keepin up with the joneses

It is somehow turning into the most glorious fall already. We’ve still had some warm days — but that cool crisp kinda warm that makes you want to bring layers just in case.

everybody is snuggly and sweet when it gets cold out!

It’s also been properly chilly on a couple days, and naturally a little rainy at times too. So all the nice cozy categories of weather. Only real bummer is the increasingly early sunset, I guess!

even doozy! in her new rain sheet!

Doozy, for her part, has been great. We had some really nice schooling rides in the last couple weeks, including a good dressage lesson, good schools at home, and that properly pleasant jump school I wrote about — plus one more after that wherein we basically just repeated exactly the same set of exercises with exactly the same properly pleasant results. Who doesn’t love that?

the sheet came in handy, bc it’s been rainy!
(also, yes, that is a whole ass flake of hay just sittin loose on the trailer floor LOL)

It was a good feeling too, bc we actually already had an entry in for Loch Moy’s final recognized HT of the year. Tho… Truth be told, legit one of my first thoughts after falling off at the starter trial was to check to see if it was too late to withdraw. Alas, it was.

It was a good aspirational bold plan when I sent all those entries in all at once — instead of my usual conservative / pessimistic approach of waiting to enter each thing until after the last thing, just in case.

“you can’t be serious” — doozy, so sweet she melts down in the rain

But, eh, that’s how it goes, right? I decided I’d still go to the recognized show since it was paid for and all, and we’d give it a good shot. Mostly I was curious to see if we could replicate some of those really good moments from the starter trial — esp in the dressage warm up.

proof we sorta kinda tried to do a thing! got some pro pics too bc #whynot, but you’ll have to wait for them to come in the mail

Idk, tho. The vibe was kinda off the whole day — and not just bc of the persistently damp chilly rain. We parked way down in timbuktu bc the place was a ZOO for area champs. They rearranged a lot of stuff from how they’d done it last year, including adding a second show jump competition ring and moving sj warm up to a whole new location (conveniently right above where we parked so we got to walk through all that** on our way to dressage).

(**All that being inclusive of the frequent victory gallops as each champs division concluded)

“i’ll take my snacks to go, pls!” — doozy, ready to be done

That’s all a long way to say: No, our dressage was not representative of any good work or improvements or whatever. It was, as they say, quite bad. Siiiiiigh.

I’d originally determined to stick around at least for show jumping, bad vibes be damned, but… eh. XC seemed out of the question with increasingly slippy torn up tracks (something like 40 BN horses had already jumped our track over the course of the weekend) and especially the warm up zone, and I don’t think I’d have forgiven myself if we had a repeat (or worse) of our last outing.

anyway. cats!! cats in paper bags!!! <3 <3

Ultimately tho, I opted to just pack up after dressage. Some other time it’ll feel appropriate and necessary to push through the cold wet chaos to go jump our jumps. It just didn’t have to be this particular day LOL.

speaking of creature comforts… my farrier started bringing his puppy on the road omg

And obvi Doozy certainly didn’t mind!! She doesn’t know she didn’t jump lol. Honestly, aside from being absolutely unable to cope the second she enters at A…. honestly aside from all that, she’s been an extremely happy camper lately!

doozy was obsessed, to say the least!

Nice rides, relaxed, pleasant and happy in the barn. Low key creepy in love with my farrier’s puppy. Ya know. Normal happy horse stuff! 

ooooh and more horse shows — this time on the administrative side of things: drafting maps!

So we’ll see what the season brings. Perhaps going back to the drawing board entirely re: test riding + ring craft. Or perhaps shifting focus to other activities that don’t involve dressage courts at all. Or ya know. Maybe just continuing to work as we have been, trusting that the progress is happening even if it’s hard to tell? Idk! We’ll see!

making plans for all these pretties!!!!

In the meantime, tho, we’re kicking back into high gear with all things Shawan Downs, as the local riding club’s fall starter event is rapidly approaching! 

get on the bus, lil’ table!!

There’s something so satisfying about being a part of that process, watching all the plans and pieces come together as the event takes shape.

so exciting to see things start taking shape! and look at those hints of crimson in the foliage!!!!

Fingers crossed the weather cooperates too bc while I’m undecided about entering the show, I’m very hopeful to at least make it to the xc schooling days. A girl can dream, right?

doozy, don’t you wanna go play too???

Right. It’s a tricky time of year to get too attached to any one specific plan or activity, with the weather being what it is. But honestly after having been on the sidelines for so much of the summer, it’s nice to even just have the choice!

perhaps haha. i think perhaps she does!

If the weather *DOES* play nice, we might have a few other upcoming activities planned too that require zero dressage (or even flatwork). More galloping hill and dale, less messy stressy contact on 20m circles. Doesn’t sound half bad, right? 

Cross your fingers the weather agrees LOL. And in the meantime, hope y’all have a nice weekend too!

show pics!

Happy Monday, folks! Hope everyone northeast of me didn’t get too too soaked with the recent storm, and hopefully not too many trees down in the wind! It was mostly quiet around these parts. A little soggy, a little chilly, but mostly quiet. 

handsome mare doin her best

But lo — the pro pics from our most recent show arrived in the mail!! I continue to just order actual physical prints bc… well. Number 1, I love pictures — lots of pictures, ALL the pictures!!! And #2, I’m grateful the photographers are there and want to support them.

just trottin around

For whatever reasons, the most economic option continues to be physical prints that arrive in the mail, of which I take slightly sketchy glare-y digital pictures to share here haha.

we might not be very good at this, but it doesn’t matter lol

And our selection from this go-round was a bit limited. I don’t know for sure, but it seems like the photographers curate the albums. Or maybe they only shoot when they think it’ll make a good picture. Regardless, it can make for slightly slim pickins for me and my silly mare.

we are slightly better at this, tho, sometimes! sorta!

C’est la vie, tho, right? I’d rather have the pictures than not have them!

pretty sure i’d already gone off course by this point tho LOL

The day may not have ultimately gone the way I wanted, but there were a lot of good moments and it deserves its spot in ye olde archives haha.

photographers chose interesting locations on cross country, so this is our one and only shot, literally just moments before our little oopsie… oh well!

Plus, ya know, I happen to think the mare is cute. She might not be everybody’s cup of tea, but she’s just the right little red wine grape for me!

technical difficulties at MDHT

So! Doozy and I made it back out for our first full three phase horse trial since her injury last spring!! And…. welllllll…. it didn’t go *entirely* to plan, to be honest. 

**record scratch**
yep, that’s me… 

But actually the good moments were quite good for us, all things considered, even if the day ended prematurely with my first ever fall off Doozy at one of the smallest jumps on xc. Well. Ok, cough cough, technically speaking, we were already eliminated in show jumping anyway bc SOMEBODY (me) missed a jump, ahem, oops. But Doozy didn’t know that! 

you’re probably wondering how i got here!

So yea. A few things went wrong LOL. But. Eh. What else is new?? So let’s get into it!

it all started about five hours earlier….

Obvi I’m not gonna lie — it’s hard to consistently kinda suck at this sport. But ya know. It’s not like I’m not trying, right? And hopefully close observers will agree with me that even with all the fuckery, there are still some pretty solid bright spots from the day — still some clear signs of slow (oh so slow) progress.

for real, tho — all joking aside, it ended up just fine. doozy, tell the people you’re fine!

Tho maybe not THAT clear bc we’re lacking a fair bit of media so…. haha, you’re just going to have to take my word for it on some stuff! Like dressage warm up. For once, I was adamant that dressage warm up would be a feature of our day, that it would get the time and attention it needed.  

doozy!! tell the people!! …doozy??

For whatever reason, some of my clock-related psycho tendencies include giving myself exactly not enough time. Not on this day, tho! I gave myself 40min. It’s more than we need for the “work” itself, but I hoped would provide the same sort of mental buffer for Doozy that the 7min break between tests at last month’s twilight dressage did. 

oh. ah. i see. just a little low key mugging while i’m trying to selfie lol… yep, she’s fine!

And we’ve been working really really hard at putting together a consistent simple flatwork routine. More evidence to come of that from a recent pivo ride that I haven’t had time to write about yet. 

All things considered, with all the prep work and time buffers and all that, I was actually extremely pleased with our warm up for dressage. Especially the canters. It wasn’t perfect, wasn’t as good as at home. But was NOT explosive, and actually bordered at times on ‘pleasant’ and ‘harmonious.’ 

walking downhill from trailers: first ring is dressage warm up, next ring holds the dressage courts, and the ring below that (behind the judge’s booths) holds show jumping. cross country is on the opposite side of warmup from this path. 

Unfortunately tho that just doesn’t translate into the show ring itself. Doozy just gets so tight and tense. The test wasn’t at all our worst… some parts were probably fine. But the score is atrocious anyway bc every single movement is so tense. And still with the collective 5.0 (x2 coefficient) Harmony score. 

anyway. for real for real — show jumping started off great!

I’d say it was a bummer except… Meh. For once I wasn’t even checking scores online throughout the day. So I actually didn’t even know the scores until I grabbed my test the next day while volunteering. It was important to me to try my best, to not feel like I shortchanged us in the warm up. But otherwise, it kinda is what it is, ya know? 

actually quite pleased with how i rode the tricky half stride distance in this line

So we just got on with our day — the next step of which was show jumping!! And another major major bright spot of the day was the warm up for this phase. Not that there’s any media at all, so again, you’ll have to take my word, but this might have been one of our strongest jumping phase warm up efforts to date.

slightly, uh, less pleased with straight up just forgetting that red #7 even existed in the world, oops

For once I actually was able to practice opening and collecting the canter and felt like Doozy understood and was responding. We jumped four jumps — the X, the vertical once off each lead, and then the oxer, and felt READY. 

ah well. doozy didn’t know her pilot is a moron.
well. ok actually she might have an inkling on that point, but it was all good!

The round itself started great too! The whole course was kinda twisty serpentine-y bending every which way with almost every jump feeling slightly related but also slightly on an iffy stride. 

We got a great shot into the first tho (with a rub but no rail), and then got the strides I wanted to jump 2 in a bending seven. The tight turn to 3 went smoothly, and I was super happy with our ride from 4 to 5, which was set on exactly a half stride but rode in a tidy six with just a slight bow vs the direct line. 

full round, complete with our drive-by of #7

We landed counter cantering tho and in retrospect I should have fixed the lead to 6 bc even tho Doozy had good distance, she had the rail and then landed in a bit of a run. That’s not why we missed 7 tho — I literally just straight up forgot about it, never even aimed for it. 

Just went right on around to the in-and-out at 8, which rode sticky and long for us, then another kinda sticky jump at 9 to finish. I suspect the stickiness is a direct result of my shoving her at 6 when she didn’t feel totally comfortable in her balance.

they still let you go cross country on a technical elimination tho!

Obvi the warm up steward — longtime volunteer and rider Meredith, who ran a fantastic ring!!! — alerted me to the missed jump and subsequent TE. Honestly tho? I honestly wasn’t ruffled by that at all. Obvi with the way our dressage is, it hardly matters anyway, right? We’re just here for the experience. And even if they’d said we couldn’t go xc, it would have still been a net positive experience. 

and it started off pretty good!

But they DID let us go xc, so ONWARD, right?? And again, Doozy actually had a very nice warm up — I only jumped one fence just when the horse ahead of us was in the box, mostly to check the brakes etc, and all was well. So we made our way to the box, picked up a trot about 30sec out, then headed out and got a great shot to fence 1!

straight up princess to #2

Doozy landed strong, but I made it my business to reestablish balance right away, and she got a really nice feeling forward stride to the second. 

i call this down hill run to jump 3 the “heart breaker,” but doozy did it just fine

Ditto for jump 3. It’s a fairly long downhill run away from the trailers and warm up and all that. I’m notoriously terrible about riding downhill, and everything about this jump is perfectly situated to tempt a rider into getting too backwards and behind the leg. Not Doozy tho! She carried a steady rhythm and jumped it nicely.

we’ve seen some variation of this bending line a few times now — #6 is top right corner

The next few jumps are all extremely similar to a couple courses we’ve done here before — with jumps nicely positioned on gently rising ground with bending approaches. 

got a pretty decent shot to the table!

Doozy was a touch distracted at times — you can actually hear me at various points in the helmet camera telling her not to worry about various jump judges etc lurking in the trees… But honestly she felt super rateable and rideable. 

proof: the good moments were good <3 <3

And she got what felt like a great shot to the table at 7!! Hindsight being what it is, tho, I wonder if she felt again like I kinda shoved her at it, sorta like jump 6 in show jumping. She didn’t land out of balance or anything like that, honestly she still felt great (albeit slightly distracted).

got a little bit of a clunker to the corner tho, oops

But the next jump definitely was a little sticky. Just not as confident a feeling as I’m used to with Doozy. I’m not entirely sure why — some people said their horses felt a little slippy on the ground, she also could have just been tired. Idk. But I opted to let her trot into the water just to be safe. 

a few small things went slightly wrong here that layered together into a slightly bigger oopsie

Tho again, hindsight being 20-20, it wasn’t exactly an effort to get her to trot. Which… Should have clued me in as unusual. And she just trit-trotted right through the water, right up to a piddly little slow-motion stop at the cedar logs after. 

Watching the helmet cam, I understand what I was thinking — clearly I was just waiting for her to pick up and go and take me to the fence. But she just… didn’t. And I didn’t do anything at all about it…. so yea, whoops. So we turned around and picked up the canter to try again. 

evidence: oopsie

But you know what they say — you really ought to jump it the first time bc it’s almost never going to look any better the second time. For whatever reason, Doozy was just out of steam and a little upset and didn’t want to play any more.

“i need an adult” — sweet little biscuit

For a hot second, I thought she would push me back into the saddle with her neck. An instant later tho I was way up in the air and actually afraid she might be coming toward and possibly over top of me. Good girl tho flung me clear and spun back and away. And then actually just stopped and stood there waiting for me instead of bolting off into the sunset. Whew.

honestly not hard to find bright spots about this video

I’ve never fallen off Doozy before — obvi have come very close, many times — but really was not at all sure what she’d do. She’s such a sweetie tho, she really does like to be with the people. So she waited <3

bummer to end on a sketchy note tho, but c’est la vie

So ya know. Obvi disappointing. In retrospect I kinda wish I’d retired after the first refusal bc the next couple jumps were all on slightly fussy downhill off-camber lines that probably wouldn’t be ideal for us anyway. But eh. In the grand scheme of things it’s not the end of the world.

no worse for the wear <3

We both probably need a little more schooling, a little more fitness. And *I* definitely need to work on being more proactive especially in the moments when Doozy ISN’T dragging me to the fences. 

All the same, tho, I’m not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater bc of one a couple mistakes, even if they were kinda big mistakes. There was a LOT to like about how our day was going. The moments that were good, were really good (for us lol). And at the end of the day, that’s what we’re here for! 

thornridge aCTivities

Not gonna lie, it feels so great lately to get to write about not just riding my horse, but actually going out and doing activities again too!! Don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty sure I’d still be out every day riding and grooming and spending time with my animal even if for whatever crazy reason we could never do another off property field trip ever again… 

“behold! i’m on a horse!!” — emma, 100% cheesin

But for me? This is where it’s at, this is my jam. Going out for lessons, little schooling shows, bigger rated shows, glorified trail rides… whatever, that’s the good stuff, ya know? And I’m so grateful to have this unique but special little mare back in action for it!

there is video from dressage!! but i don’t have a good resolution copy yet

And she was the absolute most perfect little Biscuit for our CT at Thornridge this weekend!! I won’t go into all the nitty gritty details about warm up and test riding and all that bc it’s basically exactly the same stuff I’ve been droning on about for the last couple weeks. 

click for full size — it was one of our best!

Tho, maybe all that writing and studying and pivo-produced feedback is working its magic on us, bc Doozy put in what might have been her best ever dressage test! Or at least, close to it. Not perfect, obvi, and the scoring is 100% inflated, and probably by a lot, compared to what we’d see at a rated show. 

and the jompies were fun too!!

But I was over the moon with the horse, and will hopefully be able to get some higher resolution video + screenshots to share soon. 

we were a touch skittery on some of the distances but big mare don’t care!

And in the meantime, it was very gratifying to basically immediately meet the new goal I laid out in a post two weeks ago about Harmony, with the judge’s overall collective marks and commentary indicating: “6.5 — Very fancy pair! Some tension today.” Hell yes, we’ll take that!

our most, uh, skitteriest lol… wherein we’re juussssst barely making that 7th stride fit, drifting exactly the opposite direction of ideal considering our next fence…

It was a relatively quiet wait for the jumping phase — we’d been forecast to get slammed with torrential rain literally right up until the storm somehow swung south and missed us completely. So the weather and ground ended up being literally perfect, but probably a lot of people had already decided based on the forecast the night before to scratch. Unfortunate but them’s the breaks sometimes!

the end jumps always come up tight but it was fine!

So Doozy and I were first down to the jumping area, first to go for the day. And honestly I kinda like just getting straight to it, ya know? We reestablished a little connection on the flat then jumped maybe two warm up jumps and went in for our round!

a little more composed into the final line!

They’d clearly planned the course with the weather in mind. There was nothing too too crazy out there, beyond the normal “it’s kinda a tight space with turns planned by dressage riders not jumpers” LOL — and the jumps all looked small for BN. 

left a stride out tho LOL

But the ground was perfect and Doozy was ready to go!! 

video of the round here <3

It wasn’t our tidiest round ever — kinda slightly funny distances to the first couple. And while the two related distance lines walked in an uphill full length seven, Doozy barely squeezed in the 7th in the first line and left it out entirely in the last… 

so fun to be doing activities again <3 <3

Plus naturally I did my own usual rider shenanigans like straight up letting go **completely** of my right rein over jump 2, for… reasons????… and almost forgetting about the end jump at 5 until the last possible second… So yea. Not exactly textbook tidy LOL… but FUN, and also somehow CLEAR!! 

proud biscuit won herself a very pretty little red ribbon <3
as much as i love getting big brown ribbons for this Big Brown daughter… a new run of Big Reds could be nice too LOL!

Whatever Doozy’s thoughts about some of the skittery distances, she had no trouble just popping up and over and getting on with it! What a mare! I literally do not remember the last time we show jumped on grass, it’s always such a different feeling from totally flat and level arenas, ya know? But Doozy seems to like it!

all in a day’s morning’s work, amirite??

So another fun day in the books, and still all in all a pretty low-impact activity all things considered, with maybe 25minutes of flatwork and 10 jumps on perfect ground. Not much different from a normal every day ride, it just so happened to be out at one of our favorite places full of a lot of our favorite people. Not bad!!