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Hurricane Hanna hit south Texas this past weekend, and while Austin is too far inland and north to have really felt any hurricane effects, she did bring us some much needed rain and a break from the triple digit temps. I dunno about y’all but it feels like it’s been summer for about 8 years now and we’re only halfway through it.

Since they weren’t quite sure how much rain we were going to get from this, I switched up the horse’s schedule a bit in the preceding days. Presto got ridden on Wednesday, and they both got worked on Friday just in case it was too wet on the weekend. On Wednesday, Presto went for another hack out to the back. Ride #20! Feels like some kind of milestone. Honestly pretty thrilled with where he’s at after 20 rides, especially considering how slowly we’ve been going. Most horses have 20 rides within their first month or so of being started, but he’s 5 months under saddle now. He’s gradually getting stronger and more confident, which was the plan with this approach, without making him sore or tired or sour or overwhelmed.

For his hack I got on him at the barn and rode straight out again, no lunge or arena riding first. He had a lot of pep in his step, and he behaved, aside from one genuine honest-to-god spook when something moved in the bushes. That’s the first time he’s really spooked under saddle, and it was mostly just funny. He did a very obvious wind-up to where I knew what was coming, and then he just spun around in a pretty darn balanced pirouette. I was barely even jostled. Considering that Henry’s spooks are more like teleporting 15′ away with little to no notice, Presto’s was fairly adorable.

We walked back to the scary bush, made a couple circles, and then carried on. He got over it immediately and that was the end of it. I was pleased with that. Horses are gonna spook sometimes, that’s just the nature of the beast, what’s more important to me is how quickly he moves on from it.

On Friday Presto did a quick lunge session. I set up my Pivo at E this time, mostly because I wanted to see how well it worked from there. The new Beta tracking makes it so that you no longer need to have it in the middle of the ring, and I figured E would give me a better view than C. It never really occurred to me before to use it to film a lunging session because, well… that’s boring. But I actually got some interesting footage (to me anyway) and some good screengrabs from it, so I might start including some of that footage in Presto’s monthly vlogs.

I did a quick dressage ride with Henry (because it was approximately 9000% humidity on Friday and we both start to feel like death after much longer than 20-25 minutes) with the Pivo at E and I definitely think that’s my new favorite placement. Having it outside of the arena is obviously easier, and it tracked perfectly from there. Seriously tickled with the new tracking, I’ve now used it for jumping, lunging, and flatwork without any issues. Y’all don’t even know how exciting this is as a thirsty blogger who always needs media but is also always alone. Revolutionary.

Plus I really like being able to watch the rides, it’s helpful. I don’t get lessons very often (um it’s been like a year almost?), especially not right now with covid plus the heat. Being able to see the footage gives me some kind of feedback, at least.

Luckily the rain held off until Saturday afternoon, so I was able to fit in a quick jump school (we did some little gymnastic-type exercises over small jumps so I didn’t bother to get the Pivo out) with Henry, and just groomed Presto and added more air back his ball. I dunno what they’re doing to that thing at night, but it was waaaaaaaaaaaaay in the back by the neighbors fence and looked like it taken some serious abuse in the process. I feel like this ball might not be long for this world either.

I was hoping to ride Presto on Sunday, I had plans to set out some poles in the arena and trot him over them, but Sunday morning it kept raining more. Both boys got a mini-spa day instead (ok mostly I just groomed them, brushed out and re-banged their tails and chopped some mane off).

While there wasn’t as much riding this weekend, it seems like a fair trade to have a short reprieve from the heat and some moisture for the ground. My jump field was starting to get hard, and any kind of rain in July is nothing short of a miracle around here. The last remnants of Hanna should be cleared out by tomorrow, so hopefully this week I’ll be able to do Presto’s first groundpole ride!

Well guys, gone are the days when it took effort to get all the babies together in one shot. They’ve all gotten bigger, bolder, more comfortable with each other, and the helicopter moms (ahem PEYTON) have relaxed a bit.

And while they don’t always play in one big group, none of them have really paired off either. They play with each other without a whole lot of preference, and for the most part they all seem to like each other and they all get along pretty well.

The girls hang out with each other…

the boys hang out with each other (generally with lots more biting involved)…

and they also mix it up as well. They’re very good comminglers, an equal opportunity kind of group. Admittedly, a lot of the commingling includes Ollie, because he’s a terrorist.

But Remi isn’t afraid to play with the girls sometimes either (even if he is generally quite out-matched and less bold about it than Ollie).

I think the real friendship story here though – the ride or die, the thick or thin, the BF5Ever – is Ollie and the round bale. He is kind obsessed.

But his absolute, most favorite, #1, bestest activity to do with the round bale? Jump in it. Cowabunga style, complete with a running start.

Happy Friday everyone, and I hope you have someone that loves you the way Ollie loves his round bale (although perhaps a little less violently…).

 

Yeah I know, I don’t usually do these bloodline posts for short format events, but… since 2020 has killed pretty much all of my nerd joy, y’all are just gonna have to give me this one. Plus this was kind of an interesting field at Strzegom (in Poland) last weekend. It drew a good mix of been-there-done-that horses and up-and-comers, from all across Europe. If you’re itching for some cross country live stream action like I was, you can watch the replay here (they’ve also got the replay up from the 2* pony division, which I’m not gonna go into here but it’s pretty freaking fun to watch).

If you haven’t seen the results yet, I’ll go ahead and ruin it by saying that Michael Jung and fischerChipmunk won it on a 19.4, almost a 15 point margin over the second place pair. However much of this was down to XC time – Chipmunk was the only double clear, not particularly surprising since most of these horses have had quite a light year so far and many probably weren’t really going for the time.

While the upper level European fields and the short format events tend to always be lighter on full TB’s than American events, this one had particularly little representation with only one full TB. This field definitely was not lacking in TB blood though, with 14 starters (23% of the field) having one full TB parent and 32 (53% of the field) having a full TB somewhere in the first 3 generations. French anglo-arab blood had some presence as well, with 8 horses (13% of the field) carrying some AA within the first 3 generations.

The average blood percentage of the field was 52%, which is slightly lower than what we tend to see at 4*L or at 5*, but not significantly off. The range of blood percentages was all over the board, with the lowest at 18% (Sacre Coeur – who was withdrawn after XC. Interestingly, this horse has also showjumped to the 1.55m level.) and the highest – if we toss out the full TB – at 99% (FRH Butt’s Avondale – who finished 11th). If you average the blood percentage of only the horses who went clear on XC, it stays pretty much the same – 54%. If you average the horses that finished in the top 10, it’s again about the same – 53%. You don’t see any variation until you average the top 5 finishers – then it’s bumped up to 61%.

Looking at the TB names with the most representation here, we see some of the same we’re always used to seeing. Heraldik shows up in 5 horses, Jape in 3, Chef’s Supreme in 2, Sir Shostakovich in 2, Betel in 2, Hand in Glove in 2, plus some we’ve seen several times before in other fields, like Sunlight, Esteban, Ostermond, Star Regent, Hill Hawk, Nobre, Sadler’s Wells, Lucky Boy, Likoto, etc.

I think my favorite part about this particular field is that we had THREE full siblings participating – Bandaras, Belfast 35, and Barbados 26. I’ve yet to see that before! It’s quite a feat, all things considered. All 3 are Polish-bred, by Moravia out of a full TB mare, Babilonia (by Jape). Moravia was bred in Germany, by French AA stallion Monsieur out of a Westfalen mare, and Babilonia is a Polish-bred TB by turf champion Jape. Clearly these two were a good cross and brought lots of blood – their offspring are 70%. All 3 horses completed, with Banderas the highest placed at 27th.

Moving on to the warmblood stallions who had multiple progeny in the field, we’ve got more familiar names. Valentino had 3 direct offspring, Jaguar Mail had 2 direct offspring, and Stalypso had 2 direct offspring. Valentino especially should perk the ears of American breeders, since he now stands in Canada and is available to us here in North America via fresh semen. His highest placed finisher was Valentine FRH in 7th place.

If we move beyond just direct sires and go back a couple more generations, stallions that we see multiple times are Contender with 5 appearances (3 via his son Contendro), Ramiro Z with 2, Silvio with 2, Empire with 2, Lavall with 2, and – less typically – we also see the dressage stallion Flemmingh twice, both times via the dam’s side. Not such a surprise considering that although Flemmingh was a very successful dressage sire, he has a very “jumper” pedigree.

There was definitely not as much repetition of the same sires in this field as we’re used to seeing, probably because the Polish horses gave the field more diversity than we typically see in the western Europe events. Those tend to be dominated by Irish and German blood (we only had 3 Irish horses in this field).

And of course while the mares produce many fewer offspring and therefore are harder to spot patterns with, we all know they are the most important part of the equation. If we look more closely at the dams of the top 10 horses, we find some really cool mares among them. FischerChipmunk’s dam Havanna produced several offspring, including 2 Chipmunk full siblings, one of which is eventing at 3* level and the other has made a career in the A/O jumpers and GP through 1.35m. Dimitri N.O.P.’s dam Jorine produced a whopping 15 foals, most of which competed in dressage (one to GP level). Herby’s dam Naomi competed in sport herself, showjumping through the 1.30m level, and has produced 9 foals, mostly showjumpers (successful through 1.50m level).

I don’t know whether you guys love this stuff as much as I do, but boy does it feel good to get my spreadsheets up and running again. I’m really missing the 5*’s this year, but hopefully this will tide all of us over for a little while, until the next interesting event comes along. I’m holding out hope for some of the big fall events, at least in Europe!

Y’all, I might need an intervention. In the past week I’ve dyed 4 old sunshirts and 2 pairs of riding tights. I’ve done: dingy white to light blue shirt, yellow to merlot shirt, taupe to dusty pink shirt, faded blue to turquoise shirt, gray to eggplant tights, and gray to dark green tights. However, I think I’m perfecting my technique now and getting a good handle on the dyes, because I’m quite pleased with how most of them came out. Last week after I was lamenting about how I wished I had more old sunshirts to dye, I found two more that I had totally forgotten about because I’d tossed them into a “give away” pile last time I went through my closet. I really didn’t like the color of either of them. But now… I could change that!

The blue was super faded, and the taupe one has always been an odd color that I’ve never quite been able to figure out. Sometimes it looked gray and sometimes it looked tan. And I hated how the pink collar/zipper looked with that color. I decided to try to take that one to a dusty pink, since I was already starting out with the “dusty” part, and with the blue one I wanted to go teal.

Since I already had the gray tones from the original color, I just bought pink Jacquard Acid Dye (I learned last week that I thought I preferred the Jacquard colors to the RIT) to go over this one. I put only about 1/3 of the powder into my pot and only left the shirt in for 4 minutes. These Jacquard colors are very pigmented and take to the fabric quickly so I knew I needed to err on the side of caution lest it end up super pink. You can always add more dye to the water or leave the shirt in longer, but you can’t undo it once it’s gone too far.

And I’m super pleased with how this one turned out, it’s pretty much the exact dusty rose color I had in mind. I much prefer it to the original taupe and don’t find myself hating the pink zipper anymore.

The blue one… I wasn’t so happy with. This is totally my fault, because when I bought the dye I kind of forgot just how blue this shirt already was, and I bought a tone that also had far too much blue for what I was trying to achieve when I should have gone much more toward the green side. That was not well thought out on my part.

So while the color definitely came out refreshed and vibrant and turquoise, it’s just… way too bright for my taste. Way too bright. My bad.

So either I can brew up some more pink with what I’ve got leftover and take it toward purple, or I can get some green and see if I can balance it to a darker teal that my eyeballs will find less objectionable. Bright just isn’t my jam so I’m concerned that if I put pink over it, it’ll just be bright purple that I’ll also hate. So… maybe leaning towards the green.

The other big experiment was dyeing my gray Ariat tights. I like these tights a lot, but I just… don’t like the gray. Like at all. However, they are a polyester blend, and polyester requires a different type of dye. It’s also generally more difficult get it to take dye. I had no idea if it would work at all, but hey I’m feeling adventurous right now. So I researched all the poly dyes before I settled on iDye Poly in green.

They don’t have a ton of color options (they only had green and kelly green, which look almost the same on my computer screen, the green maybe slightly darker and more subdued than the kelly) so I went with green, hoping that since the tights started off gray, it would add some depth and a little bit of blue tint to the green. But also I was just… mostly hoping that they would take the dye at all, because I’ve never tried to dye polyester. It’s pretty much the same process as nylon though, so it was pretty simple. I will say, this dye STINKS way worse than the other dyes, the fumes were intense. I had to open a couple windows and move a fan to the kitchen to blow the stench out. It also took longer for the polyester to get to it’s full color – I left it in for about 45 minutes. BUT… I’m pretty thrilled with how they came out.

These were definitely riskier, because a) I wasn’t sure it would work, b) while I was pretty confident that the vinyl lettering and silicone would survive just fine, I wasn’t 100% positive. Luckily this worked out great, and no damage was done to the tights at all. After a wash and dry you definitely would never know that these hadn’t started out this way. The color is really nice. I wouldn’t hesitate to dye some polyester again.

So far I’m ridiculously pleased with this whole dyeing experiment. The only “fail” is that I didn’t like the color I picked for the blue shirt, which… can be changed. No harm no foul, just some wasted dye and time.

I will say though, now that I’ve washed the merlot shirt (which was dyed with Jacquard Acid Dye) and the sky blue shirt (which was dyed with RIT) it really just solidified my preference for the Jacquard dyes. The colors are more vibrant, more pigmented, they dye more quickly, and now that I’ve washed each of those shirts 3 times… the merlot isn’t fading one bit. The light blue one, though… already looking noticeably paler. I’ve definitely got to give the edge to the Jacquard. It’s powder instead of liquid, and it requires some vinegar, but the quality is just better IMO.

I have to be honest, I’m not super bummed that the light blue one is fading, because I found myself wishing that I had tried an ombre technique on that one. So now I’m going to re-do it, but with Jacquard, and attempt to ombre it. Why not?

If you’re planning that intervention please wait until I’m finished with that, please.

Can we talk about the elephant in the room? Everyone knows we’re still smack dab in the middle of a pandemic, right? And that large parts of country (like… the entire south pretty much) are trending really really badly in the wrong direction?

Just checking.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about continuing to live our lives and ride and take lessons and school and horse show, as long as it actually makes reasonable sense. Like smaller, shorter shows that draw a local crowd and adhere to covid protocol… okay. You can convince me of that. But national championship shows that draw large numbers of people from all over the country together in one place, require a lot of travel across states, and at least a week’s stay at said destination before everyone re-disperses? I’m just not sold on that being wise.

I definitely do agree that there is a relatively low risk of spread at the horse show itself, given that spectators are extremely limited, and given that people adhere to the guidelines (which, whether or not they do is a whole ‘nother ball of wax in and of itself), that they stay masked, and don’t congregate in large groups and/or indoor spaces. But… what about everything else involved? Like the travel to get there, which for some people can be days of hauling across multiple states, stopping at many gas stations/restaurants/etc. And then the hotel stay when you do arrive to your destination. And the going out to restaurants and into stores. And so on and so on and so on, for at least a week. So you’re gathering all these people from different places, assimilating all of them into the local population, and then sending them all back out again.

I don’t know about y’all, but I’d be especially leery of Texans and Floridians and Californians and Georgians and and and right now (reminder: I am a Texan, and I would totally get it if you wanted me to stay the heck away, I’m doing my best to stay the heck away from other Texans too). Particularly in the states that actually have a handle on their case numbers or have made some progress at flattening the curve. Some states have put into place requirements or recommendations (lol “recommendations”, let me tell you how well that’s going with mask-wearing down here in Freedumbland) that anyone coming from the hot spot states should quarantine themselves for 14 days. How exactly would that work?

So I’m over here peering over my theoretical glasses at things like Pony Finals, AEC’s, and Equitana. I mean, does… does any of that really seem like a good idea in the next couple months? How do the residents of Kentucky (which has already had a 231% increase in cases in the last two weeks, one of the biggest) feel about that? Because, I’ll say it: it’s just not possible for no one attending these events to have covid, or to not come into contact with someone with covid somewhere along the way. Someone, or many someones, will for sure have it. Just by sheer numbers, especially from the worst states. And maybe there won’t be any transmission at the horse show, but it’s gonna be quite the feat if you can spend a whole week traveling and eating out and going to stores and manage to not either pass it on or come into contact with someone who has it.

I kind of suspect that since it hasn’t really made an impact on the equestrian community yet – in that no one “big name” has gotten a bad case of it or died from it, and no horse related things have been reported as mass spreader events – that we’re just kinda flying under the radar and trying to pretend that we’ll be fine. But I have to wonder how wise it is to be holding national level championship events when the country is literally on fire. Yes, of course everyone wants to go. Yes, of course it would be devastating to a lot of people for these things to get cancelled. No, no one wants that. At what point is it the responsible choice, though? Are there other safer/smarter options that we could be pursuing instead?

Pony Finals is the first thing up on the docket, so we’ll see how that goes. Maybe I’m just being crazy. Maybe the covid ship has long since sailed and it’s too late anyway. Thoughts? Would you feel comfortable going? Would you feel comfortable with your barnmates going and then coming back into your shared space? If you’re in Kentucky, how do you feel about all the travelers coming into your area? Do we think all of these events will actually get to happen or will the Kentucky governor step in?