this show before championships in two weeks and score the 70% I know we're capable of at home, with my trainer.

This is Connor saying "Why are we doing this...why am I so wet..." PC: My mom

Since he wasn't tired at all after 1-2, I decided on a nice long warmup for 1-1 so I would have all the time in the world to try all the things I knew to get him straight and "switched on" so I could then give this judge "more."

We practice like we show: since there was standing water in the show ring, I made him do that in the warmup too.  Bonus: all the DQ's avoided the standing water like the plague, so we had the area to ourselves. PC: Connor's breeder, Lisa Brezina

Lisa's favorite photo of the day, just as the storm was moving out. PC: Lisa Brezina

Spoiler alert: It did not work.  PC for the rest of the photos in this post to Lisa Brezina, except where noted.



The thing I notice in all of these pictures (and noticed under saddle too, but could not fix) is that his withers are never straight.  He's leaning in the entire thing, which of course means he's both not straight and not on my aids.  And my position is enabling him.  This is not new.  But it's so annoying that I felt it every step of that test and could not fix it.


He still loves the stretchy trot:

 Motorcycling:

We practice in lakes because we show in lakes.  Former eventers FTW.

Good pony.

Bit check is always interesting with this horse, given his phobia of people walking straight up to him, but luckily he didn't take offense to this older gentleman.


I was pretty down after that test.  I knew I didn't get done what I wanted to get done, I knew it wasn't as good as it could be, I knew it was the fault of my poor position, and seeing the pictures that confirmed it made me sad.  I was grateful for them, this is where we are, but at the same time, I felt like a terrible rider for not being able to get my position sorted out enough or warm my horse up well enough to get him on my aids.  The score wasn't bad, 65% and 3rd of 3, but I was beating myself up over it.

FBR was supposed to be painting fence at the barn that day, but due to the rain, she got to come watch!

But not the pony.  He was a good boy.  What a trooper!

Being majestic between classes. PC: My mom