Doing surprisingly little, yet keeping somewhat busy

Its been a sortof slow time around the barn. We've completely abandoned the project of rehabilitating Colonel, which I should talk about some other time. I rode Lady around to see if she was opposed to being ridden even though she had a slight limp at the trot. She seemed fine with it, but she wanted to kill seabreeze. I'm not going to ride her again I think, until I can trot her around to take the edge off her. She likes to flip her head a lot. Ian (previous rider) had been using a running martingale do deal with this. God (and everyone who's read some of my previous posts) knows that I don't have any problem with running martingales. However, the fact that Ian used it is probably by itself a deterrent to me. Plus, Ian used it and she's still doing it. She did it with him in it too, but then she stopped. Still, every day she flipped her head at him, sometimes she'd flip it more. Papillon flips her head when she wishes I would let her trot. I think that with consistent work Lady would stop, the same way Papillon does (I swear, Alyssa, with consistent work she stops doing that sort of thing, mostly.)

I rode Papillon for 3.2 miles yesterday at a walk. Not that this caused her to be any quieter when we came back. I cantered her around in the outdoor arena. This wasn't the smartest thing I ever did but I figured she would realize that she wasn't interested in working as hard as she thought she was. What actually happened was that she slipped in the mud, scared herself, and was quite content to walk after that. Walk fast, but a walk. That wasn't really the teaching moment I was hoping for. This possibility occurred to me, of course, and so I'm declaring this a net-gain-ergo-no-foul sort of situation. Papillon was basically sound today, although she got a bute yesterday so its not quite as surprising or encouraging. Still, its at least a little surprising and a little encouraging. 

I havent done anything with Star. I thought about lunging her over a cavaletti, mostly for entertainment. Turns out all of our cavaletti's are broken. Great. For actual under saddle jumping it doesn't matter, we have jumps we can set pretty low, but for lunging it sucks. You can do the thing where you use another pole to guide the rope up over the jump. That doesn't really work in this situation, for a variety of reasons. I'll have to nag Robert.

Also, I passed the torch on to Alyssa. Rather, I passed Dylan. Alyssa adopts these guys so fast, its really heartwarming. Dylan is cute, but I like my mares. She taught him to crosstie today. I can just see them riding around together. I suspect he'll be riding before he's driving. I think that its easier to train a driving horse once they've been ridden, and we can help more with that than we can with the cart stuff. Robert has basically finished the house now, so he'll have oodles of time, right? If I had a dollar for every time he used the phrase "as soon as I get this house finished..." let me just say we wouldn't be riding the bus to the barn. 

There are two new arrivals at the barn, an appaloosa (Spot) and a belgian/paint/arabian cross (Bella, looks like a shrunken down belgian) have arrived. We've got permission to ride them. Their owners are, um, less experience horse people. I think it would be fun to try out Bella. We've got the owners blessing, but we have to build a bridle for her. Shouldn't be too hard. Spot is too skinny to be ridden right now IMO, this doesn't stop them but Alyssa witnessed this and I didn't so she can say more.

I will be coming to the barn on Monday to do stuff, but starting Tuesday its all job search all the time. Plus a little housework and I'm taking over the kittens from Alyssa. Mostly job search. Once I've got a job I'll start coming back to the barn. With a different schedule, obviously. Eventually though, maybe I'll have a car, which means our schedule will look very different.