Last week was a long and busy one at work, so I was pretty darn happy when Friday rolled around. Even better: they had Amy’s Ice Cream come in the afternoon for free sundaes! Not gonna lie, it was totally the highlight of my week. A scoop of Belgian chocolate and a scoop of Mexican vanilla with heath bar, oreos, m&m’s and hot fudge on the top. Yes, I’m trying to lose weight right now. No we’re not going to talk about it. Free ice cream doesn’t count.

Plus when I got home I found that my Interrupters album had come. It’s their debut album and I’ve been waiting a year for it to be released so I was pretty darn excited to find the LP and CD sitting on my doorstep. If you’re into punk or ska you should check them out… Tim Timebomb from Rancid co-produced the album and he’s in at least one of the tracks. You can listen to it here.

This weekend my lesson was on Saturday. I rolled out of bed at 6:30 Saturday morning and was delighted to find that a cold front had blown through. Look at what the temperature was when I got to the barn. In August. In Texas. Unbelievable. I was actually a little cold.

The lesson was pretty good. I kept my head straight this week but kept having to be reminded to keep my thumbs on top. One bad habit at a time I suppose. Lead changes were better though!

After several warmup jumps we had a pretty simple exercise that went something like this:

Jump 1 was about 2’6″, jumps 2 and 4 were 2’9″-3″ and jump 3 was a pretty good sized 3’3″ oxer with width to match. The turns weren’t super tight but there wasn’t a ton of extra room either. To get a good approach to 3 I had to jump 2 at an angle and go around a jump that was a few strides after it. The first time through I was good at 1 and 2 but I TOTALLY botched 3. I didn’t see any spot whatsoever so I did the (not at all) intelligent thing and whoaed like hell. How or why Henry actually jumped that fence I have no idea, but it was pretty much from a quarter stride spot with a barely cantering pace and me staring straight down at it. We landed in a big ugly heap, but he went and he made it across the jump without a problem. Generally he is not the type of horse to perform epic ass saves, especially at bigger (to us right now) oxers with zero momentum, so I was pretty amazed that he did it at all. I 100% thought he was going to stop. Trainer said “Good for your horse”. I agree… I was very proud of him for that. We finished the exercise without a problem then came back and did it again near perfectly and called it quits for the day.

I have to admit, I was way more proud of my horse’s epic ass save than I was about the fact that we did it correctly the second time. He showed a lot of maturity and good-hearted “ammy-proof” qualities with that one. He got a nice liniment bath and lots of booty scratches.

Saturday afternoon was filled with non-horsey activities, and I was so tired on Sunday I didn’t drag myself out to the barn until mid-morning. We managed a short easy hack followed by a long walk around the property then I grazed him for a while. He was mesmerized by Trainer’s horses on the automatic walker.

Then I started watching Sherlock on Netflix. Because of course I needed another nerdy obsession. Guess what I’ll be doing tonight while SO is at pinball?