bird brain

Happy Thursday everyone! Brace yo'selves for another picture-heavy recounting of a work trip that tries to make it look like I didn't spend the whole time freezing my lady balls off in an overly air-conditioned conference center lol.

it's a ship!

Bc it turns out that work trips aren't really all that glamorous, even when they take me to cool places.

kites kites kites

San Diego is a very pretty place tho. The harbor definitely lends itself to some very pleasant sightseeing even on the briefest of walks.
 

i'm more than a little bit obsessed with west coast trees

It's good to be home tho. I miss my pony and would legit rather be posting pictures of him right now. This is, after all, a dedicated horse blog. Not a work travel blog lol. But all in good time, right?

srsly. these trees. they are cool.

Hopefully I'll see Charlie this evening for a nice long hack (if the weather cooperates lol). In the meantime tho, I'll just satisfy myself with recovering from the jet lag and red eye flight while trying to catch up on what everyone has been up to for the past couple days.

oooh look, it's another ship!

I'm looking forward to a little more stability in my schedule soon hopefully too. For whatever reason, I've been heading out to the west coast fairly often lately. It's a cool place to go but that's a lot of travel!

kinda wish i had made it for a tour

And it's hard to give Charlie the consistency I want for him with all that back and forth. Considering in the past 7 days he's been ridden once. Not ideal. But again, hopefully that's it for time off for a little while.

more treeeees!! these palms being decidedly more natural and normal looking than the overly preened palms of anaheim

Really tho, if Charlie has shown anything over the course of time I've had him, it's that he's pretty much always fine. Always the same horse. I always know what I'm getting with him, and it's always pretty wonderful.

so pretty tho!

And that's a reassuring feeling, right? To know that we can put something down, walk away for a moment, and still have everything right where we left it when we return.

even the little weedy mossy plants are pretty cool looking

As much as I joke about Charlie being the King of the Dings and a sensitive soul, he really has been Mr Reliability.

marina in the bay

Obvi it's tempting fate a little to write that out lol... But so far, so good.

they almost don't look real, right?

So I'm looking forward to getting back out there again soon, getting my pony fix and hopefully having some exciting stuff coming up to write about too!

can't stop, won't stop

There are a couple topics I want to write about soon too, in addition to our standard content following the training progress of everyone's favorite goofy big bay TB.

another notable difference from anaheim: birdies!!!! they wanted to share my breakfast orts lol

Not least of which, the most major of silver linings from this most recent trip!!

oooooh except we got some drama goin down!

San Diego, as you know, being home to actually quite a few wonderful equestrian bloggers - so naturally we had to find a way to weave a fun meet up into the regularly scheduled work shenanigans!!

angry birdie doesn't wanna play nice with everyone else! chill out birdie!!

And even more to my great relief - this included getting to meet a couple very special and internet-famous ponies!!!! More to come on that later!

oh snap! i love the shocked expressions of those other two trying to figure out wtf is up with crazy pants over there lol

For now, tho, wish me luck in recovering from the jet lag and getting to see Sir Charles this evening (I miss the big guy!!).

'Tis the season anyway, right? I know a lot of you have been on vacations lately, or travel for work too, or have other circumstances interfering with a consistent summer riding schedule. How have you made that work for you? Is your horse cool with down time? Or do you always have to make arrangements to keep the horse in work when you're away? Does it depend?