Change Comes Quickly!

Geez, I go a couple of weeks without posting and come back to find an entirely different Blogspot. Forgive me if this post comes out oddly, I have absolutely no clue how to work this new format yet.

So a few things:

King Oak, the first event of the season, is only four days away which is super exciting. I just found out today that they will have live scoring which is awesome. I don't have the link yet, but when I do I will post it and you all can follow along! For future reference, we are riding in BNR-A on Saturday. My name is Jamie Carleton and Ben's name is Benefit of the Doubt. My dressage time is 11:05, stadium is 1:16, and cross country is 2:04. 

Ben has become a major tick magnet! I find all sorts of gross creepy crawly ticks on him all. the. time. It's so gross! They've been on his face, in his mane, on his sheath. Poor thing! I've been dousing him in bug spray which seems to be helping and doing extremely thorough checks every day while I'm grooming him.

Just to make me sweat, on Friday right as I was doing my last canter before getting off, Ben decided it'd be good to come up lame a week before the first event of the season. Wonderful. Luckily, the next day he was fine and has remained fine since. Knock on wood!

Yesterday we went to my trainer's place and worked on some cross country stuff around the ring. Ben was an absolute star and was completely game for everything I put in front of him which was a great feeling to have for this weekend! I have plenty of videos that I will upload to YouTube and link here.

And, finally, I was planning on wearing my Point Two vest for cross country on Saturday, but after reading a thread on the COTH Forums about someone purchasing a Hit Air air vest and not being able to get it to deploy, I thought it'd be best to try it out before attaching myself to my saddle on Saturday. So try it out I did! I figured if I was going to do it, I might as well do it in front of my horse to see what his reaction would be. He was not too concerned about the initial pop but was very concerned about the sound of the air releasing! After I went into his stall for a few minutes and gave him cookies, he was pretty much okay with it which was good. 

So the plan for the rest of the week is dressage if its not raining tomorrow, which it is supposed to do, dressage lesson on Thursday where we will run through our test, and some light flat on Friday just so he gets some work in before the bathing, braiding, tack cleaning, packing extravaganza begins!

I'll be around here the rest of the week with links and videos as promised. As always, thanks for reading!