Category: Uncategorized

Alright I absolutely hate foosball but can we talk about that halftime show for a second? I’ve been a fan of Eminem since he first hit the scene when I was in high school, and my love has not faded over time. I’ve said for years that he’s the greatest lyricist of our time and I stand by that. Also Dr. Dre is still absolutely baller. If they could have just cancelled all the football and let the halftime show go for a couple more hours, I would have been delighted.

In more horsey news, Gemma continues to have very minor and easy “lessons”. Hillary ponied her out on the trails in the back

which Gemma thought was really fun. She does love to get out and see things and explore, and she was super interested in looking around at everything but she wasn’t spooky about it. Not even when two giant helicopters came thundering right overhead. Ears pricked, happy girl. You can tell she’s itching to stretch her legs and let off some steam, but seriously she gets two big gold stars at how well she’s keeping herself under wraps during her rest period. I’ve been bringing her into the barn every other day in the afternoon so she can stand in the crossties, get groomed, and get some Durasole and Keratex on her feet.

She’s understanding the crossties well now, and she stands pretty well. No fuss about leaving the other horses or being alone in the barn (unlike a certain hangry hangry hippo we all know and love) Her feet are still a bit sore, mostly the hinds since they’re barefoot now, but it’s definitely gotten better since those first couple days. The timing worked out pretty well for her shoeing transition since the ground is has mercifully softened up a bit but it isn’t muddy. One thing about Gemma for sure though – she is a FOODIE. You wouldn’t know it by looking at her since she still has a lot of weight to gain, but that girl really likes her food, especially treats. She absolutely SCREAMS at me when I’m coming with food. And not in the way that makes you feel loved… the way where you’re pretty sure she’s saying “Walk faster, peon!”. I live to serve. After all, I was trained by the Chestnuttiest Marey-est horse alive.

Gemma still doesn’t even hold a candle to Henry when it comes to the stereotypical chestnut mare behaviors.

I’ve been riding Henry some though, on the days where Hillary can’t come out. He’s really thriving I think, doing a little bit of “harder” work again with her. He’s a bit stronger than he was, but everything is still easy and infrequent enough to where he’s not being taxed by it. Although she has figured out more and more how to flat him better, which he’s not quite so pleased about. He would appreciate if everyone just believed all his “oh I don’t know what that means” or “oh I don’t do that” LIES when it comes to proper flatwork.

Presto is settling into Michelle’s too… I think she might need a bulk delivery of wine on like a weekly basis while he’s there, but more on all his tomfoolery tomorrow.

One more little newsworthy item – I’ve been officially brought onto the Eventing Nation team to provide some regular breeding articles, as well as extensive breeding guides for all of the major events. We officially kicked it off yesterday with a “fun” Valentines Day themed piece to get the ball rolling. I’m pretty excited to have the opportunity to get all my nerdy info out to a bigger audience, and hopefully see what we can do about getting this info more mainstream. I’m especially interested in doing articles that might appeal to people who aren’t already involved in the breeding business or have experience with breeding, so if you guys have any ideas for what you might like to read about or learn more about, please let me know!

Omg y’all, where the hell is the time going? Henry officially turned 15 yesterday. WTF? I remember when turned 10 and I was like oh man double digits. How did we already get halfway through his second decade?

Henry was not much of a fan of any of his birthday shit aside from all the cookies. The hat? Stupid. The banner? Annoying. The balloons? DEATH MONSTERS FROM OUTER SPACE. And once we finally convinced him to stand close to them without snorting, he then refused to put his ears up at all. Total mad donkey mode. I tried every single sound on the AllEars app but NOPE he wasn’t falling for my bullshittery.

We were busy shooting Patreon content this weekend (patrons check your dashboard – first podcast episode is up!) but Hillary did do a quick bareback flat ride on him yesterday. I’d say that he got 15 cookies, but that would be a lie because he probably got more like 30. I did give him 16 smooches last night at night check though (15 plus one to grow on) which he definitely almost tolerated without looking murderous. Almost.

I rode him a couple times last week, during one of which I propped my phone in my Pivo and got a few shots of him galloping. He was WILD AF that day but we had fun, as always. He’s the best dude.

Well ok there was one pass in particular where I’m not quite sure what he was trying to do… I think he wanted to both run away and dolphin at the same time but somehow it came out looking like a deranged llama. He is beauty, he is grace. Some things never change.

He also got to do some jumping with Hillary (I’m pretty sure she’s rapidly becoming his new favorite person, with her BEMER and her handfuls of cookies and her lack of wanting to smooch his face all the time) which he thought was super fun. Aside from the part where she’s asking him to be more round before and after the fence – he thinks that part is mega stupid.

All in all though, not a bad lead up to his birthday week, and a pretty fine birthday itself. I really need to know how to freeze frame time though… 15 already. Man.

Everyone’s favorite chaos factory (aka Presto) made the trip to Michelle’s yesterday to start his R&R time. I went up there to meet her so I could see her off, grab all his stuff, and give him a proper nose boop.

Megan says he’s been quite well-behaved with all of his down time (something I found highly suspicious, because, ya know… Presto) but indeed he did seem pretty chill about things. Immediately patted me down for cookies in a very thorough and perhaps overly personal full body search, put the sleeve of my hoodie in his mouth, and tried to make me wear his head like a hat, but that’s all very normal. He seems a little bored maybe, but he’s certainly holding himself together a lot better than I anticipated considering how long he’s been out of work.

We got all his stuff loaded up, talked for a bit, and then put Presto into Michelle’s trailer. Not gonna lie, I spent the first hour drive home regretting sending him away instead of bringing him home. I really miss having him around on a daily basis, he’s absolute mayhem YES but he’s my brand of mayhem. Once I got past the emotional side of things though and remembered why I made this decision in the first place I was like oh yeah, that’s right, it was 100% the better choice for him. He won’t be lonely, he’s got a perfect living space, and all of the extra services he needs to aid in his healing are readily available. I do miss him tremendously though, not gonna lie, and every time I see him I’m reminded of that.

Michelle got him home to her place in west Texas yesterday evening and stuck him in a pen next to the 2021 weanlings. The kiddos will be leaving for Ocala soon but for now they think he is THE COOLEST HORSE THEY’VE EVER SEEN and I’m just over here like oh my god what kinds of terrible things is he going to teach the children.

I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough. Poor Michelle, I’m not sure she quite realizes exactly what she signed up for. ^{(too late now, muahahahaha)}

Hopefully he decides to behave himself there too though, so he can get healed up and back to work. I know he’s prefers having something to do and would much rather have a job. Just gotta keep your legs out of trouble, kid, and stop pawing shit so aggressively.

As for a little Patreon update – tremendous thanks to everyone that’s signed up as we launch, I’m really excited about what we’ve got planned and upcoming and it’s giving me so much life to see that you guys are excited for it too. Things are coming together! We’re filming and recording all the first real content this weekend and I’m looking forward to branching out into these new formats. If you’re a Patron you should have already gotten a message with the link to the private fb group (there’s already lots of discussion and updates and some exclusive video there) so please make sure to check that out, and for the Supporter and VIP tiers I also posted a fun thing for y’all this morning – check your Patreon dashboard. 😉

Happy Friday everyone!

Tuesday was farrier day, and conveniently enough Gemma was already synced up with Henry’s shoeing cycle. That meant it was time for her first appointment with my farrier, and also time for her racing plates to come off.

Of course we’re still learning each other, and while I think I have a pretty good gauge on her personality now and how she will react, sometimes you just never quite know until you do things. The perk of racehorses is that they’ve been there and done that and seen a lot, so it wasn’t a matter of whether or not she was well-handled and used to the farrier. We knew that would be true. But, ya know, some of them can still be difficult about it or require sedation or multiple handlers or a chain shank or whatever. Knowing her, I doubted any of that would be the case. She’s definitely sensitive, yes, but she’s clever and a thinker and generally wants to please.

She hasn’t quite figured out the crossties 100% yet though, so I figured I’d hold her for this first time at least. We opted to do Henry first, and I held her nearby the whole time he was getting done. She was a little interested in all the smoke when he was getting his hot shoes fitted, but she never so much as flinched at any of the noise or commotion. Mostly she was just curious (always curious, this one) and was dying to put her nose all over the farrier’s tools.

Once Henry was done we got to work, first pulling off those aluminum plates. She was a little bit rude about holding her own weight up (“you want to pick it up? Fine, you hold it then.” Mares.), but didn’t do anything naughty. We opted to leave the hind feet barefoot for now but put steel shoes on the fronts. It’s not easy for horses to transition from shod to barefoot on our hard and rocky ground, especially one that’s been wearing shoes for most of their life. I also don’t like making drastic changes like that when one is just coming off the track and we’re trying to get their body to relax and unwind. Adding foot ouchiness can just create more tension and stiffness, and we’re trying to do the opposite. So, front shoes it was.

I also kind of get the impression that Gemma might not be the most stoic of horses. She banged her leg on the water trough the other day, not even very hard, but she took off a teeny lit bit of hair. Y’all, she stood there waving her leg around in the air like it was BROKEN FOR SURE, and when she finally decided she could put it back down she was mega lame and very sad about it. This went on for about 15 minutes before she declared that she might indeed survive this harrowing experience. The drama was high. I suspected that the shoeing change might go similarly and I was right… she’s pretty convinced that her hind feet are broken and there’s something very wrong with the fronts to make them weigh so much more. She’s walking a little bit like a goat now. I think she’ll forget in a few days but lord. I can’t even imagine what she would have done if we’d tried to put her barefoot. Laid down and died, probably.

But with the removal of the plates and transition to normal shoes, she’s officially gone from racehorse mode to sporthorse mode, which is an exciting step. Now I just have to figure out what the heck I want to do with her old shoes. I knew I wanted to keep them but I didn’t actually have anything in mind to do with them… ideas?

I also sent off some of Gemma’s hair to Etalon for a full genetic profile. It’s our standard practice to do that on any of the breeding mares anyway (which Gemma hopefully will be one day) and I was very curious to see what her color genetics are. I mean, we know she’s ee (chestnut) but I’m curious about her agouti and especially if she might have any of the W’s. Her white markings have jagged edges, the front one comes up over the knee, and she has a lot of ermine spots in the socks. She doesn’t have as much face white as is typical for a lot of those expressions though, nor does she have any belly spots or roaning. Color, especially for white markings, can be wily sometimes and what you see isn’t always indicative of what’s truly there genetics-wise.

We shall see what the DNA says, it should take a few weeks to get the report back. Aside from all the color stuff they also check to see if she has or is a carrier of a bunch of health-related genetic stuff (some of the testing is more proven than others, but it’s interesting info to have anyway) including PSSM, Equine Metabolic Syndrome, WFFS, uveitis, etc. Cool info to have, for sure!

Gemma’s got about another month left to go in her rest period, but until then I’ve really liked having this low key no pressure time to get to know her… I think she’s gonna be pretty fun.

First of all, big thank to all of you last week that commented and PM’d me with input on the Patreon idea. As usual y’all thought of things that I hadn’t, and helped steer it in (I think/hope?) the right direction.

Let’s talk about what I don’t want. I really definitely do not want to put content that would normally be on this blog behind a paywall. I’ve been doing this thing for 8 years pretty much 5 days a week for no other reason aside from the fact that I (usually) enjoy writing, I enjoy the community, and I enjoy the discussions it’s brought about. I don’t want that to change. Blogs have been dropping like flies the last few years and I don’t want this to be another casualty. So instead of taking anything away from the normal blog posts, content-wise, I’m thinking I would drop down to posting more like 4 days a week on average (sometimes 3 if I’m really strapped) to clear up some time for producing the Patreon content.

All of that said, what I really DO want is to make the Patreon interesting, worth doing, and worth people actually paying money for. If I’m giving you the honest truth, the idea of dabbling in something a little bit different, but still complimentary all together, holds a lot of appeal for me. I’ve been at this thing for a long time… this blog started in 2014, I’m coming up on 2,000 posts and almost 1.5 million words written. That’s a freakin lot. Having the opportunity to accent it with content in other formats makes me feel a little re-invigorated about all of it. And if I’m not going to do something cool and fun and worthwhile, I’d rather not do it at all. So here’s what I’ve got for the membership tiers and what they would include:

$5/mo “Superfan” – this tier gets access to a private Facebook group with more discussions, early updates on stuff, extra details, etc. To be honest there’s a lot that I either don’t post on here, I post vague info about, or wait until it’s very much a done deal before spilling the beans. It’s kind of a lite version of what all is really going on, mostly because I have to remember that anyone and everyone can see this site. With a private group and smaller audience, I could say more and say it earlier. Like, for instance… Presto’s lameness ordeal of the past couple months… I would have updated on that as it was unfolding rather than waiting til the end diagnosis. Or the Ocala property purchase that I didn’t want to give details about until it was all very much wrapped up. We can also do polls for fun things (want to vote on what bridle Gemma gets?) and stuff like that. Think of it as “the rest of the story” or “BreedRideEvent Plus”. I also want the group to very much be a community where discussion is encouraged.

$10/mo “Supporter” – this tier gets access to the above Facebook group plus exclusive Patreon-hosted content, which will be (at minimum) monthly podcasts and vlogs as well as extra written content. Having it at this price bracket will allow us to keep everything ad-free. The items in this tier require a little assistance in the form of Hillary, who will co-host the podcast and some of the vlogs with me and help with production. We do a lot together, she’s leasing Henry, and she co-owns Gemma, so it’s a partnership that makes sense, we’re friends so we banter well, and she’s someone that you guys already “know”. We’ll also bring in other blog “regulars” like Bobby and Michelle as guests to keep things interesting (I feel like a lot of y’all would love listening to Bobby absolutely roast me for an hour, or hear Michelle talk more about her mares and foals and breeding philosophy). We’ll give more detail about ourselves and our horses, talk about whatever is going on at the moment, discuss more controversial topics, new and cool things that are coming out, etc. When we take trips, go to shows, during the Ocala move, when we restart Gemma under saddle, etc I’ll do some vlogs with a lot more detail and more footage than you would get elsewhere. The white breeches post that the regular blog gets? Patreon gets a vlog version as well, with way more detail, as well as a regular schooling breeches vlog. The results from Gemma’s genetic testing? Blog gets the key points interpreted by me, Patreon gets to see the full report PDF and a fully detailed breakdown. You get the idea. For written content I’m also thinking I could actually publish all those bloodlines spreadsheets I’m always making, plus Hillary has some great budgeting spreadsheets and tools like that as well. This is also where I’ll put the “Where Are They Now?” WTW foal updates as we hear news from their owners. Patrons from this tier as well as the next VIP tier will also be invited to submit topic requests and participate in AMA’s for the podcast or vlogs.

$15/mo “VIP” – It’s hard to gauge how much interest there would be in this tier so we’d have to see how many we got and if it was feasible enough to keep it long term, but this would include the fb group and all the extra Patreon content, plus a “thank you” package of goodies when you sign up (I’ve already got stuff planned out and am fairly pleased with myself, and yes it will also include a card signed by humans and horses because who wouldn’t want a Henry tongue-print and a Presto nose boop?), as well as automatic entry into monthly giveaways for cool stuff. Good stuff, not lame stuff. We’ll kick it off with a bang by giving away a Seaver girth sleeve on March 1.

_{Shoutout to Aimee L who not only sneakily found her way to the Patreon early, but became our first Patron and first VIP – getting the ball rolling in style}

Become a Patron!

I think all of this is feasible with Hillary’s help in addition to cutting out a day a week (on average anyway) of the regular blog. Then the Patrons would still be getting something fun for their money, I would still have time to produce the type and quality of content I would be happy putting out (again, with Hillary’s help), and the people who don’t want to pay for any of it can still continue getting pretty much the same content here.

Hopefully this is a solution that will keep everyone happy! If you want to be a Patron, we would absolutely love to have you on board for what we’ve got planned. But it not, that’s okay too. ❤