Month: March 2022

Gemma’s now got 4, count em FOUR, post-track rides under her girth, so I guess you could say things are getting pret-ty serious.

Just kidding, we’re still walking and trotting and learning about circles.

She is, however, a very good girl. Truth be told, she’s a lot different than I expected. I thought she would be a bit hot and quick and tense… which, ya know, is fairly standard for most horses off the track, especially sensitive mares. But she is not hot, nor is she quick, and not nearly as tense as I expected. If anything, she’s got a tendency to be slightly nappy and her preferred gait is walk. But she’s also definitely sensitive too. It’s an interesting mix.

Her first real ride (real meaning doing more than 3 mins of walking) was last Thursday, and we walked and trotted for about 15 minutes. I set up my Pivo so I could get an idea of what she looked like under saddle.

We started out at the walk again, doing some walk/halt transitions, moving left and right off my leg, making some circles and figure 8’s of varying sizes. Then I asked her to trot, and… crickets. Asked again and she trotted a few steps then walked again the second I took my leg off. Interesting. Not what I expected. We trotted again, with me immediately asking her to be a bit more bright and forward, and then we were cooking. I didn’t do a whole lot, just asked her to trot forward and straight. It was a little bit like riding around with the parking brake on… if I so much as thought whoa, she stopped. Which, I appreciate that she isn’t a lunatic that tries desperately to avoid leg and has a default “run away” mode, but also… riding around with the parking brake on isn’t the right answer either. So from this first ride I got a pretty good idea of what we would need to work on first.

A couple days later I got back on her again, doing pretty much the same thing but asking her to be quicker and more responsive to my leg. She was a little better but it’s interesting because she doesn’t want you to ride around with your leg touching her, but she also isn’t really inclined to go forward if your leg isn’t touching her. Honestly she would prefer to just stand there and get cookies and be told she’s pretty. Fair enough. She started Regumate last week and is still on ulcer meds, so some of this may be due to her heat cycles or whatever lingering tummy issues might still be there, but I also think (from all the other work I’ve done with her and knowing her pretty well by now) that she’s a little lazy in general. I rewarded her every time she immediately moved off my leg, although she’s definitely less responsive off the left leg than the right. Another interesting tidbit gleaned.

For this ride I also put her in Henry’s eggbutt Neue Schule. Her mouth is a little small so she seems to prefer a slightly thinner bit, and she was steadier in the eggbutt than she was in a loose ring. Gemma is not averse to contact or seeking the hand, which is great… I think she’ll get that part of things pretty quickly. The way she’s built helps a lot, she naturally carries herself in a good place. I’ve been keeping her noseband very loose as she figures things out, and she’s gotten quieter in the mouth every time too. She strikes me as the kind that would very much resent having her mouth strapped shut, so we’re… not gonna do that. Force is never the way, but it especially won’t be with this horse.

After that ride I took her out in the pasture to walk around for a bit – her first little hack out! She seemed really happy out here… she’s curious and likes to explore and see new things, so she was very content to walk around on the buckle, watch the turtles in the pond, etc. She still had a little bit of a gravitational pull back towards the barn, but didn’t require much convincing to march forward and away.

Yesterday I enlisted the assistance of a dressage whip, thinking it might help make my point a little bit more clearly. We also started working more on moving her body laterally around my leg, bending slightly to the inside and outside, etc. Suppleness – she needs it. I’ve been riding her with my leg on but not active, and she’s getting less annoyed about it. Makes sense, she’s never felt this much leg before, being a racehorse. If I ask her to go forward or move off my leg and get no response, I touch her lightly on the butt with the whip and that seems to get my point across. I love that she’s not frantic and tense and trying to move her legs 1000 miles an hour, but she still has to be forward and responsive to my leg. There’s a middle ground, and I’m confident that she’ll find it. She’s smart and does want to be a good girl ultimately, so I think as long as I make the expectations very clear and consistent, she’ll get it pretty quickly. This is all very different from anything she’s done before, after all.

I also took her for another little hack in the front field yesterday after our ride. Even with the guy weedeating across the street she never so much as flinched. At this point I’m still keeping our rides very short, under 20 minutes, and so far it’s just been walk/trot. We’re in no hurry so I want to wait until she understands things a bit better before we add in any canter, and there’s no point in putting longer rides on her right now… just enough for her to understand what I’m asking and give me some good efforts. I think if I started pushing too hard and too fast it would just make her sour or want to fight, so – slow and steady it is. I want to make it fun for her and make sure she understands. Not to mention she was just off work for 3 months and is transitioning between two very different careers. I want to give her body the time it needs to build up correctly.

Today I think we’ll venture out to the way back to the hacking path and see what Gemma thinks about that!

I’ve not been so great lately about the weekend recaps and I feel like I’m skipping over all the little fun things that maybe no one cares much about except for me, but… I am entertained by those things. Gonna try to remedy that today by cramming a bunch of little shit in one post, yay everyone’s favorite randomness (please read that with heavy sarcasm).

First and foremost, I need everyone to see what I snagged last week at Dollar General.

Ok that’s not a picture of the actual item, it’s a picture of the result. I found a unicorn cake pan for $4 so did I buy it? Of course. Am I an actual child? Also yes. Has my giant unicorn brownie brought me extreme joy over the past several days? Also yes. I ate his face first and he smiled at me the whole time. 10/10 would do again, I have zero regrets about this purchase.

Anyway, moving on. I spent much of Friday and Saturday glued to the Carolina live stream. There were lots of horses I wanted to watch spread around the various divisions, so naturally I had my spreadsheets up and my notes out. I also got to see my most favorite Mason for the first time since Maryland last fall… he looked delighted (if not perhaps a bit wild a few times) to be out and about again. I love watching that horse though, I swear you could put a camera just on his face for the entirety of cross country and it would be riveting coverage. I’m excited to continue stalking him as he aims for Badminton this spring.

While I was stalking Mason on the live stream, a particular redhead was stalking me here at home. Gemma has figured out that I live in the little gray house, and has spotted me through the window a few times. Now every once in a while I look out and she’s straight up staring into my window, using her laser beam eyeballs to try to will me into bringing her treats (I assume).

It’s very amusing to me because either the other horses haven’t figured out I’m in here or they just could not possibly care less. When Presto was here there were a couple times I caught him looking in here, but not quite as intensely as Gemma does. She keeps showing me all the ways she’s smart (and also that she is extremely rotten and probably gets waaaaaaaay too many cookies). I have not dared to actually go outside when I catch her staring in, because I think the second I do that she’ll plant herself by my window and never leave. It would be flattering if I didn’t know it was 99% about food with her.

Aside from watching Mason and being watched by Gemma, I’ve also been checking in on Inca on her foaling cameras. She’s looked imminent for DAYS now, and her milk test has been in the “within 24 hours” range for almost 3 days. Poor Michelle is a walking zombie by this point, having hardly slept, and even Presto (who seemed excited about his midwife duties) has started to give up and lose interest. These maidens always keep you guessing, so Michelle is watching her like a hawk, but I think we’re all ready for her to just spit that baby out already. I don’t know what she’s waiting for.

Aside from all this watching, there has also been plenty of doing. Hillary is still in Ocala and won’t be home for another week, so I’m still riding Henry. He still seems to be not particularly pleased by this, but I did make him happy this weekend and do some jompies. His favorite. It’s been getting hot here in the afternoons so I’m starting to have to shift my days around again to try to get done with the horses a bit sooner.

I’ve also been riding Gemma, but we’ll talk more about her tomorrow… too much to cover on that front to cram it all in this post too!

One more worthwhile mention… last week I nabbed a pair of black Espoir breeches that I’m freaking IN LOVE with… the black glitter piping is *chef’s kiss* and these are the first breeches I’ve ever had that managed to do a very subtle and actually nice looking cell phone pocket. I’ll have to do a deeper review of these after I’ve washed and worn them more, but these might be vying for my new favorites. These are the same brand as the black coat with glitter piping that I bought at Maryland last fall… clearly I like their styling (and their glitter).

I also got an Epplejeck box yesterday… a couple weeks ago I ordered some stuff to use up a gift card I had, and then promptly forgot about the order. When the box showed up yesterday I couldn’t even remember what I had gotten, so opening it was a fun surprise. I mean, there were some interesting things in there that I have no idea what I was thinking when I ordered them, but it was entertaining nonetheless. I need to get pics of all that stuff so we can all have a good laugh.

We’ve now entered crunch time mode as far as getting things organized for the move and I’m pretty sure I’m going to require a round of Ulcergard for myself by the time all is said and done. Uprooting your entire life to move everything 1000 miles away, especially with horses, is stressful as hell. Fingers crossed all this stuff comes together though, I feel like I’ve got about a thousand things up in the air right now and the anxiety is real.

Hope everyone else had a good weekend!

Ya know how sometimes you just get on a roll and one idea spins off into another idea and then another idea? That’s kind of what’s happening here. This blog spawned more interest in the breeding stuff, which spawned some other opportunities, which spawned the Patreon, which then spawned my latest idea – Breed.Ride.Compete.

If y’all are here reading this blog at all, you know all about my nerdiness when it comes to the breeding stuff. You probably already know my history with breeding, you know the work that I do for breeders and for EN (my last EN piece, in case you missed it), you know about my plethora of spreadsheets, and the data that I’ve provided for live streams. I won’t go over that all again.

It will also probably not come as a surprise to any of you that I get asked breeding related questions A LOT. Like a lot a lot. It made me think that there might be a need for some kind of (very reasonably priced) service to help provide some information and guidance to people who are interested in breeding and/or pedigrees, but have not dedicated their entire adult life to researching it and don’t really know where to look or who to ask. I get several messages every week about it just from people who know me personally (almost exclusively amateur riders or first time breeders) so I do think there’s a lot more interest in the topic than we might think. I was already going to create all the branding for a business to put all of my live stream information under (see above logo) so that it has a more professional appearance and I got to thinking – maybe there are other services this little “business” could offer as well?

A few things immediately sprang to mind, given all the questions I get from friends as well as pain points I see with breeders.

1) As mentioned above – continuing to offer pedigree data services for live streams (I give a lot of information, like the breeder name, country bred, what the sire and the dam did, any successful related horses, the blood %, etc… assuming it’s possible to find it within any of my 14ish sources). At this point I give this data away, because just getting people to take it and use it is still an uphill battle. Someday it would be nice to be able to charge for it because it’s hours and hours and hours of work, but… ya know. I’m not that delusional.

2) “Research Packages” – a few page pdf document full of information about your horse and it’s family – pics and videos of ancestors, information about what they did and produced, what they were known for, other related horses from those lines and where they are now, etc. I have subscriptions to several databases already that I can use to research and pull data from that the average person doesn’t have access to or knowledge of, plus my spreadsheets, plus I know the vast majority of lines pretty well by now in my own head, given my general decades-long obsession. I’d only be able to offer this for TB’s and Warmbloods, since they’re my knowledge base. But basically like… you send me the pedigree, I send you a book report about it. There would be a fee for this, but nothing crazy.

3) Offering phone or email consultations for first time/hobby breeders, to talk about things they should consider, what bases they should cover, how to prepare, discuss their mare and how to analyze her strengths/weaknesses, talk about things to look at when choosing a stallion, etc. I don’t want to make the decisions for you, I want to arm you with the knowledge you need in order to feel good about making a decision for yourself. This service only occurred to me because I did this as a Zoom call last week with someone who “knows” me from Instagram. Thinking back on who I was when I took my first foray into breeding, I would have felt a lot better if I’d had someone experienced to talk to, bounce ideas off of, etc. Particularly someone who was NOT a stallion owner, NOT trying to influence me to buy semen or a foal from them, etc. There would also be a fee for this, but again nothing crazy.

4) Data entry services, like entering people’s mares and foals (fully and accurately, for crying out loud, which is RARE given how much fixing and entering I have to currently do of even the top level horses) into all of the main pedigree databases. Not only would horses get entered correctly, people wouldn’t have to create accounts or buy subscriptions or learn how to use these sites (some of which are buggy when it comes to data entry, to say the least). Having all of that data easily accessible in these big databases helps us all in the long run, since we can’t learn about what we don’t know. This would be a cheap service geared more towards pro breeders that either don’t have the time/energy to enter all this stuff, or are not computer savvy enough to do so.

So my question is – do you think any of these things would interest the “average” horse owner? Are there other things relating to breeding that you think would be helpful to offer? To be very clear – I’m definitely not doing this to try to make money (HAHAHA that would be hilarious) I’m doing it because I think breeding is important, and I think that breeding knowledge especially is a very big gap in our overall horsemanship knowledge in the US. This is a hill I am prepared and willing to die on. We don’t know our horses the way Europeans do, and a lot of it is because it’s just not as engrained in our culture, not talked about as much, and the data isn’t as easy to find or track. We spend so much time comparing ourselves to Europe but this is one piece of it I don’t think we look at hard enough. They know their horses and where they come from so much better than we do.

I know that anything I do to try to change our overall mindset about breeding is really just a drop in the bucket, but I’m passionate about the cause and if I can help influence even just a handful of people… it’s worth the effort to me. As long as, of course, I’m not just giving my time away for free to the point where it’s detrimental to everything else I’m trying to do.

At this point I’m months away from any of this coming to fruition. I want a website in place first and I have a lot happening in the next few months that won’t grant me much time to work on this project or get a website up and running. But I do want to keep thinking on it though and letting it stew in my head, and part of that is throwing the idea out there and seeing what the response is like… would appreciate any feedback y’all have!

jk I’m totally saying that. Gemma is a little red genius of a TB mare and I absolutely love her. It helps that she’s much sweeter/more open to affection than Henry is so she doesn’t pin her ears every time I smooch her face. AND she’s figured out that the tack room is the cookie room so if you go in there she neighs at you the second you come out. Manipulating me for a cookie? I am absolutely into it. Neigh at me like we’re in a Disney movie please, my inner 12yo is freakin delighted.

Every time I work with her she’s better and better. Gemma learns fast and retains things well, and she genuinely wants to have a job and do it well. Work ethic is one of my most valued qualities in a horse so I’m very pleased to see that she has it. Although granted yesterday when I was lunging her she did stop dead in the corner to grab a weed and then trot away again. It was a very “20yo quarter horse lesson horse” maneuver and I had to give her points for creativity and dedication. Calm down, baby OTTB.

Over the past week we’ve mostly just continued with the stuff we started out on… desensitizing, voice commands, mounting block training, etc. I switched her from the loose regular side reins to the vienna reins, which seemed to make more sense to her.

I’ve also played around a little with bits, loose ring vs eggbutt, different diameters, and french link vs lozenge. I have about 9000 snaffles so I think we’ve now settled on one that she seems to like most. We’ll see. I’m not short of options.

Since she started getting the voice commands down a bit better, we were doing more transitions on the lunge line, both between gaits and within the gait. She’s seemed to figure out now that she doesn’t have to trot at warp speed, she can also trot smaller and slower and that’s okay too. Plus her whoa is pretty darn good now. Sometimes she takes a second or two to process, but it’s there.

I wasn’t planning on getting on her for another week or so yet, but… she’s gotten things a lot quicker than I expected, and she’s a pretty chill horse in general. Yesterday I still had my helmet on when I was working her so while we were doing her mounting block lesson I was like “ya know what… screw it.” and swung a leg all the way over. She was like “Oh good finally, I was getting bored of going in circles”, and that was that.

I just spent about 5 minutes walking, halting, making the walk bigger and smaller, and moving her left and right off my leg. She seems very smart about it all, and she’s responsive but isn’t squirrely about it. After that we walked back over to the mounting block corner, I got off, and that was that. She was extremely nonplussed about the whole thing and I think she’s ready to go to work for real. We’ll keep taking it super slow since that approach seems to be working well for her (she’s confident and relaxed, which is what I want!) but I think we can go ahead and crack on a bit.

She also started Regumate this week, we’re going to try that for a couple months and see if that helps with her perpetual raging heat cycles. Regumate is kind of a pain in the ass, but if it helps her then I’m ok with dealing with it. Latex gloves abound. And yesterday the last of her ulcer meds arrived. It’s been an expensive month for her between the meds and the shoes/xrays, but I wanted to make sure we start her off in the best place possible, so we’ve dotted every i and crossed every t in advance, as much as we possibly can. She also got her own browband, because she’d been wearing Presto’s and we just can’t have her thinking she isn’t worthy of her own, now can we?

Otherwise I think she’s out here living her best life. She seems happy, and she’s stuffing her face with all the spring grass. Her very dramatic grazing stance has gotten better too – I think as her back loosens up and she’s less stiff over her topline in general. It’ll be interesting to see if the Regumate has any further impact on that. Her grazing stance was contributing to some of the big differences between her front feet, so getting her more even would be nice.

She seems to be feeling pretty good though! Yesterday Gemma and Henry were out there reliving their racing glory (ok, neither of them ever found so much as a smidgen of glory on the track, but don’t tell them that) running laps around the pasture. Gemma is fun to watch, she just has this general air of happiness about her in all the things she does… she’s definitely way more positive about life than my bay gelding. Nobody tell the chestnut mare haters.

I can’t wait til Hillary gets home so we can start hacking Gemma and Henry together. Gemma is ready for more adventures!

We’re now about 6 weeks away from the big move (it’s fine. this is fine. no one panic. i’m not panicking.) so I’m already in crunch time mode as far as getting all my shit organized in preparation to start packing. That means its time for another purge of horse stuff, because I’m sure not hauling it all halfway across the country with me. The cheaper items or bigger bulkier items are just gonna go to consignment or be sold locally because I cannot be bothered to deal with it, but I do have some nicer stuff/easier to ship stuff that’s still up for grabs! If you’re interested you can message me on one of my socials or send me an email via the contact form.

Coats:

Dark green Alessandro Albanese Motionlite mesh show coat, size small, new with tags. I’ve steered away from green so there’s no good reason to keep this, even though it’s pretty. $200

Navy blue with yellow piping Winston Equestrian washable lightweight wool show coat. This was semi-custom from back in the Henry prime era but it doesn’t fit me anymore and I’m not going to keep the yellow in my colors. The size is french 40T which is technically “tall” but I’m not very tall (5’6″) and it fit me great. 40 is equivalent to US size 8, bust measures 37″. The fabric is a lightweight blend that is machine washable. Super flattering, good for those who prefer a bit more structure to their coats. $150

Hy Equestrian Roka Rose show coat size Large, new with tags. I bought this from overseas but it was considerably larger than what the size chart said. Bust measures 40″. Really pretty mid-navy color with rose gold and navy rhinestones on the collar and pockets. Stretchy tech fabric, with a zipper under the buttons. SOLD

RJ Classics navy classic wool hunt coat, size 10R. I only wore this a few times, for foxhunting. $40

Breeches:

Clockwise from top left:

tan Tredstep knee patch breeches, worn a few times for hunting, in good condition. Size 30R. SOLD

chocolate brown Horze Grand Prix knee patch breeches, worn but no holes or stains. Size 30R. $30

Baleaf black full seat breeches, worn less than 10 times, too big for me now. Size S (fits like 28). $25

Pomme Nellie breeches, black with silver accents, knee patch. Great condition, I only wore these a few times, I just have a lot of black breeches and… probably don’t need all of them. Size M (fits like 28). $90

green Equiline breeches, knee patch. In good condition, no stains or tears. Size I-42 (fits like 26). $100

Other Stuff:

Navy horse size fly bonnet with yellow and white trim. – $18

brown stirrup leathers

left – HDR leathers, darker brown, only used a handful of times. Stamped 54″. $35

right – medium brown, used but in good shape. Look a few inches shorter than the HDR. $15

Boy o Boy custom belt, tone on tone blue/navy, size 36. I hardly even got to wear this one very much which is sad because it’s gorgeous, but it doesn’t fit anymore. Probably best for sizes 30-32. SOLD

If you’re local (aka can pick stuff up or arrange someone else to pick up for you) and want the full list (there is… a lot more stuff) shoot me a message!