Much to Henry’s chagrin, the past week has been filled with several Ride iQ rides.

I’m still playing around with all the different lessons and figuring out which ones I like best and which ones seem to help Henry the most. So far I can genuinely say that every single one of them has resulted in some kind of improvement at least. I definitely find that I’m staying way more focused and present and in tune with what I’m doing, and the time seems to pass really quickly. I’m doing more, and I’m paying more attention to the quality of the work. I’m kind of excited to use it when Presto gets home… I think if I’d had something like this available to me when Henry was still showing it would have really helped us tremendously in between lessons. Definitely obsessed and probably won’t stop talking about it for a while, so sorry not sorry.

Our mild, fairly rainy summer seems to have dried up for now, so things are getting hotter. Still not as hot as it could be, but more like upper 90’s instead of low 90’s. It also hasn’t taken long for the pastures to brown up and the grass to start dying off. It’s not terrible yet, but it does make me sad to look out and see more brown than green. Green grass makes me happier than anything else, I swear. Granted, the fact that we have any grass still alive at all at the end of August is nothing short of a Texas miracle. It’s also been so nice for Henry to have a summer where he isn’t just dying 24/7. He can handle this kind of heat okay… he still gets puffy in the afternoon and needs to be hosed off, but I haven’t had to back way off his workload or take any significant precautions to keep him comfortable. For him the difference between 95ish and 105-110ish is massive. The mornings have generally been more mild than usual too… like 100% humidity basically but mid 70’s instead of mid 80’s. It’s nice that I can actually do a 40 minute flatwork ride like this morning and have him be a normal amount of hot and puffing at the end rather than doing 15mins and feel like he’s gonna keel over. It’s kinda like I’ve gotten a glimpse of how much easier his life would be if he could always summer somewhere a bit more mild and I feel really bad that he’s a Texas horse. Hopefully not forever, bud.

Other than obsessively torturing Henry playing with Ride iQ, I spent a large part of the last few days watching the live stream from Great Meadow.

The live stream was good quality and for the most part I didn’t have any issues streaming on H&C, even on my slow country broadband. The commentary was decent too – I’m not always the biggest fan of KOC but she seemed a little lighter-spirited this time than she sometimes can be. They did attempt to talk about the breeding of some of the horses, although I definitely cringed several times at some of the incorrect or missing information. No, Nimmerdor was not a dressage stallion. No, not all Diarado offspring are tall and narrow (Diarado himself is maybe 16h on his tippy toes and you’ll find a huge variety in the types of offspring by him – because they usually take the type of the mare). No, AP Prime isn’t by AP Indy (close, he’s by Aptitude, who’s by AP Indy) and there are also at least 3 other examples of AP Indy line horses at the upper levels that I can think of off the top of my head. No, the horse by Ferro indeed did not have a lot of “blood”. But they tried, and they got some stuff right, so they get credit for that. They used to almost never mention the breeding stuff at all, except to diss on thoroughbreds or give such an enlightening statement as “this one is Irish”. So, ya know, while it wasn’t particularly accurate or deep-diving, it was something. Baby steps? My offer to provide pedigree and breeding dossiers to literally any livestream commentary, free of charge, still stands.

The only other semi-exciting recent development is that I finally bit the bullet and ordered the black sparkly boots that I’ve been eyeing for a while (thanks to friends who give great birthday presents!). They’re pretty cheap so I don’t have massive expectations, but I need new boots that fit a bit better, and I feel like these are cheap enough to where I can experiment with putting some studs on them and not feel like I’m desecrating something sacred in the process. Presto’s dressage bridle has black glitter padding on the noseband and his spiked punk rock browband, so I’m gonna attempt to recreate the whole Posh Punk vibe with these. We’ll see how they fit when they get here, then order the tiny spikes and start playing with them. Fingers crossed that the boots actually do fit and aren’t too short.

Otherwise it’s been a pretty quiet week around here, as is pretty typical this time of year, aside from a couple other little things that we’ll talk about in more detail in other posts. Hope you guys had a good weekend. Fall is getting close now… can you feel it?