I was kind of excited to take Henry to the little jumper show this past weekend since we haven’t been out anywhere in forever. Then they posted the schedule, and womp womp, our division wouldn’t go until after 5pm, which didn’t work for me. Very happy for the show that there were so many entrants, but sad for me that I had to scratch. Eventually we’ll make it off property and do something fun. Maybe. Henry doesn’t seem to mind.

My jump field is in need of a mow (that 6″ of rain made the grass quadruple in height overnight and there’s more rain on the way) so I can’t do too much out there right now, but I did set up a couple fences in the arena and hop back and forth over them on Sunday. I thought I would be clever and bring my little blue wannabe liverpool down to give Henry something different to see (I keep my jumps at home quite basic normally since he’s a fairly careless jumper… the fill and new “spooky” jumps at shows tend to work in my favor and perk him up a bit. Don’t want him to get too used to seeing that stuff at home all the time!). He spotted it from a mile away while we were walking into the ring and proceeded to turn into a snorting spooking dragon in a way that was kind of embarrassing for him as a Prelim horse who has jumped many a friggin liverpool in his day. It took me a while to convince him to just trot past it while we were warming up (I wish I’d turned my Pivo on for warmup, it was quite entertaining for those first few minutes) and he kept giving it major stink eye every time I went past it. Naturally though as soon as I pointed him at it and asked him to actually jump over it, he was like “oh yeah I know these, they’re boring, I was never worried jk”.

He’s always like that. He will spook sideways just having to canter past a Starter fence but then pop right over some hideous I/P weldon’s wall like it’s the most basic of crossrails. Passing jumps is scary, jumping them is fine. I don’t follow his logic, but ok I’m not complaining, that’s a lot better than the other way around. We didn’t jump a whole lot since it was humid and gross AF but he seemed to enjoy himself anyway. We’ll see how many rides I can fit in this week in between the rain before I go up to Texas Rose on Friday for Presto’s show.

Speaking of Presto, he’s basically a patience pole champion these days, having spent a lot of time there over the past couple weeks. He learned that pawing your anger out isn’t the right answer, and dancing in circles doesn’t get you anywhere. I mean, those lessons have been repeated to him throughout his entire life but I’m sure no one is surprised that regular refreshers are needed. Patience is NOT his strong suit, and he likes to express his emotions with his feet. This week the lessons are being transferred into the trailer, and then on Friday he heads over to the show. Hopefully he decides to haul quietly this time.

Which, turns out the venue double booked this weekend – a dressage show and a horse trial, which should be… um… interesting. A week after closing date they changed the schedule in the omnibus (without even sending an email to competitors or anything) moving the Training/Prelim/Intermediate dressage to Friday afternoon. People are not happy about the very late and not at all well-communicated change, and I don’t blame them. There are major clusterfuck vibes already happening.

Presto of course is in OBN, so his schedule isn’t really effected much, except usually they run dressage and XC Saturday and then showjump Sunday morning, but this new schedule has him with dressage and SJ on Saturday and then XC Sunday morning. Should be fine. I can’t quite wrap my brain around the complete chaos of a dressage show and a horse trial happening at the same time (what the actual…) but, um, I guess we’ll just deal with it?

My other main objective for this past weekend was finishing his next Futurity vlog, which is the first one about his actual training this spring. I put all the video clips together, sent it to Megan, she recorded the voice over, I stitched it all together, and voila… done. It’s way easier when someone else is doing the talking. I mean, it still takes me 9000 years to make the video but it went a lot faster than the previous ones. It’s been submitted so hopefully they’ll be posting it soon, keep an eye on their facebook page. This next round of vlogs isn’t actually due until the end of this week but since they already have mine they might post it early. It’s always fun hearing the rider/trainer’s thoughts instead of mine, so hopefully y’all like this one!

In between all that I came perilously close to pre-ordering a dinosaur fly sheet for Presto. Does he need one? No. But does he neeeeed one? Clearly. I mean… dinosaurs. Duh.

I’m trying to behave myself though because I have a feeling his summer adventures will be expensive, and while he got good use of his fly sheet in Florida, we don’t really use them much here. That and the UK shipping is not cheap, so… I’ve talked myself out of it. For now anyway.

I’ll be honest though, I freakin’ hate Mother’s Day, and was feeling particularly dumpy yesterday (the BO gave me cake though, that helped. Cake always helps. Write that down.) so I did buy myself one little thing I’ve had my eye on to help cheer myself up.

I have two spike browbands already – a brown one with gunmetal spikes and a black one with gunmetal spikes. They live on Presto’s bridles, but I do sometimes borrow the brown one for Henry’s XC bridle. The Bling Bay has lots of different color spikes on offer though, their prices are super reasonable, and ya know which of my bridles doesn’t have it’s own pretty browband? Henry’s La Cense bitless that he wears pretty much every day. That’s a travesty, right? It needs some pizazz. It’s still wearing the plain flat boring browband it came with.

I waffled a bit between the darker blue spikes and the rainbow #2 spikes, but in the end I just had to do the rainbow ones. It’ll bring me joy on a day to day basis I think. How could it not? It’s supposed to ship today and they’re based here locally so hopefully I’ll have it within the next couple days.

Hope everyone had a good weekend!