The last couple weeks have been super busy. The day before Hillary drove down, my friend Megan (of Luxe EQ) got here and spent one night here at my place before moving over to her airbnb. She was in town for a week getting one of her mobile shops set up for the summer circuit at WEC (if you’ll be at WEC this summer go check out the store – it’s right next to FarmVet in the outside vendor area near Emma’s Patisserie), so it was good to have time to hang out with her and Hillary both at the same time. Megan left last week to go back to Michigan, and Hillary and I continued on doing all the things. As it fit in between my regular work hours, anyway.

We stocked up on stuff for the horses, got some projects done around the barn, ran a bunch of errands, and of course managed to fit some fun things in there too. I will assume that people are mostly interested in the fun things and skip straight to that. We stopped at Tack Shack to order me a new XC whip… Hillary had accidentally dropped mine at Pine Hill last winter and we realized it too late, so the property owner put it in Lost and Found for us. By the time we got back to Pine Hill to pick it up from Lost and Found, someone had stolen it. Bad bad bad karma on that person. Also, if anyone sees someone in Texas with a navy and gray jockey whip with a silver glitter stripe (it’s pretty ballsy to steal such a unique whip, honestly) that would be mine. Tell them to give it back, it’s seriously bad luck to use a stolen whip and I’m totally sending them bad juju through it. But I did get to go into the back room at Tack Shack, where all the magic happens, and pick out all the colors for a new one from their rack. That’s a fun experience. 10/10 would recommend. There are like 5 different types of glitter alone.

Like I mentioned yesterday, we also went XC schooling again, this time at Sweet Dixie. Hillary took Henry and he seemed very pleased with himself as usual.

She also took a lesson on him with Steph on Sunday when she came out, and Hillary said she had a pretty mind-blowing epiphany from it, so we’ll call that a success. Steph also agreed that Henry is Perfect, which always earns bonus points with me. He is the best creature that has ever existed, and if you can tell that about him then clearly you have good taste in horses.

Hillary did make the mistake of riding in my new Arion saddle (ok it was not a mistake, it was very deliberate) and now she wants one. I’ll talk more about the saddle next week though. It’s really interesting in comparison to Hillary’s Voltaire and my older Devoucoux.

We also took the kiddos on road hacks with Henry – Gemma one day and Presto another day. I take Henry out for road hacks all the time so he’s pretty trustworthy, but obviously I’ve been hesitant to take the young ones very far by themselves. Much better to wait until someone else is here with me and they can go with Henry. Gemma was quite solid, aside from getting upset when some dogs came charging through the woods barking. That’s fair enough. Presto was more skeptical. He is somehow managing to be the bravest and yet spookiest horse all at the same time. He’ll jump anything you point him at, wants to lead the group everywhere, is curious about everything, but then will have a random conniption about a mailbox or a sign or a pile of dirt. And he can go from zero to teleport in half a second with no warning. I find it kind of puzzling considering how much I hacked him out and trail rode him as a 3yo (and ponied him everywhere his whole life) and he was never like that at all. Not even a little. I will say that he’s gotten much better in the past few weeks, and I’ve changed some things up with him, so we’ll see how that keeps progressing. I may end up having him scoped just to cover all my bases… the Presto I know just is not spooky and never has been, so I suspect there’s a reason for it, whether it’s physical or not. He only does it when I ride him out, and not every time, so… who knows what’s going on in that little orangutan-filled brain of his.

We also hit the Saturday Night grand prix at WEC both weekends, and the timing was perfect since those were the two bigger FEI classes. I got to see some stallions jump, including Faustino de Tili (who WTW has 3 foals by now) and Chacco Blue II (who I am now perhaps deeply in love with, my god can that thing jump). My friend Stormy who I evented with in Texas just bought a farm here and she was able to meet up with us this past weekend for the GP, so it was good to see her again too. We had a full table of friends both weekends.

Considering that I was a complete hermit between the last time Hillary left in mid-May and last June when she came to visit, I think I definitely made up for it in the past couple weeks. I had more social interaction in the past two weeks than I’ve had in probably years. It’s good though, I need to meet people here and start getting myself out more and making connections. I’d say we certainly did that. Last night I was so tired I went to bed at 8 and slept all the way til 5:30 this morning. Introvert battery recharge.

Now everyone is gone and I’m alone again for a while, which means everything is my responsibility again and there are considerably fewer fun things happening.

BTW thanks again to everyone for the support with the BRC stuff, despite adding more available spots this time, we sold out of pedigree reports even faster this month – they were all gone less than an hour after I posted. If you missed out this time and want to sign up for email updates, go to our website, hit the contact button, and enter your email address. We will send out an email the day before listings reopen and let you know exactly what time it’ll go live! Patrons of course always get the option to buy before it opens to the public, but the email notifications will let you know what time the listing will be publicly available. We’ll do our best to get through this batch ASAP so we have an idea of when we can open for more!