Thats Lame!!

Yup honey bunches of oats has a sore hoof (insert collective booing)
i don't know what caused it but she was just off, no swelling, no heat, no pulse.......well obviously she has a pulse.....just not in her leg....ok??
So me being the good horse mommy i am banged her tail, cut her feathers located on her fetlock (i'm studying for pony club can anyone tell??) and cut her mane. Just look how beautiful it is!!
That my friends was done with scissors, not pulled, not clipped, scissors. I haz skillz.

And i love this picture, i took it, just sayin. it looks like shes on a hill. which is actually an illusion because the land here is as flat as a pancake.

i also got some cool videos of her grazing, well as cool as grazing can be i tried to make them artistic, i think i failed but everyone else thinks they are good, but that's beside the point
I also just sat on her bareback while she grazed and laid down on her rump. Only afterwards did i realize that the vet school had sent a group of future vets techs to look at some horses, right outside where i was laying on my horse sticking my butt in the air.       Awesome.
But all in all good relaxing day, if nothing else i am positive :)

Where did April go?!?!?

i must be OCD because apparently i can't post without a picture, whatever inner OCD!! i'm breakin out!!
So not much has been going on lately except some crap that i'm not going to discuss here yet, jury's still out.
But on the India front she has been stellar these past few rides!!
I've really been focusing on collection because i wanna go to Second Level!! and thats the only piece we are missing. Its really not that she can't do it, she can, she is just not strong enough to hold the level of suspension needed for the actual test. Any ideas on strengthening collecting muscles?? Shoulder-in has been soft and forward, and her leg-yield has gotten so much more precise, i really feel like i own every single step, not every other step. Walk pirouettes are still coming along, they are getting better and slightly smaller now instead of being the size of russia we've moved to a  more brazil sized one. But thats okay with me because i really did teach her walk pirouettes way too early, so big they are. Simple changes are now down to three steps of walk, its hard to actually convince her that yes i really do want her to go from the canter to walk, not a walkish trotty thing....ish. (i guess that would technically be considered the second missing piece of second level.....oh well)

Did i mention Counter-canter??
oh yes counter canter is pretty legit right now, we can now go into corners and not die or zoom around them at Lightspeed, Sucess!!
My show clothes for dressage rally came in yesterday and let me tell you they are pretty spiffy. Black coat, White breeches, stock tie, indie's show bridle (which is really her everday bridle but cleaner), white spotless saddlepad
we are going to look like i actually know what i'm doing!!

Hokan :)

Hokan :)

So the last ride he had on Roxi (that we saw) was fabulous, she was relaxed and happy and he was even able to do some flying changes and extended trot!!
and afterward when he was taking off his helmet, which he put on after these pictures were taken i guess he is still not used to wearing one. She walked up behind him and put her head on his chest. It was seriously the sweetest thing i've ever seen

And i passed my D-2 rating!!! and fell in a huge sinkhole all in two hours
i haz skillz

Just Kidding.....

Short short post today

soooo about that show its not gonna happen because i can't wear a helmet for another about four days, because on tuesday i feinted and fell and busted my head open on a door jam so that morning we spent an amazing two hours in the emergency room getting my head stitched back together.....joy.

The best part is though, i don't have black stitches, i have green stitches. be jealous. be very jealous.

Blog Award

Wow i got the beautiful blogger award from confessions of a struggling dressage rider, can i just say thank you so much!!

So seven things about me

1: my theme song is All the single ladies, for a reason, i'm single and proud

2: i got india for christmas, big red bow and everything (thanks mom and dad)

3: I used to own a dressage farm, it wasn't fancy but i loved it.

4: i love music, and i listen to a bunch of random songs, i don't have a genre

5: i have a wintec isabel and i love it, me and my mom fight over which one of our saddles is better, don't tell her, but mine wins hands down

6: My favorite drink is dr. pepper

7: one of my nicknames is pinto bean, and my best friend's is soy bean, because we're cool like that :)

ok now i'm gonna give this award to some pretty amazing people 

Foxypants (because this chick is hilarious) 

Saving Faith

Spidersweb

A day in the Life

Grand Prix Someday 

Dorothy!!

So there is a reason that i waited so long to post about this lesson which was about a week ago and the reason is this

                                                             

ok so i know i look like a turtle, but i was concentrating, and dumb-moment of the day award goes to me. Lesson learned?? never turn your horse out anywhere with tack on it gets really muddy.....really fast. My bestfriend wants to be a professinal photographer and wants to take  show photos for some extra money and was practising on me and india and i'm telling you right now india is a lot more photogenic than i am :)

So first lesson (outside) we worked on getting her to take longer, calmer steps and walked most of the time...oh well. However we did work on trot lengthenings and finally got one!!

the exercise that we did was in every corner and at E and B do a ten meter collected trot circle then inbetween circles ask for a lengthening. It works so well!! but when she explained it i was like "oh this will be easy" i stand corrected it was hard. after a while she started to anticipate the lengthening, if she started to anticipate it we just did another slower circle then she was alright. She was high as a kite that day, getting her to listen to my aids was really difficult.

Ok second lesson, she was very good this time and we worked on collecting and legthening again and lateral work. We worked on shoulder-in and leg yield, and indie gave me the best shoulder-in i've ever gotten. Also we had to share the arena with a bunch of western people that saw the part of the lesson where i was mostly walking, a couple of them decided to i guess show me up by cantering around with tie-downs. Dorothy looked over at them and started muttering about "ooh look i can canter with a tie-down i'm so fabulous"

Does anyone know the look people give you when they are thinking evil thoughts??

i do.

She told me to canter (without a tie-down) and had me lengthen the canter right under their noses and to do it big. Then to do some leg-yield and shallow loops. I swear the looks i got  were priceless they ranged from disbelief to humbled.

If any western people are reading this i would like to point out that we have tons of western people at my barn and i love most of them, but there are two groups that come that i really strongly dislike, the first group is the one that beats the shit out of their horses, the second one is really mean to anyone who rides english dressage or jumping. They have kicked us out of the arena even though they never rented it (which you have to do to kick people out) They almost run us over pretty routinely. However i will give them some credit this time they where polite most of the time (i think dorothy scared them)

In other news we are going to a show this weekend, i'm showing first one and two. And i'm so nervous, i'm really not sure why i can do the tests with no problem, indie's been to these showgrounds before and we won everything we could have won. I think it has something to do with sleep deprivation, its making me very emotional. For example i was reading over my tests and was about to the point of tears, and i really don't know why. Note to self sleep is very important, the earliest i have gone to bed the past like four days was one in the morning and i woke up at six every morning, its really killing me, i stayed home today (because i'm a wuss) and slept until 12, can i tell you how much better i feel.

Note to all concerned sleep, its good for you.

Dentist!!!

The horsey dentist came to see indie because she was long overdue. Apparently (as i'm told because i've been sick all week) They had to sedate her big time. Like walking around like a drunken sailor. And as some of you know none of our horses can see the horsey dentist without something going wrong, Roxi sees the dentist tries to throw him against the wall after being sedated, Romanche sees the dentist has to be snubbed to a tree because he thinks the dentist will try and pick ticks out of his ears, baron sees the dentist and tries to kill him, Rosetta was the only good one, but Rosettas perfect, because duh!! she's Rosetta!!
So this time india being the drunken wench that she is bit her tongue and it was bleeding all over the place. As i understand it my mom the nurse was calmer than the dentist, oh great!!
The dentist found some nasty spurs and points on her teeth and she had some ulcers. And now her mouth is all owchie so no riding until friday (which doesn't bother me since i've been sick)
BUT.... that only leaves two days of practice before Dorothy comes back!!, which is good and bad

Good: dorothy's coming!!!
Bad: crap she's gonna yell at me for not practising when i did!! 

so yes this is my life....

but on another good note before all this crap happened, awesome trainer had me start working on collected stuffs Yeah!!!
and i jumped my first whole baby course on india and passed my D2 (i know i'm way behind but its hard when i had my first official jumping lesson the day i did my first whole baby course, cut me some slack over here!!)

now i shall put some real people cloths on, retreat to my living room with dressage day and try to get better.......joy