I'd been busy with finals all week but went out late Friday to grab my riding stuff at the least. I chatted with Robert for a while. He suggested turning ponies out in the arena to stretch their legs.

So I grabbed Reno and we death marched to the arena. He got the saddest look on his face when we stepped into the slush, dropped his head down, and trudged. Poor pony. He couldn't believe EVERYTHING was wet.

I turned him out and he was pretty cute. There was the normal galloping up and down, a little bucking, and then.... cantering. He did very cute twenty meter canter circles down at the western end of the arena for probably ten minutes, very nice bend around the open side. When he had walked for a few minutes and stopped huffing and puffing, I went out to go catch him. He started up his canter circles for a while, getting smaller and smaller as I got closer, then bolted "past" me to the gate. He stood there in the corner til I came up to halter him. He looked a little uneasy, but he figured he had trapped himself in a corner and if I was gonna eat him, so be it. He was really full of himself walking back, he barely noticed the snow.

Next up was Keno. He came in without me having to go in the mud (yay!) and threw a bit of attitude in the arena at first. I'm not dumb, I grabbed a lunge whip before I let him go. He was lazier than his brother but did some galloping up and down. He started to charge me once but quickly decided that would end worse for him than for me. So he contented himself with cantering into the gate corner, stopping, trotting out of it, cantering back in, etc. There was a mounting block in the way, so instead of avoiding it he would swing his legs around it. Predictably, he wasn't paying attention when he was cantering out of the corner, smacked his legs on the block, and tripped. He was pretty sure it was my fault.

When I caught him we did a little mounting block work and he was fine. It's probably different when he has tack on and thinks he might get ridden, so I should do that someday when it's warmer.

At this point I was unconvinced I still had feet or hands, so I put him back and went into the trailer for a while. I came out when Robert came back with bedding and swept the aisle, then helped him unload the bedding. We had a bit of time before we fed and turned Luca out.

That pony is an athletic little thing. Watching some of the bucks he threw, I think he was being kind to me when we were riding. His movement's gorgeous, he put in some nice rollbacks too. Robert was tossing cones at him to get him to run a little more, which Luca was thrilled with. I really want to ride him again. There's a saddle fitting at Mt. Hood at the end of January that we're going to go to, and at least get an idea of what size saddle he needs so we can restart him. The other option is driving him hard earlier that day, then riding bareback later, which I'm not opposed to. He's got a big barrel so I can grab on, and he's also not very far from the ground (shh. Don't tell him that.).

Robert tried to catch Luca and Luca ran. I cheated: Luca went to the manure bucket and started sniffing, so I walked up and grabbed his halter, then walked over to Robert with him. Robert said it figures he'd let a girl catch him. I think Luca was just playing with Robert. That pony and I get along pretty well generally, though, so who knows.

I've been having a strange urge to just hop on ponies in the arena, with or without a lead rope attached to them. It's a dumb urge and other than Star I've managed to resist, but holy crap is it ever powerful. You have no idea how much I wanted to do that when I caught Luca. We could go galloping from one end of the arena to the other, and then I could go headfirst into the wall when we did a sliding stop. It'd be awesome.