Well, we’ve made it to the end of the 2019 recap posts, and I’ve saved the best for last. It is, perhaps, the pinnacle accomplishment of the year. The crown achievement. The apex. My own personal zenith.

You see, Bobby has always been a hater of glitter. In fact, I’ve heard him refer to it as “the herpes of the craft world” on many occasions. He has always been the least fabulous, most khaki-wearing, plain black or white saddle pad type of guy in existence. Simple. Straightforward. No frills. It’s quite disappointing at times, to be honest.

Over the years I’ve certainly worked some of my magic on him a bit. Gussied him up, got him looking more modern with his turnout, converted him from synthetic to leather tack. I’ve even slowly but surely turned him into a bit of a shopper, as evidenced by the Burghley trip. Granted, the real reason he went and bought that hunt bridle was because Ben Way had one on one of his young horses, and Bobby is a total fanboy (Ben Way also had a Fairfax breastplate and I tried to talk Bobby into buying one so I could steal it, but apparently his devotion as fanboy ends somewhere well before the $350 mark). But whatever… I totally talked him into all the other things.

So I think when he switched over into Dressageland this year, he was a lot more primed and ready to accept their blingier culture. I mean, he still went to nationals in a Wintec (which is honestly kind of badass, don’t tell him I said that), but otherwise he looks super legit. He’s even got more than one show coat now, and neither of them is a women’s blazer (he will never live that down as long as I’m around).

But still, when I showed him the Punk Ponies glitter boots, I expected him to make some kind of herpes comment. Because they’re glitter. Bobby HATES glitter. Like he once threatened to tit punch me because I entertained the idea of sending him a glitter bomb in retribution after he sent me an anonymous package of gummy weens (which was not anonymous at all because I only know one asshole that would send me that).

So you could have knocked me over with a feather when he LOVED the boots. And then proceeded to order himself a set. And not only did he order himself glitter boots, he ordered them in NAVY. WHAAAAAT? Seriously, he has lived and died by black/white/red for the entire time I’ve known him. Navy, while absolutely the best color, is just as far out in left field for Bobby as glitter. NAVY GLITTER? Has he been body snatched?

He has seen the light.

And I mean… I don’t want to gloat, but…

I totally got Bobby into navy glitter.

Let me just revel in that for a second.

But it didn’t stop there. Not only did he buy the boots, but he also went back and ordered the matching navy glitter pad. Yep, that’s right, now he’s 1. Navy 2. Glitter 3. Matchy. Hell hath frozen over friends. There is no way I can top this accomplishment.

Indeed, he decided he liked the navy so much that he also found and ordered some burgundy glitter.

TWO sets of glitter. And neither are black. He’s even talking about coordinating browbands. Who is this person?

I don’t know what happened, or how it happened, but… this is a glorious moment in history, friends. Light a candle for the old Bobby, who swore that Halo didn’t wear boots or bonnets because he didn’t like them, owned one black saddle pad and one white saddle pad, and liked his plastic tack because he could hose it off. Now he’s a full-fledged tack cleaning, outfit-coordinating, matchy, glittery DQ. I mean, he still won’t buy things unless they’re a good deal or on sale, because I raised him right, but he DOES have a weakness for pretty things that didn’t exist before.

Maybe I should just retire. I can’t top this.

We talked about the best parts of 2019 and the more disappointing parts of 2019… now we get to the rest. Maybe these seem like totally random categories, but in case you haven’t noticed, I myself am pretty freaking random, so it fits.

Top 5 favorite products

This was TOUGH because I acquired so many things this year that I really love. I had to go with the ones that either made the biggest impact or sparked the most joy.

The Burghley hunt bridle – I found a few good deals at Burghley and this one is definitely my favorite. It’s the classy, classic hunt bridle that I’ve always wanted, and was so cheap I almost feel like I stole it. Henry looks dapper AF in it.

Dark sparkle boots – technically I have two dark sparkly boot items, Henry’s Cavallo boot and Presto’s set of open fronts. They both make me way happier than they should, but dammit if those dark sparkles aren’t fabulous.

Premier Equine merino wool pads – probably the most practical thing on the list, but I got these hoping they’d help with Henry’s rubbing issues and they’ve done that and more. They’re so reasonably priced, are holding up well, have superb airflow, are really pretty… I have no complaints about them and now own 4. I’d have more if they had other color combos that I liked (can we do hunter green with navy, please?). Possibly my #1 favorite product of the year.

Spikey browband and bonnet – okay again this is 2 things, but they’re both spikey so I’m saying it counts as one. I love spikes. Maybe it’s weird that I also like sparkles, but… it’s who I am. The spiked browband looks badass AF on Henry’s XC bridle, and Presto wore it at FEH Championships. The bonnet was really meant for Presto to wear eventually, but Henry has donned it a couple times. It’s my favorite bonnet. Plus they’re from two of my favorite small businesses.

Neue Schule bit – I know some people think these are overpriced and overhyped, and maybe they are, but all I know is that Henry loves his Tranz Angled Lozenge Eggbutt. Will it magically take your horse from llama to Valegro? Of course not. But for me it took a horse that was 75% happy in contact and made him 99% happy in contact, and much more relaxed in his mouth and topline. I’ve tried a lot of bits on him over the years and he’s by far the happiest in this one. Probably because he just likes to test my devotion by making me buy him expensive things.

Honorable mention to the shirt with Henry’s XC face all over it. God that thing is GLORIOUS, it deserves to be on this list for sure.

 

Top 5 most popular posts

The massive Black Friday sales post is always #1 and this year was no different, with 10k hits. So let’s toss that one aside and take the top 5 “regular” posts.

Let me make myself unpopular for a minute – ah SafeSport, you were the gift that really kept on giving all year. I have a feeling that will continue into 2020.

Why I don’t calculate the cost – explaining my complete aversion to tracking horse expenses.

It’s OK to just not – the art of doing what you actually want instead of what you feel like you should want

Neue Schule bit review – ha, see I’m not the only one obsessed with them

Gutted – when I found out the old barn was being sold to developers

 

Top 5 favorite podcasts

I spend a lot of time in the car, so audiobooks and podcasts were a big part of my year. Mostly podcasts, because audiobooks get expensive.

Buckoff banter – I’m sorry but the Brits are just waaaaaay fucking funnier than we are. This is the only horse podcast I listen to religiously, always on the day it comes out.

In the Dark season 2 – this was originally out in 2016 I think, but I just listened to it this year. And holy crap. Crime, race relations, scandal, conspiracy… it’s a horrifying story that’s got everything and will leave you outraged.

Believed – originally from 2018 but again I just listened to it this year. THIS is why we have SafeSport. THIS is how predators get away with it for so long. THIS is how many lives they can completely ruin in the process.

Hunting Warhead – another one related to child sexual abuse, the dark web, and what they’re really doing and thinking. The whole SS/GM thing set me off down this path and it was certainly enlightening. It’s next level bonkers to see into the minds of these people, but it was also really educational.

Root of Evil – a family does some digging and finds compelling evidence that makes them believe that a relative was the Black Dahlia killer. History and murder, two of my favorite things.

 

Top 5 favorite memes

Yeah this is silly, but look y’all, memes got me through some tough times this year. I love a good meme, I can’t help it.

Gotta have a baby Yoda meme

I can’t explain why but this one makes me actually laugh out loud no matter how many times I see it.

Valid coping mechanism

Sadly, the vet bills were high AF.

Sorry, I try to keep politics off of here, but this is hands down my favorite of the year, so…

Happy 2020 everyone!

I stayed up a little bit late (like 10:15… I normally go to bed at 9 so that’s late for me) to make sure the horses weren’t worried about the fireworks, and luckily they weren’t. The neighbors have been shooting god only knows what in the woods for the past couple weeks so I guess everyone is well accustomed to the pop-bang-pop-bang noise by now. I sat at the table doing a Harry Potter jigsaw puzzle (sometimes your dork level reaches maximum, what can I say) and watching the horses on the cameras until I was comfortable that there wouldn’t be any trouble, then I went to bed.

But not before coming across this meme, which might be a new favorite. New year, new memes.

I decided a while back that I didn’t want to do a goals post this year. I’ve gotten away from that more and more as time has gone on, and I didn’t feel like it was really enriching my life or adding any value. It kind of just made me want to chase the things that may or may not be the right ones, as time moves on and circumstances change. Maybe instead 2020 is the year of “fuck it, let’s see what happens” and being more receptive to going with the flow and adapting to whatever life may bring, rather than feeling like it HAS to go the way I’ve plotted it out in my head. Not rudderless, per se, but more like sails up and receptive to go wherever the wind takes us.

That was a lot of boat references in one sentence.  My apologies.

Really I think Muddy Mayhem laid out my feelings pretty well in her facebook post yesterday:

This is Marla. Marla is going to say it.
Marla fucking hates new year. She hates people trying to schedule ‘fun’, she hates the competitiveness of looking back at how much she might have (or not) achieved, she hates the weight of expectation that somehow what she has done already wasn’t enough & this year she needs to ‘step it up’ & smash 2020.

Because the thing is, Marla might not have glittering results, frillies, championship qualifications & eleventy billion sponsorship deals but Marla knows this. She did her fucking best.

Yes, sometimes that felt like it fell majorly short. There were still dressage tests that were twatlaps of chaos, show jumping rounds where she couldn’t see a stride even if there had been a massive flashing sign saying ‘Oi Twatchops THIS is the spot you want’ & Cross country rounds where her fuck ups picked up faults & even going training there were visits from The Fuckening that left her doubting whether she should even still be riding, let alone attempting to event. But Marla knows this: every time she went out & put a saddle & bridle on her horse, she wanted to do her best. And you can’t apply a shiny social media filter to & a hashtag to that…because, quite frankly, that is enough.

Marla has learnt that not everyone is going to like her & she can’t change that ( she also gets it because quite often she doesn’t like herself either) but she has a crew of people who, despite her loud, brashness & potty mouth, quite like having her around. They are the people cheering with her when she’s happy, sending her messages when she might be feeling low & inspiring her with a year planner filled in with what she should be aiming for. These are the people that matter, because to these she is enough.

Marla loves her horses. She appreciates the privilege of having them in her life. This last year she has realised that having that beautiful head looking over a stable door happy & healthy means more than any competition result, that doing your best for the horse in your life is more than any frilly. It is enough.

So if any wants Marla she is saying this. She is tiptoeing forward to 2020, with more wrinkles & grey hair, a slightly fatter arse (by the next decade that fucker is going to have its own postcode) but with a dream, a passion & the knowledge that she is enough.

She said it better than I ever could.

So Happy New Year everyone, I wish you all the best! And oi twatchops (which I will now be using on a regular basis, god I love the Brits despite their insistence on all that Brexit nonsense), I hope your fuckenings and twatlaps of chaos are maybe a little fewer and farther between.

Yesterday we covered my top 5 best memories from 2019, and for the sake of balance, it’s only fair to also talk about the less shiny parts. In general I don’t like to focus on what didn’t go well, because IMO you learn from it and move on, but I do think its important to be honest to anyone reading and talk about the bad as well as the good. I make mistakes. Sometimes things are disappointing. That’s just life.

The barn closing

I think the thing that gutted me most was when the barn I’d been at for 3 years sold to developers and closed down. The place was a bit rough around the edges, not at all fancy, and mostly a barn for very occasional trail riders, but it had tons of beautiful open land, they let me do what I wanted, and it was only 20 minutes from my house. Over time I’d come to make that place work quite well for me, and I was attached to those back fields in a borderline spiritual way. It wasn’t just the fact that we had to leave that was so disappointing, it was the idea of the land being turned into more disgusting cookie cutter neighborhoods. It still makes me ill to think about. Plus it broke up our Hillary/Bobby/Amanda trio of trouble. But, it did lead to bigger and better opportunities, so I suppose “for everything there is a season”.

Human injuries

In May I managed to sprain my ankle pretty badly when I stepped down on the edge of the mounting block (it’s STILL not quite right) and then had a particularly nasty fall a couple weeks later while XC schooling. I ended up under the horse, and while overall I was fine, I was pretty well banged up. The hematoma on my leg is now a permanent dent. I think I learned a valuable lesson about taking better care of myself and giving myself appropriate time to heal rather than being stubborn and trying to power through things (as is my general nature). I think. I hope. I’ve tried to take the “treat yourself like you would treat the horses” approach a bit more. Grit is one thing, stupidity is another.

Vet bills

It has literally been one freaking vet bill after another since June. It started with routine floats and vaccines and injections, then there was a respiratory funk, an allergic reaction, a hematoma that subsequently got infected, a skin funk from hell, a ripped off chunk of hoof/heel, a cut hock, a broken tooth that needed to be extracted, and then a mystery foot lameness. And now they’re due for routine stuff again next month. If I could go a month or two without giving hundreds of dollars to the vet, that would be fun. Between the money and the issues, it killed any hope I had of a fall or winter season. Which again, may have turned out to be a good thing, because it gave me time away from all that to really have a think about what’s most important to me and spend some time just enjoying the horses without any other pressures.

Going splat at Coconino

So, real talk, that was a shitty moment. We’d had the best XC of our life the day before, and by the time we stepped into the ring for stadium we were literally the only pair left that hadn’t been eliminated. All I had to do was stay on and jump the jumps in the right order and we’d win, taking the $1200 Open Prelim division money home with us. And we jumped the first jump brilliantly, then almost fell down in the mud a few times in the corner before sliding through fence 2, and I went flying through the air to end that dream with an unceremonious splat. Disappointing, for sure. To be honest though, I kept waiting for it to feel like some kind of soul-crushing, life-altering defeat and it just never did. This sport is hard. Shit happens. To everyone. It would have been freaking awesome to win and bring home some money, duh, but I was still really pleased with my horse and no matter how it ended, the XC was a career highlight that could never be erased or minimized. In the old days, pre-working-on-my-mental-game, I would have been absolutely devastated. Now it was just… a bummer. So I guess, depending on how you want to look at it, it could have been a good thing? Showed some growth anyway.

FEH Champs

While I was happy that Presto qualified for FEH Champs again, and grateful that he was sound and could actually attend despite trying to rip his foot off a month before and then cutting his hock a few days before, I was admittedly disappointed in the day. I believe heartily in the importance of the FEH and YEH programs and want to support them as much as I can, and I had really been looking forward to Championships. Prices went up this year, which I totally understand, but it was a lot to spend (like as much as I’d spend on a regular recognized horse trial) and a very long hot day (we had to stand in the sun in 100 degrees for a couple hours after we were done to wait for results) to show a baby horse on the line. While Presto wasn’t unsound from the cut on his hock, he did move very wide behind to protect it, which (fairly) they did not like at all and seemed to interpret as a substantial overall weakness. We got good pictures and more experience, so it wasn’t a total wash, but given the time and money involved, it was a bit disappointing. Naturally he was moving normally again within a few days, because horses.

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To be fair, these are really the only truly disappointing moments that spring to mind from the year. And even then, I think most of them have or will ultimately lead to something good. You live, you learn. Shit happens for a reason. Blah blah blah. I don’t always believe that, but as long as I’m learning from the blunders, I do believe they can turn into positives in the long run. Or ya know, build character at the very least? And honestly, sometimes my stubborn hard-headed self really does have to learn things the hard way.

I feel like every year I kind of change how I do these “year in review” type posts. I don’t really like doing just a summary of what happened, but I also think that doing a “by the numbers” thing kind of puts the focus in the wrong places. My goals are to have fun, enjoy my horses, and learn. Numbers don’t always really reflect that. So I’m going to try out something new and instead break up the year-recap into more of a Top 5 series. For today’s, we’re starting out with my top 5 memorable moments of the year, the bits that really spring to mind as the most spine-tinglingly “I’ll never forget that time when…” type of memories I made in 2019. These are in no particular order of course, because who could pick a favorite?

Finally getting a clear Prelim stadium round

I love Henry to the absolute depths of forever, but Jesus H Christ, it is hard AF to show jump clean on this horse. Especially at Prelim. XC is his forte, and he really just doesn’t care much if he hits a rail or three. Trying to dial in the stadium has been a lot of ongoing work. In February we finally pulled that shit together, and despite a few rubs they DID all stay in the cups. FINALLY. (I think it was a one-off incident of pure luck but shhhhhhh I’ll take it)

First “sit” on Presto

I don’t know that it counts as a “ride” since I literally just swung a leg over and sat on him at a standstill for a few minutes, but there’s nothing quite like the feeling of being the first one to sit on a horse that you bred. I was there when he was created, I was there when he was born, and now my butt will always have been the first one to grace his back. It seems like a small thing but after years of investing so much time, energy, love, hope, money, etc it feels like a magical moment. Especially when he’s a second generation homebred for me.

Henry’s first recognized Prelim

It sounds silly but once I knew Prelim was actually attainable, I really wanted Henry to have it on his official USEA record. I know, horses don’t give a shit about that, and since he’ll never be for sale it doesn’t actually matter at all, but something in me just really felt like he deserved to be an “official” Prelim horse. It’s a title he’s more than earned and I’m ridiculously proud of him. It kinda feels like a public record that testifies to the fact that he always tries so hard for me and is the most golden of eggs. When we sealed the deal on our first recognized Prelim completion, it was a great feeling.

Meeting Mighty Magic

Honestly that whole trip may have been the best yet, between Burghley and France I have so many great memories and cannot WAIT to do it again. But if I had to pick my absolute favorite moment of that entire trip, it would be meeting Presto’s sire Mighty Magic. We have met a lot of stallions in our travels but MM is special to me. I’ve loved him for so long, and finally getting to see him in person, and have him just be SO MUCH like Presto… it was awesome.

Conquering the jump that’s lived in my nightmares for years

You know how sometimes you see a jump and you’re just like hahahaha I would never jump that, you could not even pay me enough, that thing looks like death personified, EFF NO? I have felt that way about the Prelim/Intermediate (they share it) weldon’s wall at Coconino since the first time I laid eyes on it in 2016. Like I couldn’t even make eye contact with it then without wanting to barf. I figured I’d never have to jump it anyway, so I was content to let it live in the land of nightmares. And then we went to Coco and ran Prelim and there I was, staring that stupid thing down, trying not to shit myself. I still hate it, but we jumped it, proving once again that with the right horse, even those “never in a million years” things can suddenly be do-able. That whole XC round was probably one of the top 5 moments of my entire life, but finally jumping that stupid thing in particular felt equal parts terrifying and amazing, so it stands out.

It was definitely a year of stepping out of comfort zones and stretching ourselves, and also learning how to roll with the punches. Sometimes we succeeded, sometimes we didn’t (we’ll talk about the Fails in another post), but we showed up and we tried. I think I’ve finally learned how to really have fun no matter what happens, and how to put the most emphasis on the things that matter most (hint: it’s definitely not scores or ribbons or points).