Riding a Red Horse

THE FOOTING IS THAWED!!!

Of course, it's pouring right now, so tomorrow it might be under water, but today I had time to ride Red. Not Mo (sniffles), but I can put water wings on him and hack around tomorrow in the mud, no worries.

Thank god.

I really needed to get on a horse ASAP. This has not been an easy year so far over here, and riding has been minimal thanks to all the shitty weather that I've been complaining about endlessly. So even though all we did today was a little bit of walk/trot (because you don't take a 17yo ex-show jumper with an old suspensory injury and push him beyond that when he's had a month off), it was excellent.

Let me tell you. Red is a very nice horse to sit on. You should all come over and ride him.

Who, me? Aw shucks.

He LOVES his job. Loves it. So his walk was big and forward and swinging right from the get-go. And after about, oh, 15 minutes of walking around, we picked up a big, lovely trot. All I did was loop the reins at him, and he stretched over his topline looking for the bit and powered around, stepping under himself, all with no input from me. I just had to sit up and smile. I mean, if I'm being truly picky, he was a leeeeeeeeeeeetle bit leaning on my inside leg going left, but I can fix that. I'm out of riding shape too, and so I'm not sure I was sitting my best.

I could stare at this picture all day.

Oh, and one other fun thing--my mom gave me an antique but still usable sewing machine, so I tried making a pad like Lauren wrote about. It turned out okay, function-wise, and it was fun to do. So I'll be practicing my stitching and making some more! I'll write about it later, but at the moment, I'm excited to have some baby pads in colors I like, with a forward-enough cut to accommodate my ridiculous saddle, with wither relief, and with girth loops. It's true that one could acquire run of the mill baby pads for way less than it'll cost me to make them (and it's quicker to just give Smartpak more of my money), but this is more fun and hopefully will be more functional for me. Don't look too closely at the stitching on this one--it's a prototype to see if I could do it before I invested in all different thread colors and piping and whatnot. I'll learn to sew as I go and these are just for me, so it's all good. If you have even the mildest crafty tendencies, you should try this. If I can do it, so can you.

Post-ride, didn't slip! WINNING.

So thanks to Lauren for helping me find something new to learn while I sit in the career/life/riding holding pattern I'm in, and to Big Red for being so lovely and kind to me. Maybe everything isn't hell? Am I jinxing myself if I say that?