Merry Christmas!

 

WW: Longer Days

Celebrated the shortest day of the year with a good ride last night, and now the days start (slowly) getting longer!

Lucky Number Thirteen

 Well.... How about that?

I don't have any idea how that's calculated, and I certainly didn't submit myself for consideration 🤣 also clearly under the old name before the rebrand, but still sort of cool!

https://blog.feedspot.com/dressage_blogs/

Welcome New Noodle!

Since the cat (or noodle!) is out of the bag..... Meet Penny!

The breeder photos that made us fall in love!

We lost Rufus in January of 2020, and ever since then we've been idly talking occasionally about adding another dachshund to the herd. Most of our dogs are pretty close together in age, and after Cici (the youngest) had so many issues this year, we were worried about losing all our oldies close together without them having a chance to train up a younger one. 

DH telling Cici she is going to have a new sister. 

If we had timed things better, we could have gotten a puppy while I was WFH during the pandemic, but of course we didn't, alas. The two breeders we got our original fearsome foursome are both out of the dog breeding business, but I reached out to one of them to have her let me know if she came across any females that were not working out in a program for whatever reason, to give me a shout. We weren't in any particular hurry, just casually keeping an eye out for the right dog. We love Cici but it's unlikely that situation will ever happen again -- DH was at a total stranger's house with a mutual friend, complimented her because we had so many dachshunds and clearly love them, and they just GAVE her to him 😳

I still don't understand how someone could just GIVE this spastic little meerkat away, but their loss was very much my gain. I love this dog. 

But the universe works in mysterious ways and just like that....we had a lead! In less than a week, the breeder we got Hayden and Indy from (the two remaining from our original four) told me a friend had a red smooth female that ended up a little too leggy for her breeding program. I swapped some messages with this breeder and before I knew it, we had an appointment set up to see "Ginny" last Sunday, our 12th wedding anniversary :) she was a bit younger than I'd hoped for (only 10 months old), and raised in a kennel, so not housebroken, but she ticked all the rest of the boxes and DH had fallen in love with the photos the breeder sent, so off we went! 

Total champ for the 3-hour car ride home

We spent all of two minutes with her before DH was hopelessly smitten (not that we didn't see that coming, he had already bought a collar and leash and toys before we even went 🤣), so clearly she came home with us! We didn't love her name, so lively discussion ensued... After a lot of arguing (he wanted MAPLE, and I was angling for something literary like Sansa or Ansel), we compromised on Penny. It's not original, by any means, but it fits her! She is a child genius who pretty much immediately figured out the stairs for our couch, and is probably 80%+ potty trained in less than a week. She was great on the 3-hour drive home, immediately fit in with our pack, is obsessed with toys and playing with Cici (who vacillates between love and hate about her lol). She's been pretty good about crate training, and I'm working on doing a better job introducing her to the barn so maybe she can be my horse show dog :) 

She's off to the vet today for booster vaccinations and to schedule a spay, but I hope you'll be seeing plenty of her on the blog in the future!

Lesson Recap: More Friends, More Fun!

I guess I'm never going to get around to recapping the lesson two weeks ago, but since I didn't get any media, it's not like it would be a terribly interesting recap anyway. But I don't want to get too far behind, so I'm going to try to catch up from last weekend! A local(ish) friend from my GMO takes lessons right down the road around the same time as I do, and actually two weeks ago I stopped by her lesson on my way home and snapped some pics for her. It was super cool to get a chance to watch her lesson, because her coach is very well versed in biomechanics, so the teaching style was very different than what I'm used to while simultaneously framing some of the things I'm working on in a totally different way. Local friend had also asked about stopping by where I lesson to watch my lessons, so after clearing that with my new instructor (jesus I need an abbreviation for that at some point I guess) we managed to make it happen last weekend! Do you know what that means? ALL THE MEDIA. 

Leg yields are coming along I guess lol. 

Not only did my friend cheerfully pick up the camera and snap photos throughout the whole lesson (getting some GEMS, let me tell you! I posted way too many on FB and I'm not even sorry about it lol), but I also brought my Pivo thinking maybe I could start getting video footage even on days I don't have someone to take pictures, and she kept an eye on that and moved it around to make sure it tracked me through probably 80%+ of the lesson. Media overload!!

But can we talk about this ROOTD? IT KILLED. 

Mostly the lesson was chipping away at the same old things we have been working on - making sure I'm maintaining the connection equally in both reins, and not letting her take off and zoom away in the canter (which I am still only marginally successful at lol). This lesson we also finished by working on some stretchy trot, since we got (deservedly) dinged on that in all four of my tests at the schooling show. Ruby used to have a really killer stretchy trot, but then I broke it somehow and she started using it as an excuse to take off with me any time I let her have that length of rein. Not bolting, she'll still trot, it's just trotting at mach 10 with her nose in the dirt and I can't steer or influence it at all, which is... decidedly unhelpful in the show ring. 

Obviously still so much work to do to consistently fix it, but we made more progress in the 10 minutes at the end of the lesson that I've made on my own in the last year so like.... that's why we pay the professionals HAHA. 

I haven't had (and don't anticipate having, frankly) time to chop this down into more manageable bits, but here is 5 minutes of the lesson - occasionally I come too close to the Pivo in the corner and it loses me, but it picks me back up, so if you want to see a snapshot of just general lesson (not cherry picked photos haha), here you go! It's cool to compare to footage from some of our first lessons, the changes are astonishing to me. 

Still totally in awe every day (and particularly when I see photos/watch video that this mare is mine guys!

Blogger is doing things backwards again, this was us leaving the morning of the lesson. I love her new halter fleece. Be your own secret santa, drink and Amazon Prime ;) 

It'll be a bit quiet on the lesson front through the end of the year - we have a lot of family/holiday events each weekend between now and January, so I gave my instructor a heads up I would probably fall off the face of the map for a minute, but we'll be ready to pick things back up in January. I also talked to her about bringing Cinna out - we've had a few bad rides in a row where we just sort of negatively fall into the same old stupid patterns and I can recognize this but I can't figure out how to STOP doing it, so we're gonna set up some relationship counseling (aka let the professional watch me and identify how I'm fucking things up and how to fix it lol). 

WW: New Family Member!

I've been keeping a secret! Details to follow :)

Fun with Friends!

Not the past weekend, but the weekend before, I got to meet up with a group of friends from my GMO for a super fun trail ride! We ended up going to Three Creeks, since it was close to the three other trailers hauling out and worked best from a timing perspective. That made it my third trip there in less than a month, but the hill work is good for Ruby's booty ;) someday I'll convince them to haul out to Indian Camp Creek or Broemmelsiek lol. 

It was still technically hunting season (although anterless, so not as busy) so we broke out the orange vests for 4/6 of the riders. Didn't see any hunters, but did run into a group of riders on very cute mules!

It was a super fun time! We shuffled the horses around a few times taking turns being in the lead or being in the back, so all the horses got to work on it a little. 

This mare went snorkeling 🤣 and then she tried to drop and roll and soaked her mom's pretty boots lol. 

This cute gelding forgot how legs worked for a moment haha. 

Still can't believe the weather we're having in December - it's supposed to be 77 tomorrow 😳

I didn't get photos but one of the other mares was super aggressively splashy every time we found water so she ended up dousing anyone standing near her 🤣

 

Last two photos courtesy of Lauren from Knotted Elm Farm (who I swear used to blog but I cannot find a link womp womp). At any rate, super fun day, and I hope we get to do it again soon!