Long time no post. At least for me anyway.

I really had nothing to say last week unless someone wanted to hear me continuing to complain about the ankle. Even I was tired of hearing myself complain about that. Plus with what happened the weekend before last with Georgie Campbell I thought that anything I had to say just rang a little bit hollow in general. So I just… refrained. Reflected. Took some time to STFU.

The good news is, I’m now back on two legs, which of course means that I’m back on four legs too. Which means I have a few things to talk about at least.

The bad news is that, as with most injuries, its not as simple as just getting back on and picking back up where you were. The first couple rides I really couldn’t put my foot in the stirrup, then I could put my foot in but I couldn’t post or anything that put actual weight on it. Now we’ve made it to the point where I can post some, but not for more than like 5-10 minutes before it starts to get mad. And I have to be really careful when I get off to make sure I don’t slam down on my right foot. Which is… easier said than done when you ride a 17.1+ hand chaos factory.

But I’m absolutely DELIGHTED to feel like I’m actually doing something again. Presto is out of shape and back to being a bit dull to the aids (we had really JUST gotten him feeling sharper and more responsive when I got hurt) so these first couple weeks of riding it kind of works out to go back to the basics and reinforce some of that. At this point we have aaaaaaalll frickin summer anyway, with the next show not being til the end of August. Nothing better to do at this point than take our time and bring us both back in a way that is helpful and methodical. I also reached out to someone new about lessons, but haven’t actually set anything up yet because… well… I feel like I need to be a couple weeks further along in my healing than I currently am. We can talk about it soon hopefully.

In other, equally exciting news, being able to walk again means that I can FINALLY start working on stuff with Lottie! And by working on stuff I really just mean spending time handgrazing her, working on manners, learning to relax when she leaves her friends, standing in the crossties for grooming, etc. That’s as far as we’ve gotten, and I’m pretty delighted to have literally ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD to get her going. I still haven’t decided whether or not I’m going to give her a long break and aim for RRP 2025 or not, I figured we’ll just go week by week and see how things look.

The first order of business is getting her body “right” after so much time on the track. She’s sore and tight and her SI is definitely gonna need some attention, and her feet are teeny tiny little pancake disasters. So I’m more than happy to just take the time and get all that stuff headed down the right path, and not have to feel like we’re on any kind of timeline.

We’ve already started on her feet of course, and she’s had some chiropractic. I’ve been using a massage and stretching e-book (that I’ll review for you guys soon, because it’s super cool!) to try to help improve her tightness on a day to day basis, and it seems to be helping. Next steps will be teeth and stomach. The feet, like the body, are just gonna take time. Lottie is really sensitive, although not particularly explosive, but spending the time with her on the ground is teaching me a lot about her brain.

Mostly she just kind of seems like she’s learned to internalize a lot of things, and she hasn’t seemed to see humans as being a particularly safe space. We’re working on that, and she’s seeming to trust me a little bit more every day. She’s quite polite, and wants to be a good girl, but we’re just going to have to re-wire her brain a little bit to make her feel a little bit safer so she can let her guard down a bit.

The gray is starting to grow on me a little bit too. It’s not my color of choice, but one perk is that they don’t turn yellow in the Florida sun. I pulled some hair to sent to Etalon to do genetic testing on her, mostly to see if she’s homozygous gray, since she has two gray parents. I’m also curious to see what her temperament variant comes back as… she might be my first horse that I would call Vigilant, but I’m not sure how much of that is her learned self-preservation tactics versus her true nature. She does seem to have some Curious in her too, but I’m not sure yet exactly what my guess is.

She HAS figured cookies out though, finally. It took her a few weeks, but she’s convinced now. German Horse Muffins, Nickermakers, and soft peppermints have all gotten the seal of approval. She still takes the daintiest little bites though.

Breeding season is also slowly but surely coming to a close. We’ve got one more to breed for sure, and then a few more pregnancy checks. Hopefully they’re pregnant so we don’t have to breed them again. No offense but I’m a little bit tired of staring at mare hooha’s at all hours of the day and night.