We’ve officially got our second Ocala lesson in the books now! Yesterday I took Presto over to Steph’s for a dressage lesson – all of 5 minutes away, which has yet to stop blowing my mind. I don’t miss anything about Texas, including the amount of time I always had to spend hauling to literally anything.

Steph of course is willing to come to me like she did last time, but I wanted to take Presto on his own solo off-property adventure. He was a little stuck and herd bound and nappy on his last couple adventures with friends (better the second time, but still) so I wanted to load him up and take him somewhere alone. He actually was super good about it – loaded right up, stood tied to the trailer while I threw tack on him, and walked down to the arena with no real issues. He neighed a couple times and was a little wide-eyed at a few things, but that’s perfectly fine. This horse is really quite well-traveled for his age, he should be pretty good about this stuff by this point. I think he’s better alone than he is with friends.

He did make a few new horse friends as a group was finishing up their jump lesson before us, and after a stop to say hello to them we headed into the dressage arena. I thought he might have a bit of a tantrum when they all finished up and left, and Presto definitely did notice that he’d been abandoned, but I put him to work and he decided against any theatrics. He gave the hairy eyeball to the big arena sprinklers and the rubber mats by the entrance, but after a few serpentines to click him into work mode he decided none of it was really that interesting.

Soon Steph came out with her CeeCoach, we got everything hooked up, and away we went. Right away she said she was pleased with how much better he was starting out than the first time she saw him the week before. I spent that time in between really getting him thinking more forward again, responding quicker to the aids, trying to get him softening more through his ribcage, starting to step under more with the inside hind, etc. Now that he’s stopped getting so mad at me for wanting more contact and weight in the reins (that was a few weeks of some animated discussion) he’s becoming a lot more rideable.

He still isn’t totally convinced that he has to give me 100%, and sometimes I swear he spends more effort insisting that he doesn’t want to do something than he would if he just did it. That’s like… every 5 year old that has ever existed. He’s a naturally more uphill horse but he still finds it easier to plop his weight down into his shoulders and try to curl behind the vertical, rather than shift his weight back, hind end under, and bring his shoulder and poll up. We’re working on that. He’s BIG, work is hard, and he had like 7 months off so he’s still weak. Plus I’m still learning him, and he’s still learning me. It’ll take some time. It’s great to have some eyes on the ground again though, I do feel like we have made a lot of progress even just in the last week and I feel like we’re finally on the same page and the right track. Steph’s helped add some direction, and I’m able to work on those things in between lessons.

The more time I spend riding Presto, the more I really like him. He’s definitely different than my other two, but I think he’s really fun. Not always particularly easy (I feel like I’m in pretty good shape right now and my core/thighs were screaming by the end of the lesson) and he’s got an army of orangutans in his brain, but he’s smart, and he does have moments of WOW where you can feel how nice he’s going to be. They’re short and fleeting right now, but they’re in there. It makes him exciting, I think. He’s just my type of horse in pretty much every way. Which, uh… I guess that’s a good thing, considering the substantial amount of time and money I’ve got into him at this point.

After we were done I untacked, put him back in the trailer, and we were home again by lunch time. Granted he did scream the whole way home because he was convinced he’d fallen in love with one of the lesson ponies and didn’t understand why she couldn’t come with him. He’d forgotten about her by the time I unloaded him though, so I guess the orangutans reached the limit of their short term memory.

Also, MVP award to the exceptionally kind lady who sat through my entire lesson and took like 7 minutes worth of video clips for me even though she’d never met me before in her life. Patrons got the whole video with all of Steph’s commentary, but I pulled some GIF’s for here on the blog too.

All in all it was a great outing for him. I thought he handled everything better than I expected, we got some positive feedback, and some stuff to take home and work on until next time. It’s definitely nice to feel like we’re finally getting back in the swing of things, too. For the first time in a long time I find myself actually interested in looking at what shows are on the calendar, and starting to consider which horse might be able to do what. It’s been a few years since I felt any kind of motivation like that. Being here in Ocala where it’s possible to do so much more, and there are so many more options for things to do… that’s a big part of it.

Although Quinlee is the only foal this year, she hasn’t been lacking for company. Inca has been pretty tolerant of other horses interacting with her baby (ok, in all honesty I think Inca is like “you want her? take her!”) so Michelle has been able to put Inca and Q out in the field with the yearling fillies. Both Pippa and Teddy are still young enough to be nice to the baby, and close enough in size to not put her in any danger when they get to playing. The three of them have become pretty good friends, and now they’re the official Girl Squad.

They spend a lot of time together, these three, doing everything from shenanigans to gossiping to just contemplating baby horse life. Sometimes they stand around just looking like they’re having serious baby horse chats.

At least until the baby side of Q wins over and before you know it she’s gotten distracted and started gnawing on the fence.

And while Inca doesn’t do a lot of reprimanding or chaperoning, their field neighbors some of the other mares, and ya know who’s ALWAYS up for playing Fun Police?

And while Quinlee definitely loves her horse friends, she’s also really into her human friends too. Like… it can be hard to get pictures of her sometimes because she sees a human coming and makes a beeline for them.

Especially when said human brings a squad with them too, plus fun things to play with, eat, or drink. All of Q’s favorite things.

Which is why so many of her pictures end up coming out like this…

She was born a social butterfly and apparently that particular quality is here to stay. Especially now that she’s got her very own posse of fillies. Lord help whatever colts are born next year, can you imagine having a whole crew of big sisters like these?

The last couple weeks have been super busy. The day before Hillary drove down, my friend Megan (of Luxe EQ) got here and spent one night here at my place before moving over to her airbnb. She was in town for a week getting one of her mobile shops set up for the summer circuit at WEC (if you’ll be at WEC this summer go check out the store – it’s right next to FarmVet in the outside vendor area near Emma’s Patisserie), so it was good to have time to hang out with her and Hillary both at the same time. Megan left last week to go back to Michigan, and Hillary and I continued on doing all the things. As it fit in between my regular work hours, anyway.

We stocked up on stuff for the horses, got some projects done around the barn, ran a bunch of errands, and of course managed to fit some fun things in there too. I will assume that people are mostly interested in the fun things and skip straight to that. We stopped at Tack Shack to order me a new XC whip… Hillary had accidentally dropped mine at Pine Hill last winter and we realized it too late, so the property owner put it in Lost and Found for us. By the time we got back to Pine Hill to pick it up from Lost and Found, someone had stolen it. Bad bad bad karma on that person. Also, if anyone sees someone in Texas with a navy and gray jockey whip with a silver glitter stripe (it’s pretty ballsy to steal such a unique whip, honestly) that would be mine. Tell them to give it back, it’s seriously bad luck to use a stolen whip and I’m totally sending them bad juju through it. But I did get to go into the back room at Tack Shack, where all the magic happens, and pick out all the colors for a new one from their rack. That’s a fun experience. 10/10 would recommend. There are like 5 different types of glitter alone.

Like I mentioned yesterday, we also went XC schooling again, this time at Sweet Dixie. Hillary took Henry and he seemed very pleased with himself as usual.

She also took a lesson on him with Steph on Sunday when she came out, and Hillary said she had a pretty mind-blowing epiphany from it, so we’ll call that a success. Steph also agreed that Henry is Perfect, which always earns bonus points with me. He is the best creature that has ever existed, and if you can tell that about him then clearly you have good taste in horses.

Hillary did make the mistake of riding in my new Arion saddle (ok it was not a mistake, it was very deliberate) and now she wants one. I’ll talk more about the saddle next week though. It’s really interesting in comparison to Hillary’s Voltaire and my older Devoucoux.

We also took the kiddos on road hacks with Henry – Gemma one day and Presto another day. I take Henry out for road hacks all the time so he’s pretty trustworthy, but obviously I’ve been hesitant to take the young ones very far by themselves. Much better to wait until someone else is here with me and they can go with Henry. Gemma was quite solid, aside from getting upset when some dogs came charging through the woods barking. That’s fair enough. Presto was more skeptical. He is somehow managing to be the bravest and yet spookiest horse all at the same time. He’ll jump anything you point him at, wants to lead the group everywhere, is curious about everything, but then will have a random conniption about a mailbox or a sign or a pile of dirt. And he can go from zero to teleport in half a second with no warning. I find it kind of puzzling considering how much I hacked him out and trail rode him as a 3yo (and ponied him everywhere his whole life) and he was never like that at all. Not even a little. I will say that he’s gotten much better in the past few weeks, and I’ve changed some things up with him, so we’ll see how that keeps progressing. I may end up having him scoped just to cover all my bases… the Presto I know just is not spooky and never has been, so I suspect there’s a reason for it, whether it’s physical or not. He only does it when I ride him out, and not every time, so… who knows what’s going on in that little orangutan-filled brain of his.

We also hit the Saturday Night grand prix at WEC both weekends, and the timing was perfect since those were the two bigger FEI classes. I got to see some stallions jump, including Faustino de Tili (who WTW has 3 foals by now) and Chacco Blue II (who I am now perhaps deeply in love with, my god can that thing jump). My friend Stormy who I evented with in Texas just bought a farm here and she was able to meet up with us this past weekend for the GP, so it was good to see her again too. We had a full table of friends both weekends.

Considering that I was a complete hermit between the last time Hillary left in mid-May and last June when she came to visit, I think I definitely made up for it in the past couple weeks. I had more social interaction in the past two weeks than I’ve had in probably years. It’s good though, I need to meet people here and start getting myself out more and making connections. I’d say we certainly did that. Last night I was so tired I went to bed at 8 and slept all the way til 5:30 this morning. Introvert battery recharge.

Now everyone is gone and I’m alone again for a while, which means everything is my responsibility again and there are considerably fewer fun things happening.

BTW thanks again to everyone for the support with the BRC stuff, despite adding more available spots this time, we sold out of pedigree reports even faster this month – they were all gone less than an hour after I posted. If you missed out this time and want to sign up for email updates, go to our website, hit the contact button, and enter your email address. We will send out an email the day before listings reopen and let you know exactly what time it’ll go live! Patrons of course always get the option to buy before it opens to the public, but the email notifications will let you know what time the listing will be publicly available. We’ll do our best to get through this batch ASAP so we have an idea of when we can open for more!

Hillary left this morning to head back to Texas (boo). We had a super packed long weekend that I’ll have to go back and cover, but since Gemma got the spotlight last week I figured it was only fair that Presto get a bit of it this week. He actually earned it.

It has been a bit of a process for me, figuring this horse out. At first I was trying to find all the buttons, and then once I found them I wanted to move and change some of them a bit. He did not care for that idea at first… he went the way he went and didn’t understand why I was trying to do other things. There were several discussions about it, and a few tantrums, but after a few weeks we made it over the hump, and for the past week or two he’s been much better in his day to day work at home. The first day Hillary was here we took the horses to Majestic Oaks to school, and as I mentioned last week, he was a bit of a whirling dervish. Just excited to be back out, decided he got married to Gemma in the trailer, had a lot of opinions about leaving her, etc. He wasn’t terrible but he wasn’t great.

That seemed to be the final “switch flip” event though, because since then he’s been really damn good. More rideable, more obedient, not trying any of his favorite tricks to avoid having to work harder. I’m still mostly working on basic things with him, changing a few things to be more in line with how I ride, plus working on building his strength and topline back up, so his work has been fairly basic. We flat in the field a lot, walk and trot over poles, canter cavaletti exercises, etc. I haven’t really been jumping him though, aside from the cavaletti excercises, because I have the luxury of time and would rather do it correctly now than pay for it later. Slow is fast, and all that.

We wanted to go XC schooling again before Hillary left, and this time we picked Sweet Dixie (I’m still extraordinarily mindblown about having so many options so close by… it’s insane.). Hillary was taking Henry, and I waffled a bit between Gemma and Presto. They both need the outings, but I thought that Gemma got a lot out of Majestic Oaks and was really good there, whereas Presto had more room for improvement. So, off we went on Friday with both boys over to Sweet Dixie and met up with another friend.

Presto was definitely less wild coming off the trailer this time – I think having Henry as his companion instead of Gemma gives it a little bit of a different vibe. Henry is perpetually bored and deeply uninterested in any of Presto’s shenanigans, so he mostly just completely ignores him and does not engage. Gemma is more tolerant of Presto and entertains him a bit too much sometimes.

We tacked up and got on, and I went off to warm him up. He wanted to be a little nappy the first time I rode him directly away from the other horses. One smack, a “no sir, absolutely not”, and I put his ass to work… he gave up quickly and said yes ma’am, and I didn’t have any more problems after that. I trotted and cantered him over a little log and he was actually super, so as we made our way around the course I picked a few Starter and BN jumps to hop him over. He seemed very happy to be out jumping the fun stuff and was surprisingly very good. Rideable and brave and for once in his life I felt like I actually had his full attention. We didn’t do a whole lot, but he was all in.

He got better and better as he went around, I think, and there were no more attempts at naughtiness like he’d had at Majestic Oaks. He seemed to be having fun with it. I’ve not really gotten to feel “XC Mode” on him before but I do think that’s definitely his phase. Pretty sure this was his first time seeing any XC since he ran River Glen last August, so I was pleased that he could come out and be as professional about it as he was.

Well, except for the first time I tried to canter through the water. That was… uh… a little green. Got to test the stickability of my new saddle. Thanks Noodle.

@breed.ride.event

Cannonbaaaaall! #equestrian #shiteventersunite #horsefail #horsegirl #eventing

♬ original sound – bantsbrits

Then on Sunday I had my first lesson in Ocala. I’m literally around the corner from Steph Cauffman, who is friend/trainer of Libby, one of my Patrons and a long time reader/supporter. She helped facilitate the hookup, and Steph offered to come over to me rather than me have to deal with taking 3 horses over to her. That is a massive selling point when you’ve got two young, sometimes dingo-ish horses to wrangle. Hillary had a lesson on Henry, I had a lesson on Presto, and Steph rode Gemma. I’ll share more about Hillary’s lesson and Gemma’s ride tomorrow. For me and Presto, I really like how she approached us and her overall philosophy. She agreed with my general assessment of him and what he needs to work on, and thought I had the right approach, but she helped me kind of push through into the next stage. That’s what I needed, I think. I feel like I’m pretty good as self-assessment and getting the overall picture of what’s going on, but I need someone on the ground to push me for more and to help me keep moving the goalposts forward. Now that his buttons are more where I want them, it’s time to start pressing them more.

We just did a flat lesson, and nothing particularly long since he was trying very hard to do what we wanted. I like that she has my same theory of “I’d rather quit 5 minutes too early than 5 minutes too late”. I think with a horse like Presto especially, continuing to nag on him would really frustrate him. Plus he’s still got a lot more muscle and fitness to put back on… there’s no use in pushing him past what he can physically handle at the moment. It’s too early days to say for sure but I do think Steph and I have pretty similar ideas/styles/etc, so we’ll see where it goes. I’m gonna try to schedule something else with her this week or next week.

And that’s how Noodle earned his first gold star week! He was due for one, that’s for sure.

One other note for today – we’ve re-opened the BreedRideCompete store to offer 8 more pedigree reports for the month of July. I gave Patrons early access last night and as of this moment we’ve only got 3 spots left, so if you missed out last month and want to get in on this cycle, be quick!

This is really all I have to say about that.

@whitechocolatehuman76

#stitch with @debtcollective #genxtiktokers #progressive #leftists #americaisthebadplace #genzforchange #thisisamerica #universalhealthcare #dobetteramerica

♬ Love You So – The King Khan & BBQ Show

Oh wait, one additional note on my least favorite holiday. Everyone who sets off fireworks within a 3 mile radius of my horses can, respectfully, go to hell: