It’s been show recap central around here for a while, and while the blog has been covering the things that already happened, life has still been trucking along in the meantime. Plus I’ve been mum about some stuff publicly on purpose while I waited to see how they went (Patreon folks y’all had the tea, so a lot of this might not be news to you at this point). Anyway… let’s catch up on what’s been going on around these parts.

First and foremost: Argo sold. He sold a while ago actually, we’ve just been waiting on a shipper. West Texas isn’t the most common route, especially this time of year when every truck in Ocala is pointed north. His PPE went really well, much better than you’d expect for an 8yo that raced for 5 years of his life without any real breaks. They did a fair amount of x-rays and there was nothing particularly noteworthy on any of them. The only weird thing came in his bloodwork, with some elevated liver values. We ended up doing repeat and additional bloodwork over the next couple weeks and determined that he does indeed have a functional liver, and will indeed be fine. It did manage to give me some mild panic though in the meantime.

Selling horses is just stressful as hell. I bought and sold some in my 20’s and I have kind of forgotten how horrible it is, even when the people involved are really nice. It’s just anxiety central. I hate everything about it. And I never even actually advertised him and had to deal with all that part of it. But now he’s just been sitting here for basically a month waiting to get on a truck, and every day I’m like “please don’t do anything stupid to maim yourself”. He’s such a sweet dude and I’ve enjoyed having him, but I’ll still breathe a sigh of relief when he gets on the trailer and heads to his new people.

When he first sold I was holding out hope that I’d find something else pretty quickly and be able to pick back up on the journey to RRP for this year. But lord there was nothing. Just nothing that I liked that was also in my price range. The double edged sword of things like RRP is that it’s raised the value of these horses coming directly off the track, which is a great thing. The downside is that now a lot of them are out of my budget. Gone are the days when $2500 was a lot for one fresh off the track. The only horses I saw that I really liked were priced at 6k and 8k respectively, still on the track. They were nice horses, so people can price them at whatever they want, but it did put them solidly out of my reach.

I scoured every single TB group on facebook. Every track resource. I even started stalking cheap claiming horses at the Tampa meet and messaging their trainers/owners. Still nothing. Nothing nothing nothing. And if anything did happen to pop up, you’d better be on it within literally minutes, because the resellers nab the cute and less expensive ones super fast. They know what they’re doing.

If I’d just been looking for a horse, there would have been a few of interest that would have worked. But I figured since I had a little bit more to spend this time (thanks Argo!) and I remembered now how much I hate selling horses, plus I’d be starting so late in the year for RRP, ideally I was looking for something that I’d want to keep rather than just take to RRP and then sell. If I found something that excited me, great. If not, I was fine with calling RRP a loss for this year and waiting til the fall to find something for next year.

Which is good, because I was looking for like 6 weeks. My window for realistically making RRP this year came and went, which is fine. I basically gave up, but kept looking at all the groups once or twice a day just to see if anything came up that was interesting.

And then I was at the POP show with Hillary on Sunday… which was her OTTB mare Tilly’s horse trial debut by the way. Tilly just came off the track in December and she went to the big scary busy Florida Horse Park last weekend and got a 36 on the flat and marched around both jumping phases like an actual pro. Big props to Hillary and Tilly, I think she’s got a really nice one and she’s done a great job in just a few months time. She’s working her butt off to make sure the basics are installed thoroughly and correctly from the very beginning, and I think it shows.

Anyway… Hillary was in warmup and I popped open my facebook to do a little mindless scroll. I hadn’t really been on it yet that morning because I’d gotten up early to get all the farm chores done in order to make it to the show in time to catch Hillary’s dressage. So I open it up and the very first thing at the top of my feed was an ad in one of the OTTB groups for a gray mare. I am not a lover of gray, I’d prefer it NOT be gray honestly, but her pics looked potentially cute so I clicked on the pedigree. Low and behold, she was by a Tiznow son out of a Macho Uno x Royal Academy mare.

That got my attention. I love Tiznow (he’s Argo’s damsire, but most commonly known in the sporthorse world as being the sire of 5* horse Phelps), Macho Unos are known for being good jumpers, and Royal Academy (another 5* connection – he’s the second sire of Twilightslastgleam and Ferro Point, second damsire of SAP Talisman) is my favorite source of Nijinsky.

Her jog video was not the best quality but she seemed to move pretty evenly. I messaged the seller to ask the price, thinking she’d for sure be out of my price range (the gray ones almost always are, I find it hilarious that grays tend to sell for more considering that I’d much prefer a horse not be gray), but low and behold… she was within the threshold. I think it helps that she was based in Oklahoma, not exactly a hub area. I called to talk to the listing agent about her, made an offer, the owner made a counter offer, and like 5 minutes later I bought myself another horse on PayPal. Totally normal Sunday morning activity.

So now we wait for her to get here. The process of finding her a ride has not been super quick, which is a good thing really because on Monday I fell off of Presto and broke my ankle.

Ha. Haaaaaa.

It’s as if he felt me send in that Prelim entry for Majestic Oaks a few days prior and was like nah, let’s waste more of mom’s money and decimate her dreams. His favorite pastime. Luckily it’s a fairly small and simple break, nothing crazy. I can’t put any weight on it for at least 10 days, and then after that I’ll probably be in a boot of some kind for a little while. But hopefully I won’t be out of the saddle for too long. Probably just long enough to miss the last shows before the summer break here in Ocala, which is just about right for Presto. He does have impeccable timing. Love that for me.

Megan was going to come back to FL to coach me for my Prelim debut so when I texted her and asked if she wanted to ride him instead she was like “well turns out I just broke my ribs…”. We’re all down for the count. Oh well. Whatcha gonna do. The green numbers will have to wait. I’m mostly just glad it wasn’t worse, because I felt the pop when I hit the ground and was really worried I’d torn some kind of soft tissue. That would have been a lot worse and taken a lot longer to heal. I’ll take a minorly broken ankle.

In the meantime hopefully the mare gets here soon and in one piece, and she can enjoy a bit of a vacation until I’m back on two feet again. She raced about a month ago so some time off will probably do her good, and give us some time to get to know each other. I’ll do a full post about her and her history/pedigree later, once I’ve had more time to get it all together. In the meantime… yep, basically now you’re all caught up on the major stuff. 😅