We made it through the first hurricane of 2024! It’s funny, I think because this one was pretty weak, all things considered (just established as a Cat 1 before it made landfall) no one was really concerned about it. The number one thing you’ll see Floridians do before a minor hurricane or tropical storm? Mow their grass. Because it’s pretty much a full time job keeping the grass mowed here in the summer anyway, but if it’s not freshly mowed before it gets a bunch of rain dropped on it, you’ll be at jungle status within a few days before its dry enough to mow again. Everybody and their grandma was mowing on Sunday as it started to blow in.

We’re pretty far inland so all we typically get is some wind and rain, and that’s what we got this time too. The wind wasn’t too terrible, but man we got A TON of rain. More than any of the last hurricanes from the previous two years for sure. It just absolutely poured buckets for like 24 hours straight. And it’s been raining a lot the past month anyway, so it was water on top of water. The biggest issue we had was flooding.

I was concerned that with all the moisture and the wind we’d lose trees, and with that the secondary concern is structures, fences, or power lines. We did lose one tree but it was in an unused front area and it didn’t land on anything. We also got really lucky in that we didn’t lose power, although it flickered pretty hard a few times. Tons of people around here did lose power, there were trees down all over the place. We got lucky this time!

And even though we got something like almost 8″ of rain, as soon as it stopped actively pouring from the sky I was able to get the horses turned back out. Gotta love that Florida sandy soil… as long as it’s not a low area it dries quick and isn’t slick.

We ended up only missing one day of riding, so aside from being water-logged in our drainage areas, things have been back to normal.

My trainers were on vacation last week so no lesson last week or this week. I did take Presto over to Sweet Dixie yesterday to gallop, but it was so freakin humid that even he wasn’t that enthusiastic after the first few minutes.

I think he was also unenthusiastic because he was alone. Like really really alone, the only horse on the property. It’s always quiet there in the off season but not usually THAT quiet. He kept looking around for his BFF Wally and seemed genuinely disappointed to have no friends. The ground felt GREAT though, and he’s starting to feel stronger again (both muscularly and cardio) after all that time off he had. I’m ready to skip ahead to September so we can get past the worst of the summer and get closer to doing things again. This is truly the swampiest, most boring time of year.

Although I signed us up for a dressage test at Majestic tomorrow… Prelim A. That’ll be our first time tackling that test, which I totally definitely have memorized and have ridden through more than once. Tooooootally. Definitely.

My ride time is like 2:40pm though, which is really testing my resolve to participate. But unless it’s doing some kind of death thunderstorm I really have no reason not to, and I’ve already paid, so… let’s go? I guess?

Next week we should be back to our lesson schedule and starting to pick up some steam again, or at least be back to things that are more interesting. Now if we could turn Florida’s thermostat down a little bit, that would be superb.