Monday, February 18, 2008

Sunday, Feb 17 - Damn Snow!

Well, I stared outside a lot of the day watching the wind blow and the snow dance and feeling a little pissed at mother nature. I had big horse plans for the day thinking the weather wasn't going to be quite so bad. About 4pm, I decided to just get dressed up and go play with horses anyway. It's not so bad once you get out there, really. The snow pelting your face only bothers you for so long. After a while, your face goes numb.

So, I grabbed Gemini. He's always happy to play with me. We worked on moving the fore, then the hind, then sending on the circle. He's a dominant horse, a pretty straight-forward LBE, and he immediately gets exhuberant. The ground is not good for energetic horses and he figures that out quickly. So he's carefully showing his energetic side (pretty funny) and at the same time telling me I'm not the boss. He tickles me. So we have a little discussion, I keep my cool and he quickly comes around and decides cooperating is the easier way to go. He's the coolest horse. We didn't stay out in my front pasture long - maybe 25 mins. Towards the end, I started working on teaching him to bow by developing the cannon bone tapping cue. Sixty seconds later, he's got it. Smart boy. Then, I drove him back to the barn from zone 3.

In the barn, I stood on the step-ladder and taught him to swing his body to me for mounting. He's never done this before and he was a little befuddled at first. Then, in perfect Gemini form, he gets it and swings carefully up to me for mounting. We practiced this a few times and I hopped on bareback a few times in the barn aisle. We worked on lateral flexion and backing. The barn aisle can be good for doing things slowly and precisely since the floor is concrete and the horse doesn't want to lose his footing.

He was dying to eat hay and I could tell. It was well past "hay" time for him and I decided we'd done enough.

I then grabbed Rain and brought her into the aisle. I started teaching her to swing her body to me for mounting from a step-stool about a month ago. We hadn't done it since that one session. I wanted to see if it had stuck and how she'd feel about it. I love that horse. She was a little miffed at first, but I persisted in tapping her rump, pushing her hind end towards me and after a little tail-swishing, she moved closer and got the release she was after. Ahhhhh... Then, it was like butter. She was much happier if I didn't actually touch her rump, but just rythmically push the air against her rump. She could swing over without showing her annoyance with a tail swish. She is really good at telling me I'm talking to loudly and I'm getting better at listening.

That's it - Kendall shows up and I've been in horsey land for about 90 minutes. I could live in the barn, really.

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