Henry’s first year as an eventer (and my first since 2003) went a lot better than I would have ever expected. We moved up to Novice sooner than planned, we made it to AEC, and more importantly Henry gained a lot of confidence. We did 7 USEA events in total, and while no doubt some were better than others (ahem, The Greenwood Stadium Massacre) overall I can’t complain.
I know. I’m impressed too. Sometimes it’s no small feat to stay in the ring despite both my and Henry’s panicked desire to flee the horrors of the rectangle. Granted, there was the time that Henry knocked the chain down with his foot when he tried to prematurely exit at A…
But there’s one part he’s exceptionally good at:
Would have been double clear XC all year except for that one time my watch died in the startbox and I accidentally accrued 3 time penalties. Sorry Henny.
Somehow we managed to come away from every show with a ribbon (even the disastrous Fall Greenwood since they mercifully gave out dressage ribbons), which is now a nice pile of satin sitting on top of the dresser in our guest room. Aside from AEC it was a very Christmas color themed year. We should try for more blue next year. Maybe some yellow for contrast.
And last but not least, the emotional toll.
It’s been real 2015, let’s do it all again next year. I’ll try to push the right button this time.
Henry got his fetlocks injected on Friday afternoon. With a healthy dose of sleepy juice and a twitch, he was almost not that bad about it. Almost. Not stoic, this horse. Kind of a wuss, to be honest.
He was enough of a turd about the left one that the vet was concerned about the possibility of a hematoma, so we wrapped him in Cool Cast and left him bandaged for 24 hours. I’m always super nervous the first day or so after anything like this but luckily all looked great when I pulled off the mummy wrappings. $300 worth of lube successfully transported into fetlocks. At this rate my trailer is never going to finish being refurbed.
bye bye money, I’ll miss you
On Saturday afternoon I went to a baby shower for a very good friend (we’ve been friends for almost 20 years, how scary is that?). I don’t know jack squat about babies and 99.999 times out of 100 I’d rather stab myself in the eye with a fork than go to a baby shower, but I went because it’s her. If that’s not love I don’t know what is. Also I’m no expert but I feel like I nailed her gift:
I won’t buy you diapers, but I’ll buy you vodka. Pretty sure you’re gonna need a drink after all this.
On Sunday I got on Henry for a very light w/t to see how he felt and I think it’s fair to say he’s feeling mighty fine. Where’d this fancy trot come from?
I also decided to go ahead with clip #2 of the year, except this time with some added decorations.
Yes, we have butt unicorns amidst a field of dapples. Of course, I only got about halfway through the clip before he decided he was done cooperating, so I’ll have to finish tonight.
New shoes with a new farrier today, too! Hopefully that’s the last piece of the puzzle to get Henry feeling great and ready to go.
I have to admit, when I was contacted by Teddy’s Tack Trunk about reviewing a Leistner brush, I almost just flat out said no. Of all the things I’m super particular about, grooming equipment generally doesn’t rank high up on my list. But Peony is a big lover of the brand and convinced me to give it a try, so I emailed TTT back and told them that I would review it, giving them the usual warning about how if I didn’t like the brush I would say so in the review. Luckily they were confident enough to chance it, because – and I never thought I would ever in my life utter this sentence – THIS BRUSH IS REALLY REALLY NICE. I know, it sounds crazy, but stay with me here.
I read up a little bit on the Leistner brand on TTT’s website… “100% pure goat and horse hair bristles and fine quality beech and pear wood bodies carefully processed from sustained, European forests. This guarantees the best cleaning results with gentle, skin-friendly care, as well as a high durability and longevity of their grooming brushes.“. Honestly, it was greek to me, but it all sounds fancy right? ‘European forests’… that’s prime unicorn territory.
also works well on Bobbys
TTT sent me the Prinz brush, which is described as “a medium bristle texture, made of 100% pure horse hair and a lifted double edge of natural bristles”. Medium. Got it. When I first opened the box I could tell it was a nice brush… the wood is obviously nice quality, the handle is leather, the size is perfect, and the bristles felt amazing. If nothing else, it was pretty. No fake wood or plastic bristles here. I tugged on the bristles a bit to see if I could pull any of them out, but they all stayed put despite my attempted destruction.
new brush vs old brush
Then I used it. And used it more. And used it more. My other brushes mostly just move the dirt around, especially with Henry’s clipped and staticy winter coat, hence why I always finish up grooming by wiping him down with a microfiber rag. This brush actually pulled the dust out, visibly laid the hairs back down into place (someone gets major bed head when he sleeps in his pee), and left him super shiny. There is no need to follow up behind it with a rag. The outer bristles are a smidge longer than the inner bristles, so it almost works like a medium brush and a finishing brush combined.
Thinking that this was some kind of magical voodoo, I went to a couple other horses in the barn with different coat lengths and textures and it worked just as well on them too. So here I am, yet again, having been proven wrong about a product. Is it possible for a brush to be amazing? I would have laughed at the idea before, but now I say yes. I’ve never even given so much as a second thought to my grooming tools (except my beloved Ultimate Hoof Pick, which someone will have to pry out of my cold dead hands) but the difference is undeniable.
good food + good brush = shiny unicorn
I thought Princess Henry might try to kick my face off with a medium brush but this one is quite soft and he didn’t seem to mind it. Henry not trying to kick my face off is basically the same thing as an official Henry seal of approval. I also noticed that this brush with it’s natural fibers seems to generate less static than my synthetic one does. Apparently natural bristles also help spread the oils of the skin a lot better too, which could be why I see a difference in shine.
Price wise, the Leistner’s aren’t too expensive. At $19.50 retail, the Prinz is obviously more expensive than my $12.99 generic brush that I’ve been using, but the difference in quality is pretty obvious, and the performance isn’t even comparable. The Leistner Prinz wins that one by a long shot. There are a ton of different Leistner brushes on the TTT website, ranging anywhere from $9.50 to $32.50, plus some grooming sets. They’d be great presents… hint hint. This might be my first nice brush, but it won’t be my last.
In the spirit of holiday sales, of which I am a seasoned sucker veteran, right now Teddy’s Tack Trunk has a special going on – $5 off orders of $50 or more (code HOLIDAY5) and $10 off orders of $100 or more (code MERRY10), with $2 flat rate shipping to the mainland US. If you think you can’t make it to $50 just buying brushes, they have EQyss, Espana Silk, Mrs Conn’s (psst the Mrs Conn’s sponges are buy one get one free), and several other product lines as well. Stock up, and as usual, support another great small business (with all natural products!) in the process.
My poor vet. I’m that crazy person who texts to ask some weird off the wall question, or send a picture of something unidentifiable. This time I sent him a text saying that Henry sometimes looked NQR behind, but only very slightly, and only sometimes, and it was really weird. Could he come figure it out? I’m sure he looked something like this when he read it:
But he’s the best, so he came. He watched Henry trot, watched me ride him, and saw some unevenness in the LH. He flexed off on that hock so we figured that was probably it, injected them, and away we went. My vet texted me a couple weeks later and asked how Henry was, and I said that while it was better, he still felt ever so slightly funky to me. The best description I could give him was that he felt “stabby” behind in the canter (but only sometimes), and I noticed that when we got to a short distance he would swap leads in the back just as he pushed off the ground (but only sometimes) . That’s literally all the help I could give him. I’m sorry, world of veterinary medicine.
But my animals are cute
So he came out again and we tried the stifle first… both of us thinking that it looked typical of a stifle issue. Alas – nothing. He ended up having to leave that day before we could go further so we set another appointment. The next course of action was to start at the bottom and block our way up the entire leg. No one needs money around the holidays anyway, right?
Luckily it didn’t take long – as soon as we blocked the fetlock Henry trotted off totally even. I never in a million years would have guessed fetlock, but okay. We took radiographs from every angle (getting what are no doubt the BEST quality x-rays I’ve ever seen, much less from a mobile machine) and got to see all kinds of cool things going on back there. In fact, the vet warned me in advance that these radiographs are SO good that it’s easy to over diagnose, so not to freak out.
cha-chingcha-chingcha-ching
Luckily there was nothing major or scary – the big fear was that we’d find a chip – but there are a few little things that he thinks are adding up to create the discomfort. Henry has a little bit of remodeling on the cannon bone, it looks like concussion type of stuff from whacking himself over and over and over his entire life. Because clumsy. He also at some point had a (now healed) very very teeny tiny hairline fracture in the inside sesamoid, probably due to a relatively minor soft tissue injury just above it. Plus there’s definitely reduced joint space in the fetlock itself. There was something about a slight rounding of something somewhere too that I have totally forgotten now.
The reflection messes up the view, but you get the idea
Sounds scary but basically it’s not anything out of the ordinary for an OTTB that is now an eventer. The vet thinks the unevenness we’re seeing is due to chronic inflammation and general achiness from the wear and tear, which is being exacerbated greatly at the moment by feet with too long of a toe and too low of a heel (hasn’t that been a common theme amongst bloggers lately?). Nothing acute, nothing that affects riding or his job, but some general maintenance. We are going to inject the fetlock on Friday and make some shoeing changes to get the extra strain off of the sesamoid area.
Also, Quinn tried to leave with the vet. Zero loyalty in that dog.
I think I’ll follow that up with a chiro appointment to make sure he’s not totally out of whack from compensating, and then hopefully we’ll be done and Henry will be totally back to normal again. I’m sure the vet would be really happy to stop getting the “I dunno, something just feels weird” texts from me…
Because I’m the biggest procrastinator ever, I waited until the day my USEA membership expired to renew. One of the great things about being a lower level eventer is the membership fees – technically all I have to have is the $85 annual membership to do recognized shows. Coming from Jumperland, where you need 5 thousand different memberships and registrations and renewals that come out to something around 19 million dollars annually if you want to do rated shows (only a slight exaggeration), I will never complain about USEA’s cost. It’s a bargain, and so much less headache to renew and keep up with.
They do give you the option of joining your area’s Adult Rider program, which I did last year but opted not to do for 2016. Aside from the Adult Team Championship at AEC (for which you had to be an Adult Rider’s member) I did nothing with Adult Riders in 2015, and since I don’t plan on going to AEC this year I decided to skip it. I can always join later if I need to.
Instead I think I’m going to join a local association instead. Of course Texas is split up kind of awkwardly for me… Dallas/Ft Worth has North Texas Eventing, Houston has Greater Houston Combined Training, and San Antonio has Central Texas Eventing. Austin has nothing centered around it. Of course. Because there is no eventing in Austin.
I’m pretty on the fence about which one to join. Each association has a couple of things that appeal to me, but no one in particular stands head and shoulders above the rest. When I did local h/j shows you had to be a member of the local association to do their shows, so there was no option – you had to join. None of the local eventing associations put on their own shows (at least not ones I would go to), the venues do, so there’s no membership requirement to do the shows.
If you’re in an area where you have more than one choice for a local association, how do you decide what to join? What things make one organization more appealing to you than another?
Mostly I’d just like to support their existence with my membership dollars, and since I can’t do all 3 of them I have to pick one. I have to be honest, I think I might just pick the one where I have the most friends and know the most people…
breedrideevent.com 