Yes I know, I missed Foal Friday. You have every right to be upset. I didn’t even realize I missed it until Sunday, so… that was a big fail. BUT – I have a very valid excuse that I hope you’ll find acceptable: Friday and Saturday Hillary did her first Training!

She badbitched it, with a double clear XC, so now she and Lex are officially a Training level pair! So anyway yeah… I was morally supporting for that instead of doing Foal Friday. Sincerest apologies. (If you’re a Patreon member I posted some Rue and Ri video in the facebook group to tide you over!)

Last week was pretty busy with other things too. My big project was writing a piece for Eventing Nation about Mighty Magic (that might be posted today? not sure…) that had me calling and interviewing all kinds of people from Andreas Dibowski to Miks Master C’s breeder. It was a lot of coordination and phone tag, and it ended up being the longest piece I’ve written for them yet. Shocking, I know, given the subject matter. I was delighted when I was asked to write something about MM.

We also had aquatred on Monday, which was Presto’s 3rd session total and his first one in a while… their machine was broken for a few weeks. Kind of a bummer because part of the point of doing it was to try to catalog the week over week progress. On Wednesday we also had a jump lesson, where we started putting some bigger stuff back in there. Since show season has been so hot and heavy we’ve just kind of been cruising in between the shows, but this time we had some harder exercises again and the triple combination ended up set pretty big… boob height? However big boob height is.

We’ve also had friends in down visiting… first it was Holly, who some of you may know from blogging. She was here for a week and I think got the pretty good full Ocala experience. She ordered a custom whip and custom boots, and we stuck her on pretty much all the horses while she was here.

Presto, who she thought was a lot of work. She is correct. He is large.

Henry, who she rode a bunch and got to take him XC schooling at Sweet Dixie. He was quite pleased with himself.

And last but not least…

Holly and Nunez got along like a house on fire, it was really quite adorable. She is well suited to the Adult-Riders-On-Ponies lifestyle.

A couple days after Holly left, my friend Stacy came out for a long weekend. It was her first time here and she came to the show with us, we took her to WEC, she got some boots (its like… the thing we do to everyone I guess), and she rode Henry and Presto. She too thought he was a lot of work. Henry was quite delighted to take her over some jumps too… he’s feeling very superior after the last couple weeks. He thinks he’s King Henry God of the Guest Horses (he’s not wrong).

I also perhaps ordered a new custom whip of my own

I’m excited to see how it turns out because it took a lot of debating for me to choose. I don’t like color very much but also just a black and silver whip is boring, so I was trying to figure out what color I could add to it that I wouldn’t hate. In the end I settled on purple, which was my mom’s favorite color. It’ll be black with silver glitter and purple thin stripes, a silver glitter spiral around the handle, and a black soft popper with purple stitching on the edges and a silver embroidered lightning bolt. Hopefully that’ll be distinctive enough to prevent it from walking away (or, uh, me losing it). I’m excited to see how it turns out!

I think that catches you up on most of the happenings around here. Later this week Hillary and I will be down in Sarasota to cover the 4* at TerraNova for EN, but I swear I’ll schedule a Foal Friday post to run while I’m gone. I swear. I don’t want to incite a riot by missing two weeks in a row.