It's our last day in Rome before we head out for Florence so I thought I'd put up a few pictures of my trip thus far. Because I don't have access to a real computer, I apologize for the jumble and lack of captions.
Also, I don't know if I ever mentioned this but I actually have a degree in Classics and a double minor in History and Latin so this is pretty much the best place ever! Most of the time, I feel like a tour guide for my poor mother since I drone on and on about all the monuments and architecture and art. She just keeps asking me if we're going to see "another ruin". :)
Although this will probably be my last post before I leave for Italy tomorrow, I don't actually have anything big to say. Sunday was the last day that I made it to the barn as this week has been crazy for me trying to prepare to leave and get all my schoolwork done. I do have my lesson tonight, and it will probably be a jump lesson so hopefully we can improve a little bit on my position over crossrails. I thought I had it last week (or at least my instructor led me to believe that I was improving!) but after watching the video I took of myself over the weekend, I obviously just resort to my bad habits when I am not being supervised by someone!
On the weekend when Walker was lame, I talked to one of the kids at the barn about stretches. She suggested I pick up a copy of this book and I'm quite impressed. There are lots of great stretches in the book for before, after and during the ride, and the book also explains various sweat and muscle patterns to help you better determine if your horse is in shape and using himself correctly. I'm excited to be able to incorporate some of it all into my rides when I get back from my trip.
Other than that, I am in serious pain. Although my chest cold generally cleared up about a week ago, the cough never entirely went away. Unfortunately, I started to get a serious pain in my chest and so I spent 7 1/2 hours at the emergency room Tuesday night waiting to find out what was wrong. The doctor told me that he thinks I pulled/tore a muscle around my lungs from all the coughing, but unfortunately, the only thing he could recommend was taking advil as often as the bottle recommends. :( Needless to say, I don't think the lesson is going to be a very good one. Either I am going to be in pain from all the movement and twisting and turning, or else I am going to start coughing in the dusty cold air again (and coughing always results in the most pain). So it is very possible that I won't actually make it through the entire lesson or else that I will decide not to jump.
The only reason I'm going is because I'm going to miss next Wednesday because of my trip, and the last time I saw him was on Sunday. If I skip tonight, he probably won't get lunged or ridden by D until the weekend, meaning that he will have had an entire week off, and to make matters worse, I won't get to see him for over 2 weeks! I don't think I can leave the country without at least one more kiss on that soft nose of his!
Unfortunately, Walker was lame yesterday and today. He went outside yesterday morning, and I think that he was so excited that he ended up hurting himself. I decided to stop riding when I felt it because Walker is generally not a faker, or at least he hasn't pulled that on me yet. I thought he would be better today, but he was still feeling off in his left front. I decided to ride him for a half hour anyway to see if he would work himself out of it. He didn't. So after we had trotted and cantered for just a little bit, I ended up putting him away.
I was pretty disappointed especially since this weekend was supposed to be my last rides (other than my lesson on Wednesday) before March Break.
Because I'm going to Italy for March Break! I'm very excited, and although I'm sad to leave my baby behind, it should be a lot of fun. I will be checking my blog and other blogs regularly (probably), and hopefully I will have some nice pictures to post.
Gracie - one of the school ponies who needs exercise
While I'm gone, D is going to look after Walker for me. She's going to lunge him or ride him every other day to make sure that he gets his exercise. It turns out that D is going to be quite busy over March Break. With our trainer pregnant, our barn owner needs a few more people to help out with riding some of the school horses. Apparently some of them have been quite crazy in lessons and simply require a little more consistent work. There are 3 of them that need to be ridden 5 days a week, so I think I'm going to offer to help out after I get back. However, over March Break, D will be riding 7 horses all week! She will have her own horse, Starr, as well as Walker and another boarder's horse, Izzy, since Izzy's owner is also going on vacation. She is going to be riding the 3 school horses, and my trainer also wants her to put a few miles on another horse that they are trying to sell. She should be thoroughly exhausted!
Hopefully Walker will be good for our jump lesson on Wednesday. I don't want to jump him if he's still a little lame, but I think he should work himself out of it by then.
Walker undoing the knots that are keeping him from freedom
Walker's mane - I was hoping it would be long and flowy before Spring so that I could cut it and know what his wild side looked like. Instead, it's just scraggly and the scissors will be coming out soon
I didn't go out to the barn on Thursday like I normally do because I really had to get a handle on the state of my apartment. I was sick all last week and busy all this week. There was no food to speak of, everything was dirty, and I really just had to have a night to sit down and organize my life.
Today I decided that we would work on my jump position. After I warmed him up a little bit, we set up some crossrails and went over them a couple of times. Then, for my own pleasure, I decided to see if Walker could/would jump a 2 foot vertical. Can I just say that my horse is a saint? The first time we went over it, I definitely caught him in the mouth, added no extra leg, and was pretty much an uncoordinated monkey on his back. He asserted his opinion of this by stopping the next two times I asked him to try it. Luckily, they were by no means "dirty" stops - more like "hell no, you crazy" stops. Then the last time, he graced me with a nice little jump and I tried to reciprocate by, you know, being more helpful.
I wish his body wasn't swung away from me, otherwise it would've made a better conformation shot
I have to say that I was pretty proud of him. And now that I know that he can/will jump that high, I have something to work towards, and we can go back to our crossrails! He definitely knocked the poles each time, but he was pretty exhausted by then. I have faith that even if he never has the talent to do a full course at that height, he may be able to jump a little higher at least once or twice in a row (dare I say, 2'6?). But I digress.
I took some video of our jumping today, and I managed to upload it online. Fair warning though: I don't know why, but youtube added a green streak along the bottom of the video which is wildly distracting. I also suggest turning the sound off. I couldn't figure out how to do that on my own, but all you will hear in the background is hooves and my occasional lung-hacking cough. For the record, my video camera works fine. It's my lovely dying laptop which can't seem to handle videos of any kind. At least I got it uploaded - for the first time ever! Sigh.
Can't pull a fast one on Walker! He always has to be the centre of attention. And he usually is
Anyway, if you can manage to bear through the video (really, the green is the most distracting thing in the world), you will see at the beginning how he likes to pick up a canter closer to the jumps, but as he grows tired, he stops doing that. At the end of the video, he just trots them. This is pretty much how our lessons go as well. I didn't set up any trot poles today because I wanted to work on other things, but I definitely think I'm going to start incorporating more poles before the jumps to see if I can stop him from doing this.
Also, keep in mind that I have had approximately 3-4 official jump lessons, and my position/form is trash. I'm sure another thing you will notice is how low Walker's head is. My instructor is afraid that jumping will undo his Western Pleasure training, but I don't see that happening anytime soon. It doesn't seem to bother him to trot/canter into the jump hanging his head low, and I can't seem to convince him that this is not a good idea. You should also know that this is the highest his head is ever at. Oh well. At least he's trying.
We were supposed to get a snowstorm yesterday, but for whatever reason, I guess it decided to bounce over us. I skipped my last class anyway because it kept threatening freezing rain. I decided to run out to the barn in the afternoon to lunge Walker in anticipation of him being a crazy man in the lesson. After all, the last time I officially rode him was Friday, even though I did free lunge him on Sunday.
Walker was in a pretty bad mood for that. He actually turned on the lunge line so that his butt was facing me as though he were going to kick out at me! Ummm. Excuse me. In what universe did you think that was ok! He's never done anything like that before, but he only did it once! I made him regret it immediately.
When I came back for my lesson, it ended up being just two of us. Walker wasn't hyper at all and frankly didn't need to be lunged. The warm temperatures seemed to make him lazy and he made me work for every step. Every so often, he'd get a little burst of energy and try to canter and then think better of it and slow to a walk. In the lesson we worked on turns on the haunches and turns on the forehand (kind of).
We weren't going to jump because snow was coming off the roof, but Walker isn't very spooky and the temperatures were dropping and solving that problem. Walker was much straighter in his jumping today but my position still has a lot to be desired. Either I am bending too far forward (and my legs are going back), or I'm taking my leg off when I should be applying it. Walker is also rushing the jumps a little bit. He's still trying to get his balance, and for whatever reason, he didn't want to trot the jump, only canter it. I think this is my fault because I let him canter the jumps when I practice on my own time, but my instructor is afraid that it will become a bad habit, so I'm going to have to work on keeping his pace consistent to the jump. I find it difficult because he'll have a nice speed and then we round the corner and he slows down so I apply leg and he sees the jump and doesn't go back up to a nice trot, he just bursts into a canter and by then it's too late to try and stop him. I appreciate his enthusiasm. I just don't want him to start rushing fences early on. I'm going to have to lay down the law!
I caught Walker laying down in his stall today. For the first time ever. Yeah, that's right. In the entire 11 months I've had him, I have never seen him laying down - not in his stall, not in the paddock, never. The other day I walked in and I know he was laying down because I heard him get up, but I never actually saw it.
Today, however, he was laying down in his stall and let me go in with him. He was kind of moaning and groaning a little bit, but he put his head in my lap and let me give him lots of love. It was pretty cute. Other than the moaning and groaning of course which worried me a little bit. So after I reveled in the moment, I made him get up just to satisfy me that he wasn't sick.
I was still feeling sick again today so I didn't plan to ride. D and J were there (whose horses I rode earlier in the week), and so we decided to turn them out together in the indoor arena. This may have been a bad idea because all though all three of them have been turned out together before and Walker and Starr are turned out together regularly, Walker was clearly in a bad mood. There was some hay in the arena and he refused to share with the other two, which caused a mass upheaval. We three were actually in the arena with them and had to crawl up on top of the therapeutic mounting block to stay out of the way of flying hooves and galloping horses. I'm sure they get into arguments like that all the time, but usually Walker is the friendliest horse ever. I've actually never seen him kick another horse, let alone find any kick marks on his body. We managed to split them up, and that was that. It was probably the dynamic of three horses in a small enclosed space in the middle of a blizzard that set them off.
After that, we set up the arena so that we could free lunge. I didn't do much of that with Walker because it turned out that in his argument with the other horses, he crashed into a bunch of jump standards and had a little cut on his leg. I let him run for a little bit but then I decided to clean it out and put some ointment on it. Mommy to the rescue!
Anyway, you know how when you free lunge a horse, they will eventually come to you in the middle and follow you around. Well, when I do this with Walker, he will follow me no problem, but only at a walk. D can get Starr to follow her at a trot, but Walker is simply too lazy. Tabu, on the other hand, will follow J at a canter. I mean, she can run as fast as she can around the arena and he will canter after her. He will canter after anyone, and when we discovered this, we played Tag with Tabu which was both fun and terrifying. There's nothing like having a horse right behind you going full speed to make you question your sanity!
This is what he does within seconds of me attaching one crosstie: smell everything in his vicinity
So in some ways I am feeling much better but in others I am still pretty under the weather. I went out to the barn today anyway, even though I knew that the dust and cold air would continue to irritate my nasty cough, but I only rode for 35 minutes because of it.
We didn't do too much because I kept stopping to hack up a lung, but I did work on some halt to canter transitions which weren't that bad, after he got the silliness out of his system (i.e. after he stopped trying to see how much trotting he could get away with instead). We didn't really do that much cantering because he wasn't feeling particularly frisky, and I continue to feel so wore down from the week. We did maybe a couple circles in each direction, a couple half circles when we were doing the transitions, and a few loose rein circles. Nothing to write home about.
Even though I was still feeling yucky, I decided to throw up a crossrail. Days ago, when I thought I would be better for today, I was going to put up two crossrails to practice with, but since I barely had any energy, I just kept it to one. We trotted it a couple times each way, and I cantered him a few times as well. For the first time ever, he actually took the jump from a long spot (or this is what I assume happened since no one was around to explain it to me!) and I now understand why it is a good thing to learn distances. Poor patient pony may have got jabbed in the mouth on that one. But in my defense, up until now, if he didn't think he could make it with as little effort as possible, he would just break into a trot and go over it so I really wasn't expecting him to go for it. In a way, I guess it means he's warming up to the idea of jumping. He's starting to feel braver!
Because I only rode for a short amount of time, I decided to turn him out in a little paddock with one of the horses that has the heaves and is currently living outside to manage it. The horses didn't get outside today simply because my trainer had an appointment and was rushed for time, but there was no reason that he couldn't go socialize. While he made friends, I did part of the chores so that there would be less to do when my trainer's husband arrived to feed.
Also, as you can see from the photo above, Walker now has mismatched fuzzies. I don't know if any of you use fuzzies on your halters, but I find that the halter rubs Walker without them. He had lovely bright blue ones but he must have got a little rough with the other horses because he broke 2/3 of them. My friend got him a green halter for Christmas so we got green fuzzies to match it. Unfortunately, it turns out that the halter doesn't fit (even though it's horse sized and Walker is by no means a giant). So I had to improvise and use the two green fuzzies with the blue one. After all, I couldn't put three green fuzzies on a burgundy/red halter. Christmas is over. :P
Unfortunately, Walker was lame yesterday and today. He went outside yesterday morning, and I think that he was so excited that he ended up hurting himself. I decided to stop riding when I felt it because Walker is generally not a faker, or at least he hasn't pulled that on me yet. I thought he would be better today, but he was still feeling off in his left front. I decided to ride him for a half hour anyway to see if he would work himself out of it. He didn't. So after we had trotted and cantered for just a little bit, I ended up putting him away.
Even though I was still feeling yucky, I decided to throw up a crossrail. Days ago, when I thought I would be better for today, I was going to put up two crossrails to practice with, but since I barely had any energy, I just kept it to one. We trotted it a couple times each way, and I cantered him a few times as well. For the first time ever, he actually took the jump from a long spot (or this is what I assume happened since no one was around to explain it to me!) and I now understand why it is a good thing to learn distances. Poor patient pony may have got jabbed in the mouth on that one. But in my defense, up until now, if he didn't think he could make it with as little effort as possible, he would just break into a trot and go over it so I really wasn't expecting him to go for it. In a way, I guess it means he's warming up to the idea of jumping. He's starting to feel braver!
