Okay, I’m willing to concede that when people say summer is monsoon season in Florida, they are not joking. In the past week we’ve gotten about 10″ of rain. The evening deluges are impressive… it just pours like hell for hours, with rivers of water running across the top of the ground.

These storms have a lot of lightning too, so my horses have been spending their evenings and overnight in their stalls. Which has made them a bit more… fresh… than usual. Gemma’s sass level has been dialed up, and Presto seems to be stuck in SupremeDingDong mode. He’s been alright to ride (I say that before we head off for our jump lesson this morning… hopefully I don’t get murdered), but sometimes he’ll just start galloping circles in his turnout, screaming his fool head off for absolutely no reason. Just funsies. And every morning when I go get them from the barn to turn them out, he plays shark attack with the halter, and it turns into a battle of wills to get the halter out of his mouth and onto his head. He’s a fast mofo with that mouth, man.

Even the field, which had yet to be too wet to ride in even a single time since we got here in early May, has leaped right over “squishy” and into “there is literally a lake in the middle”. Thank goodness for the arena or I wouldn’t have anywhere dry enough to ride. And I have to say, compared to a lot of farms around here this place does drain pretty well, and all the vital infrastructure is on higher ground, so thank goodness we’re not having problems that others around here are having, with flooded barns and water up to the top board of their pasture fence in places. There’s standing water in a few spots, mostly down by the pond, but we aren’t flooded and the turnout footing is still fine since it’s so sandy, so considering how much rain we’ve had it’s not bad. If the rain could pump the brakes for a few days that would be great, but according to the forecast it’s just going to rain every day forever. I’d been thinking about getting a kayak, maybe I should…

In other news, the SO decided that since he moved to a super horsey area, he should learn how to ride a little bit. He’s ridden Henry 4 times now, and this past time was his first time trotting. It’s always very satisfying to me how people think riding can’t be that hard and then they do it and they’re like Jesus Christ. He’s a cyclist so he’s at least starting from a good place athletically, but it sure is a lot different from riding a bike.

To all of Henry’s eternal credit, he’s been an absolute fucking trooper for this. He’s kind but he is not what I would call a total beginner lesson horse type by any means, so his patience and tolerance for this is earning him yet another golden crown (how many is he up to now, like 300?). Don’t get me wrong, Henry absolutely 100% takes advantage of the SO… yanking his head down to graze whenever he feels like it, pretending he doesn’t know how to walk faster than a crawl, whipping him in the eye with his tail the entire time he’s being groomed, etc. We wouldn’t expect any less of Henry would we? But the fact that he will tolerate a floppy bouncy beginner all over his back is pretty damn stellar. Just when you thought the best horse on the planet couldn’t get any better.

SO already decided that he needs some proper riding clothes because riding in jeans sucks (you are correct sir), so we went around to some tack shops last week to let him try on breeches. It will surprise precisely NONE OF YOU that he didn’t like any of the ones in the sub-$150 range, and indeed the only ones he liked out of the 10 pairs he tried on were the $300 Ego7’s. To be fair, they really did fit him the best. So now we’re on the hunt for a good deal on some of those (they have to be black, naturally, which the store didn’t have in his size). Next we’ll get him a proper riding helmet, but he was so irritated with trying on breeches that he Could Not Even with the helmets. Now he knows how we all feel when trying riding clothes…