Sooo HOT out

Yesterday was a good barn day. Sluggish because of the heat but we took good advantage of the sluggishness. My dad is in town and I took him out in a carriage ride. Reno was good and manageable. He didn't spook at any of the lawn equipment. He went basically where he was pointed. He barely jigged and only cantered a little bit in the expected places. My dad drove him for a little while and Reno didn't take massive advantage of the situation. Everyone enjoyed the ride out, especially my dad. It was pretty hot though and he had one more swim meet so we went in and ate the berries he brought out to the barn.

When he left, in an heroic act of discipline and heat resistance, I got star out. We've been working on cantering without pitching a fit, running away, or stopping dead and bucking. Today seemed like a good day to work on the running away part. She has basically stopped the whole 60-0 in 2 seconds thing. Today it was hot and we did circles. Well, circles in that we crossed the arena twice and we cut some of the corners. You couldn't really call them circles per se. Still, they slowed her down.

I did my level best to just focus on breathing and on sitting back. Getting too forward really irritates star. I expect her to deal with a certain amount of irritation, of course, but I'm trying to make this as un-irritating as possible for her while we work up to dealing with the more irritating stuff.

I usually wimp out of cantering in these sorts of situations. I do a circle or two and call it good and stop and pant. Today I circled and circled and circled. It was at least 60 seconds. Maybe more. I dont have a good sense of it. Star went at a perfectly reasonable speed, I would even say pretty balanced too. It wasn't really a very good circle, as I said before, but I was focused principally on breathing and sitting up. I was very minimally focused on steering. I was able to ignore speed control today because she wasnt racing around and she has pretty much given up stopping. At one point she broke down into a trot, I had my dressage whip, I cropped her, she bucked, and cropped her again and off we went. All this happened while Alyssa wasn't looking, giving us the appearance of an even better ride than we actually had!

We didn't get a chance to go the other direction, since we had to feed. So I want to work on going the other direction, her bad direction. I also want to work on this head tossing thing. She started tossing her head when we picked up the trot. Simmered down after a while and then when we picked up the canter lots of head tossing. With lots of head tossing interspersed throughout the ride. I'm worried something is hurting her. Alyssa said she didn't see anything, and thats saying something.

I think I'm going to do some canter work outside and see if she's still doing it. I think she likes being outside, she doesn't like closed in spaces. This makes me worry about whats going to happen when we go to foxfire farms (I almost called them firefox farms.) That arena is like a coffin with sand and a judge in it. It has one opening to the outside, through which all light comes in, and an opening into the stables, which are dark to supress grass growth on their dirt aisleways. No other windows at all. The corners of the arena are very dark. Its all very skeery. Oh well.

If she canters again on monday like she did yesterday I'm going to stop working on that so much and start focusing on the dressage test. I still want to do some canter work, of course. I want to do it outside though because in the arena, when we do a trot circle, I'd like her to keep it at a TROT god damn it.

Ok, time to do stuff.