Monday, February 3, 2014

Is It Spring Yet?

Winter can be over at any time now. It seems as if it's either incredibly cold or snowing or sometimes both at the same time. Having an indoor this winter is of course great, but I think Ben and I are both looking forward for the weather to break so we can go on a hack, or even just ride in the outdoor arena.

There's currently about 6-8 inches of snow on the ground outside and its still snowing, so I have to skip my barn trip for the day. I'm sure Ben will be perfectly okay with this as long as he still gets his food delivered to him.

We've been continuing to work hard on our dressage and he is really coming along. He's realizing that it is a lot easier to do what is asked of him instead of throwing a temper tantrum. He is also consistently forward which is such a nice change. 

He is absolutely nailing his walk-canter-walk transitions and has even had some stellar halt-canter-halt transitions. He picked this up in about two days once my dressage trainer fixed my position. Go figure. I've been struggling with his walk-canter-walk transitions with mixed success for literally years, so to have them down now is a great feeling. 

We were supposed to head to a jumper show yesterday, but I decided against it at the last minute as I may or may not have severely procrastinated writing a big paper for my Marketing course that was due last night at 11:59pm. I just couldn't justify sitting around at the show for hours waiting for my classes to start when I could have been home making sure my work was in on time! There's another show in a couple of weeks and assuming the weather is decent enough we'll head to that one instead. 

I've been counting down the days until the first event of the season (97...) but its not coming fast enough. I would be happy if it would just thaw out enough to start on hacking and trot sets!

I've been trying to keep Ben in consistent work as much as possible but its been too cold to ride a lot of the time and last week he threw a shoe so we've been lucky to squeeze in a few rides a week on a regular basis. We should be back in business now if it would stop snowing!

He's getting quite chubby from sitting a little more than usual but he's still having a blast playing around outside with his buddies: