Month: January 2015

I’m on my way to freezing cold Philly this morning for AETA! Yes I packed every long sleeve shirt and jacket that I own, which juuuust fits in a carry on, puffy jacket and vest included. I fear I am woefully unprepared. Oh well, we’ll call it an arctic adventure and keep the heat cranked in the hotel.

I wish I could say I had super detailed info on the daily omeprazole like I did with last weeks update, but basically it rained buckets last Fri/Sat, then we moved barns on Sun, then I didn’t go the barn Mon/Tues. So… I’ll just write what I can. He is super easy to dose and has been all along so I won’t even bother saying how we was for that part anymore. It must not taste that bad because he takes it willingly enough and swallows it on his own now.

Day 15 – Groomed

Really I just scrubbed the bird poop off his head (seriously), picked his feet, gave him his omeprazole, and left. He was pretty cheerful.

Day 16 – Groomed

Again “groom” is probably not quite accurate, I knocked the dust off with a towel (he didn’t protest, but he was also preoccupied with his rice bran) and gave him his omeprazole.

Day 17 – Moving day

He very happily and enthusiastically grazed for a while before we loaded up. He settled in really well but I still gave him a little bit extra of his meds that day, especially since it was still too wet for them to go out. Plus we did go on Walkabout and he chomped like hell on his bit for the first half, so although he didn’t express it beyond that, it did stress him out a little.

Day 18 – No barn

He still got his meds (YAY, a BO who can be trusted to give a horse it’s meds!)

Day 19 – No barn

He still got his meds (YAY, a BO who can be trusted to give a horse it’s meds!). It was also dry enough for them to be turned out. According to BO he ran a few mighty impressive laps around his turnout and then settled down into the round bale, which is pretty much where he’s been ever since.

Day 20 – Groomed and rode

What? I ride? Sometimes. He was good for grooming and tacking up, but I wore spurs which was a mistake. If he’s kinda fresh and you wear spurs, he just gets SUPER oversensitive and tight and backwards. That was my stupid mistake. Halfway through I ditched the spurs and he got better, but still never really felt that relaxed.

Day 21 – Groomed and rode

I think he has readjusted to life as a horse with lots of turnout, a round bale, and a buddy, because when I went to bring him in for dinner he was pretty much passed out asleep in the sun. I was slightly alarmed for a second because normally he comes to me in the pasture, but once I went and got him and he realized I had cookies he perked right up. I rode him in his sidepull and decided to jump him, since the day before he just kind of caved in on himself mentally, and the sidepull + jumping is his favorite thing. He was really fantastic in the flatwork and jumped everything in the ring without a second glance, including the skinny off a tight turn and a vertical on a pretty sharp angle. He was happy, he was bright, and didn’t even so much as flick an ear when I groomed him. He would like to petition USEA to allow bitless dressage, please.

Summary of week 3: he definitely remains better to groom and has started to put some bloom back on. Sometimes I think I definitely feel a difference under saddle, other days not. One more week on the 4x treatment dose, then 2 more weeks on the 2x.

I have noticed a definite trend lately in the collections from many equestrian apparel companies: lace.

Aztec Diamond has it on breeches

and a shirt

Valentine Equine clearly loves lace and has several shirts with it, ranging from more basic

to much more bold

while Fior da Liso‘s Lacie shirt is more subtle.

Even bigger companies like Equine Couture

Horseware

Animo

and Cavallo have items with lace.

There are also lace stock ties, ranging from a whole lot of lace like this one from Dameron

to just a hint of lace like this one from ShowChic

How about a show coat with lace on the collar like this one from Kentucky?

or lace boot socks, like these from Ariat

who also has a lace vest

You can even get a lace HELMET from KEP!

What do you think of the lace trend… would you wear any of these items? Personally I’m a huge fan of lace in general and would definitely like to have some of these things, but others are a bit too much even for me. I’d love to see more companies play around with lace on breeches… maybe just a little touch of it on the pockets? Especially if it was combined with leather – maybe lace backing on the pocket area and leather piping on the pocket edge? Someone get me a sewing machine. And fabric. And a person that can sew. And a designer.

On Sunday after we finished moving the boys and unpacking/arranging all of our stuff at the new place, the BO invited us to go on “walkabout” with her and another boarder. The barn is off in the back county roads where there isn’t really much traffic, so they often go on rides down the road. When I was a working student at an eventing barn on the east coast most of the horses regularly did road work at least twice a week (by “work”, I mean we would walk through the neighborhood next door for half an hour or so). The science is that a little bit of conditioning work on hard surfaces helps build bone density and strengthen tendons and ligaments. It seems more common in Europe than here, and among eventers. Maybe if everyone just agreed to call it “walkabout” more people would be into it. Road work sounds like something you would do in a hard hat with a jackhammer. Walkabout sounds like a grand adventure.

I’ve never ridden Henry on the roads and he’d had a few days off, plus just moved to a new place, but there were 4 of us in the group and he is generally a cool-headed dude anyway, so I tacked up and off we went. I couldn’t resist the appeal of getting some Vitamin D on a beautiful 75 degree January day while on walkabout with my pony. (best sentence ever)

He gave the herd of baby and momma cows a good hearty “What in the holy hell???” jiggy sideways stare, and flinched at a couple cars that passed a little too close for his comfort, but otherwise he was great. About halfway through he settled and ambled the rest of the way on a long rein.

I’m excited to be able to add a little bit of road work (er, sorry, WALKABOUT) to our repertoire. Plus the new barn is only about a mile up the road from a good friend’s place, so I can literally ride my horse to her house!

It was moving weekend! But that didn’t happen til Sunday, we have two other days to cover first. Friday was a wet and yucky day (a few random snowflakes actually came from the sky at one point. Tuesday it was 80, Friday it snowed, Sunday it was 75. Seriously Texas?) so no riding happened. I did have happy hour with some horse friends though, one of which was Karen of Bay with Chrome, who wrote an AWESOME post about why horse friends are better than normal people friends. She gets it.

Saturday morning was spin class followed by a swim. In light of Tracy’s post last week about fitness goals I decided to start keeping a calendar of my activities so I can track it better. She did it as “Weigh-in Wednesday” but I figured I’ll just post it every Monday in my weekend recap so it’s less intrusive, and I’m not tracking my weight, just my activities for fitness purposes. You’ll probably have to click on the picture to make it easy enough to read, I couldn’t find a way to make the text bigger. But at least if I post it here weekly I have hundreds of eyewitnesses to reprimand me if I start slacking off. Go ahead, shame away. I didn’t bother to try to remember things well enough to go further back and fill it in, but everything starting from the 18th will be logged going forward.

After the gym Brandy and I went to a tack sale where I scored all this awesome loot for a total of $3!!! Not gonna lie, I’m very excited about my $1 bottle of Microtek shampoo. I love that stuff and it’s normally $20+ a bottle. And Quick Braid is $10! And my little Loopa bath mitt still has the $8.95 price tag on it! And there’s always a need for a baggie of black rubber bands. Total score, I wish I’d had more cash with me so I could have bought more. I want to go to a tack sale every weekend.

I spent the afternoon cleaning all my stuff and packing, figuring out how the heck to condense two giant lockers full of stuff into just a tack trunk and a couple of racks in the new tack room. For the record – I figured it out, but it took a lot of creative maneuvering. Basically I have a lot of stuff.

Then I rushed home to make a sopapilla cheesecake for a cycling club party that night. By this point I was so tired I might have just been sleepwalking, but at least the cheesecake was a hit. I mean… anything with cream cheese, sugar and cinnamon as the main ingredients is guaranteed to be a success.

While at the party, chit-chatting with people about plans for the year, the subject turned to my upcoming visit to Philly this weekend. There was a joke made about the weather, at which point I realized I hadn’t yet looked at the forecast. So into my Weather Channel app I went, and lets just say this Texan was HORRIFIED. I immediately took a screen cap and sent it to my friend Megan, who I’m going to Philly with. In case you Northerners have ever wondered what would happen if a couple of Southerners were faced with a real winter (or really, the mere suggestion of a real winter), I present to you:

Today it looks like the snow chances have gone down a bit for the weekend so maybe there’s hope I’ll live through the experience after all. Of course, by the sound of the forecast today and tomorrow there will likely be a foot of snow on the ground when I’m there. I’ve never seen more than a few inches at a time, so this is a new one for me. My Chicago native SO had to explain it all to me last night. I didn’t know you could drive on it. Huh. Fascinating.

On Sunday I was up and at the barn early to get all of my stuff loaded into Brandy’s truck and get the boys ready to move. She and Auto moved with us, so luckily Henry gets to keep his BFF.

Into the trailer they went…

and just a short drive to the new place. They were welcomed with a stall full of hay and some cookies waiting for them in their feed bucket (the barn owner bought all blue buckets for Henry’s stall since all of our stuff is blue… how adorable is that? And a nameplate to match, too!). Henry of course instantly approved, and after a short look around settled right into his main business of hoovering hay.

I have to say, for the first time in months I feel like I can finally breathe. I don’t have to tailor my life around getting to the barn at feeding time every day anymore so I can throw him more hay, and I know that he always has plenty of clean water and someone keeping a close eye on him all the time. I know the new barn owners well, and they’re so diligent and take such fantastic care of the horses. Really it’s a huge weight off my shoulders to have him there. Just in the few hours I was out yesterday he’d already gotten more hay than he would have had in an entire day at the old place. Now that he will always have something in his belly hopefully between that and the ulcer meds he’ll be back to 110% soon. He’s already put a little bit of weight on just in the last few weeks from me tossing him a couple extra flakes a night, so fingers crossed that he gets his bloom back quickly now with proper food and nutrition. Plus I got a text message last night saying that the boys were both eating, drinking and pooping normally. So nice to have updates, especially unprompted ones!

After we got the boys settled in we went on a Walkabout, but we’ll save those pictures for tomorrow…

OH – and for those who asked, here’s a better picture of Henry’s butt heart!