A Little Late

Better late than never, I suppose. I stumbled upon these photos I took from a moving car of various barns. Last week's Sunday Stills Challenge was BARNS! I meant to post these last Sunday, but (add excuse here). I'd actually have better luck participating if it were Saturday Stills, since Sunday is the only quiet day in the neighborhood and I use it to train the horses.

This first barn is more modern day, probably built within the past 10 years. If it weren't for the blurred fence posts and sign in the foreground, you'd never know I took it out the window of a car going 45 MPH.

This next one is my favorite. Despite having more sky than is necessary in the photograph, I find it interesting the I managed to get the old pick up truck into the lower corner of the picture, and the cross of the telephone pole in the very center adds some interest, as well. If there were some distinct clouds in the sky, it might balance out better.

This final photograph is blurry all over, but if I ever pass by this way again, I'll make the effort to get out of the car and set up the shot, because the tonal range of the wood on this barn is lovely. Also, the telephone wires offer some juxtaposition, with the lines going in a different direction.

New Tricks

My only resource when I owned my first horse was the breeder who I bought the horse from. I boarded my horse with her for the first year I owned him while my family built a barn and installed some fencing. I have always been grateful that this breeder was willing to work with me and teach me all she knew after 60-some years of experience raising horses.

Every now and then she'd teach me something that didn't make sense to me. I didn't agree with it. I wanted to do it my way, but if she caught me doing it my way, she'd correct me and make me do it her way. After a while I started feeling stifled and couldn't wait to get my horses onto my own property where I would have the freedom to raise them how I thought was best.

However, even after I moved my horses onto my own property across the street, my mentor could still see me from her window, and she'd throw it open to yell out at me, "Don't groom that horse without tying it first!" or "You're using the wrong brush on his face!"

It was especially frustrating when my trainer would tell me to go out and buy a specific item of tack, and then my mentor would see me using it and tell me never to use it again. Yet, despite all the things I was doing wrong, I could clearly see plenty of things my mentor was doing wrong, like not wearing a helmet while riding, putting splint boots on backwards or upside down, and not getting all the rusty nails and sharp sheet metal out of her horses' corrals.

When I broke my arm bailing off a bucking horse, I couldn't bring myself to tell her how it happened. I gave the vague response of "I fell." I feared she may become more controlling if she knew I got hurt while riding a horse, and at the same time I felt that she was such a gifted horsewoman that she would never injure herself around horses. Ironically, she suffered the exact same injury and had to go through the same surgery as I did after a horse slammed her into a wall a couple of years later. I realized that my belief that really good horse people don't get injured was just plain silly. You can talk to any of the best horse training clinicians today, and they'll have plenty of war stories to tell. But sometimes getting hurt is how you learn safety.

After my mentor spent hours working with me on teaching how to get a horse on the correct lead, I watched her blow a horse show by riding half the class on the wrong lead. I started taking much of what she said with a grain of salt. At first I felt all her years of horsemanship made her a God to me, but then I began to realize that she was so stuck in her own traditions that she wasn't willing to learn anything new herself.

I started attending horse training clinics and studying topics such as natural horsemanship. I tried discussing what I learned with her, and she'd shoot it down. I tried lending books to her, but she'd return them years later claiming she never had the time to read them. I realized there was no point in trying to convert her to some of my beliefs.

Eventually, she stopped trying to control my choices in horsemanship and let me do my own thing. She watched me from a distance. I'd hear her on her mobile phone in her yard telling someone about some crazy exercise I'm doing with my horses. She seemed to think that desensitization was especially silly. Next thing I knew, she was talking to me about desensitization as if she invented it. I suspect that someone she respects explained to her what I was doing with my horses in a way that made sense to her.

Years ago I had several truckloads of decomposed granite piled in a mountain on my property. I spread it in the stalls and around the paddock to soften the ground. I discovered that a horse could pee in D.G., and the wet spot would instantly disappear. If I remember correctly, I had just called a construction company and asked for a suggestion on what kind of material to use for soft footing, and they suggested D.G. My mentor told me that was a bad move, because D.G. is like sand and can cause the horses to colic. She scared me so badly that I spent hundreds of dollars on various feed troughs in hopes of keeping all the feed up off the ground. Of course, nothing worked, because the horses just throw their feed out of the troughs onto the D.G. and eat off it anyway.

However, they've been eating off the D.G. for many years now and the vet says he doesn't hear any sand in their guts. Ironically, the other day my mentor informed me that she just had a truckload of D.G. delivered to her place. She loves it and uses it in her stalls. I guess, like me, she's getting tired of having to pay $8 a bag for wood shavings that only last a few days and triple the mucking time by requiring you to shake every loose shaving off your fork before depositing the manure into a wheelbarrow. With D.G. the horse can lie on soft ground, have it's pee absorbed, and protect its hooves. You can pick up the manure with a fork and the grains fall right through the prongs, so there is nothing to shake out. I guess my mentor discovered that maybe some of my methods aren't so bad after all. Horsemanship is a learning process that can sometimes be extended beyond a lifetime into many generations.

Batten Down the Barn Doors

Just a warning for those of you in the path of this storm that passed through Northern California and Nevada yesterday. This was the worst wind we've seen in our history of living here, and we've experienced hurricane force winds quite often.

You remember that tarp I hung from a fence the other day? The wind whipped it around so much that the whipping of the tarp snapped a wooden fence panel right off its posts and both of my tarps have holes ripped in them. My neighbor's fence was blown down, and my truck got pelted by debris as I drove to work.

Just before leaving for work, the power went out. I figured it was just our neighborhood, because we have the world's worst electrical service, but it turned out to affect the entire valley, which includes two towns. All the traffic lights were out and everyone had to stop at every intersection and treat it like a 4-way stop. However, with it being rush hour, all the people who felt that they couldn't wait to get to work just pushed their way through the intersections in chunks without yielding to the right-of-way of others.

My job is on the top of a mountain where it rained all day, but the wind wasn't nearly as bad. We had electricity, with just a few occasional glitches in the network. Around 4:15 PM, I called home to see if the electricity was turned on and if they needed me to pick up dinner in the one city that did have electricity. It turned out that the valley had no electricity all day from about 7:00 AM until 4:10 PM. I just happened to call right when they turned it on. Of course they needed me to pick up dinner. Everything in the fridge had been sitting at room temperature all day.

Of course, while I was one the phone with my son promising to come to the rescue with some food, my boss was asking me to work late. I said no to my boss, but agreed to log in and work once I got home, provided the electricity stayed on. My boss had made another coworker stay at the office until 10:00 PM the previous night and I wasn't going to even start such a precedence, especially when my home was blowing away in pieces down in the valley.

I usually stop at In & Out Burger when I need to bring home dinner, but cars were lined up around the block -- probably all the people who live in the valley with spoiled food from the power outage. I looked over and saw that no one was at Quiznos Subs, so I picked up some yummy, thousand-calorie sandwiches for dinner. I got home to a shell-shocked husband. He said that the noise from the wind was so loud, he didn't think the roof was going to hold. Because the electricity was out, he couldn't get his car out of the garage to go drive around and find out what was going on. His little truck was outside, but he knew it would probably roll in the wind if he drove it out from behind its windbreak. He was supposed to work from home, but had no computer, so he used his iPhone to access the local news, which said that power lines were down all over the place.

It turned out that the power was out most of the day for the schools, and the kids at one elementary school were instructed in the hallways instead of their classrooms to keep them away from the windows, I guess. The aluminum roof on Gabbrielle's stall has always been a problem for us, because it shakes violently and loudly. There was an error in the number of panels and their thickness when we were building it, so we had to do some patchwork. I'm always worrying those panels will rip loose and decapitate someone, but they are within our 90 MPH wind building code, so they withstood this wind. I was sure to give each horse a treat for surviving in his/her stall at the end of the day. They seemed fairly calm by the time I made it down the mountain, but I'm sure they were just as shell-shocked as my husband.

Oh yeah, and my husband told me that hurricane force winds are not enough to stop our neighbors from doing their annoying construction projects. Some guy showed up at a house across the street with a generator and a jackhammer! So, on top of having to listen to the sound of the wind ripping shingles off our roof all day, my husband had to listen to the sound of a jackhammer. Lovely.

April Blizzards

I never take my camera out to the barn with me when I clean stalls, but I'm starting to think that I should, because the cutest things happen when I'm out there. It's just kind of hard to shovel manure with a camera hanging around my neck, plus I don't want all that dust to get in it.

Anyway, this evening I was shoveling manure when I saw a flash of yellow disappear behind my barn. I knew my son was wearing a yellow shirt, so I figured it was him sneaking up on me. I quietly moved out of the stall I was cleaning and came around the opposite corner of the barn to sneak up on him. He was disappointed that I ruined his stealthy move by being alert. He came around the corner with me while I returned to cleaning stalls, but he wasn't wearing shoes and the horses were bearing down on him.

He quickly jumped up into a sitting position on the sill of a stall window, so that the horses couldn't step on his bare feet. Gabbrielle was so fascinated by all that bare skin on his legs and feet (shorts and no shoes) that she kept poking his legs and feet with her muzzle. I told my son to be careful, because sometimes the horses will nip to get a better understanding of human skin. I remember Bombay getting a little nutty over seeing my bare legs the first time I wore shorts around him, and he almost bit me.

While Gabbrielle was doing her exploration with her muzzle, Bombay wandered over with a basketball in his mouth and tried to get my son to play basketball with him. The horses often watch my son play basketball on our driveway and I'm sure they'd love to shoot hoops with him. Soon both horses were getting a little too frisky investigating my son's legs, so he stood in the window and started to swing from the rafters. That sent the horses running, but then they'd come right back to sniff and poke at him again.

I wish I had my camera, because their curiosity was just too cute, stretching their necks out with their ears pinned forward and wiggling their lips back and forth. My son had enough when they started investigating his shorts, so he swung out in one big kick, something the horses understood, and they ran far enough away to let him escape the paddock in bare feet without getting mobbed by hooves.

Since I didn't get pictures of that, I'm posting pictures I took while trying to sneak up on Lostine the other day. My son won't be in shorts and bare feet for long, we've got another storm coming through tomorrow that is predicted to bring us snow all the way through Friday. It's supposed to be "April showers bring May flowers" -- not April blizzards freeze your gizzards.

End of the Tunnel?

I really would like to be able to ride more often, and I'd like to take care of myself better, but a lack of time always seems to get in the way. Obviously, I have time to blog, but that is because I'm always sitting at a computer with my job. I'm blogging in the few seconds of wait time I have here and there in increments throughout the day with my job, or I'm blogging late at night before bed or on the weekends and scheduling future publish times.

The biggest time hog is my job. It's almost impossible to just start work at 8:00 AM, take an hour lunch break and end work at 5:00 PM. I am often given more tasks than can be done in 40 hours a week, and they are all urgent. I am handed more "emergencies" in the software industry than I'd see as a trauma surgeon. If I start work at 5:00 AM, log in again late at night, work holidays or work weekends to try to catch up without interruptions, my boss sees me online and starts giving me additional tasks. The work never slows. Each time I try to take a bathroom or snack break, I get called into a meeting in which I am told that I have to complete the impossible within the next two hours or the world will self-destruct. I know from experience that this is the norm for my field. Changing companies won't improve my hours. I have to change careers.

I've actually been trying to break out of the software industry for many years now, but bad luck keeps hassling me each time I come close to escaping. At one point in time I had set several thousand dollars aside to start my own publishing business, and then our septic system bit the dust and we had to install a whole new leach field, which ate up all the money I had set aside to start my own business. That's just one of many examples of how my efforts to change careers have been thwarted.

I want to do something I enjoy, so that I don't have to hate waking up every morning to face another work day. To know what I enjoy, I have to look at how I choose to spend my free time. I like working with horses, but I'm really too old and my bones are too brittle to start a career as a horse trainer. Most horse trainers have been riding since young children and have had many mentors. I still have a lot to learn and it's mostly stuff I should have learned when I was 12.

I like fabric art, but most cotton fabric costs $10 a yard and thread isn't cheap either. Tack some labor onto that and equate it into how many hours it takes to construct an art quilt, and no one could pay me enough to help me break even. In fact, I doubt anyone would pay me since it's easier to just pick up a mass-made quilt at your local department store for $100 or so. So, starting a fabric arts business is out of the question.

I like to write, but writing pays peanuts unless you can strike gold like J.K. Rowling or Stephen King. I looked around at freelance writing websites and was shocked by the low pay. I would have to crank out a dozen articles a day to even come close to earning my current salary. I've started several novels during my lifetime and have finished none. Life always tears me away from my projects before they can reach completion. The last time I left my job for three months to try to rekindle my writing career, I earned nothing except some praise and encouragement to keep going from editors and even a Pulitzer Prize winning poet. However, praise doesn't pay the bills.

So, I've been scratching my head over what I can do that I know I will love doing that will also pay the bills. My husband pointed out that I spend a lot of time taking pictures with my camera, and I seem to enjoy analyzing and experimenting with the art. I usually just upload pictures straight from my camera, because I never have time to play around with PhotoShop. However, I started thinking about how fun it would be to have a photography business. I wouldn't have to sit at a desk all day. I could choose how much variety I do or don't want by deciding what to specialize in. I could be in charge of my own schedule, and I could even work all my other loves into the picture by photographing horses, art quilts, and helping out the publishing industry.

My husband offered to invest in some professional camera equipment, so we have spent the past couple of months gathering the supplies I need. I am taking an online photography course that is surprisingly difficult. Even though I don't have to deal with developing film in a darkroom with a DSLR camera, there is still a lot of math and science involved in the art of photography. It's not enough just to have an eye for material. You have to understand how to optimize your camera, and every camera is different -- even two of the same model.

I had hoped to be able to leave my job some time after June 1st, when we can switch the kids and I over to my husband's employer's health insurance plan, however I've already run into some snags. My current employer pays 100% of my family's health insurance, and it is one of the best plans you can get, while my husband has to pay the majority of his employer's health insurance out of his pocket, and we just received notice that they are raising their rates. The changeover in insurance will be a very expensive move. Also, we were denied a student loan for my daughter's junior year in college next year. I rely on those loans to be able to pay at a comfortable rate, as opposed to having to pay in large chunks over a short period of time. In a year and a half, both my kids will be in college. If I'm working in a career that pays less money, a large amount of our income is going to pay for health insurance, and we have two college tuitions to cover, we'll really be in trouble if we get denied a loan.

I'm not ready to give up yet, but am feeling worn out from all the snags I must endure in my effort to improve my quality of life. Those days of people telling me that "anything is possible" and "you can be whatever you want to be" seem silly. Anything is possible if you are young and single and have no responsibilities. However, once you gather a family, a home, pets, material belongings, and your children's futures, you can't just throw it all to the wind and do what you want. You have to put others ahead of yourself. All I can really visualize at the moment is keeping my current job and perhaps doing some photography assignments on the weekends to build a clientele base and gain a supplemental income.

Anyway, if you've been wondering why I haven't been leaving many comments on blogs these past couple of months, it's because in addition to working 60 hours a week, I'm taking a college course. Every homework assignment seems so simple, but I always somehow manage to botch it and end up re-doing the task a dozen times until I get it right. I got so busy creating a gray scale for my camera this past weekend that I had to sacrifice cleaning the horses' stalls. The poor kids had to sleep in their own poop. There really aren't enough hours in the day for work and school and responsibilities at home, but hopefully when all is said and done, this project will pay off in more free time for me, and perhaps waking up with a smile on my face each day, because I get to go do a job that I love.

A Quick Change of Scene

This was how our yard was looking a few days ago...



This is what our yard looks like today...

It's too muddy and slippery to ride the horses, so I've been relocating manure.

The pasture is finally starting to turn green in patches.

Dandelions have taken over our yard.

I started digging some of them up and trying to clear all the grass out from around my hedge, so that I can create a trench to water it with, but before I could get more than two dandelion bunches dug up, my neighbor brought in another work crew to do I-don't-know-what on her property and inside her guest house. It looks like she's preparing for long-term guests, which means more neighbors and less privacy for me.

The leaves haven't had a chance to bud on most of the trees.

I hung an old tarp over a fence near one of the horses' feed troughs. Then the wind picked up and started blowing it around. Interestingly, Bombay was the only horse unfazed by the billowing tarp. He ate to his heart's content, and each time one of the mares came over to try to steal his food, the tarp would startle them and chase them away. I think that trail ride did wonders for Bombay's courage.

Friday Funny

So, my husband and I were watching the TV show, Wife Swap, and he said, "If our family did Wife Swap, I'd have to tell the new wife to do whatever she wants as long as she scoops poop. She can have the run of the house, do whatever she wants with the kids, but she's got to scoop poop. That's all I care about. Get that poop scooped. Then when it comes time for the rules change, the new wife will tell us it's our turn to scoop poop. The whole week will be a TV show about scooping poop."

A Dog and Her Toys

These pictures were too sweet to pass up...

She played so hard that she passed out in a pile of dog toys.

Fuzzy Wuzzy Was a What?

Monty the old man Shelty having one of his puppy moments. The lady who bred him named him Bear. He's definitely the biggest Shelty you'll ever see.

A Note on the Photography: If you are taking a photograph in a dark location, the shutter remains open longer to let in more light. Therefore, anything that is moving during the duration of the shutter remaining open comes out blurry. I also took pictures with the camera's flash, which snapped the shutter open and closed must faster, but in the end I liked how the blurriness made the dog appear to be more fuzzy.

Last Ride Before the Storm

I was desperate to get in one more horseback ride before the Monday night storm moved in. The wind was whipping things around, but the sun was still coming and going as clouds drifted past. It was Bombay's turn for some exercise, so I saddled him up and free-lunged him in the round pen.

The wind filled his sails and he chose to go at the fastest pace of each gait, head up in the air, another hand taller than usual. A truck I had never seen before came speeding up the street right when we were walking through the gate, and of course it had to go behind my barn and into my next door neighbor's yard. I thought, "Now what kind of construction project are these people starting? Can't they give it a rest?"

The man in the truck turned out to be a farrier, which surprised me because you'd think he'd know better than to speed around a neighborhood where people may be riding horses, and he pulled his anvil out, so I knew he was going to do some hammering. Once Bombay settled down a bit, I led him over to the the step stool, put my foot in the stirrup and BLAM BLAM BLAM! My neighbor came driving his rickety truck up the street hitting every pothole along the way, pulled into his yard, and proceeded to sit in the driver's seat and stare at me for ten minutes. I said, "I don't believe this! This guy drives up every time I've got my foot in the stirrup ready to mount. Does he have a satellite image trained on my round pen or what?"

Most people go to work in the morning and come home in the evening. These people come and go just about every 15 minutes. I have never seen people who waste so much gas driving here and driving there without seeming to have any plan on how they could consolidate all those trips into just one or two. I wish they'd just either stay in their house or leave and give me some alone time with my horses for a couple of hours.

I didn't want to mount, because then the guy would sit there even longer and stare at me, so I did the most boring thing possible I could think of and walked around my arena picking up rocks. He finally got out of his truck and started shuffling toward his front door, so I mounted... too soon.

He had his hand on the doorknob, saw me mount, turned around and started finding things to do along the fence line so that he could watch me ride. He turned on his hose to water a tree and the hissing noise put Bombay on alert, so I rode him harder, pushing him up to the extended trot and keeping rhythm with my posting. Then the guy walked over to a trash can and started pulling plastic bags out of it just a few feet away from me. You don't do that around horses. Yet these people are always farting around with plastic bags when I'm trying to ride my horses.

They are like pack-rats, carrying things in plastic bags back and forth between their house and their garage and their vehicles just about every 15 minutes. Yes, I use plastic bags to desensitize my horses, but after many years of desensitization exercises Bombay and Gabbrielle are still just as worried about plastic bags as ever, unless they clearly see food inside the bag. Also, I shake bags at them from the ground, not when I'm in the saddle and at risk of being thrown.

I remember being at a horse show years ago when a gust of wind blew a plastic bag out of a trash can into the middle of a group of horses and riders waiting outside an arena. It was pure mayhem. All these riders were trying to control their horses and yelling at me to get that bag. I grabbed it, wadded it up, shoved it under my shirt, and there was this collective sigh of relief followed by a number of thank yous.

I was tired of having to delay my horseback rides because of this neighbor's intrusive and disruptive behaviors, so I just rode harder, keeping Bombay collected so that he couldn't pop his head up and see those plastic bags. Then the farrier started hammering a horseshoe and Bombay broke out of frame to look up to see where that noise was coming from. Now the neighbor was pushing a wheelbarrow around and he realized there was a man in his backyard. He waddled back there and sat down to stare at the farrier while he worked. I thought, "Well, that farrier isn't going to last long."

You see, my farrier trimmed their horses' hooves a couple of times, and the man and the woman bugged the crap out of him. He said they not only didn't help by holding the horses still, but they don't have a clue about horses and kept doing things to get in the way and bother the horses. He didn't want to go back there, because the horse owner was so ignorant that she wanted him to just put one shoe on the horse without a trim since that's all she could afford. He had to educate her on the realities of trimming and shoeing horses.

I opened the round pen gate, rode Bombay out, let the ladies in, and locked it. Then Bombay and I trotted around the paddock for a while. He's much braver now that he's been out on the trails. He used to stiffen up as soon as we passed through the gate, even though he stands around in the paddock all day. I guess it looks a lot different with me on his back. Now I can ride him all around, even in the wind, and he's okay with it.

I had to work really hard to get this last picture. I kept trying to get Bombay to put his ears forward, and as soon as he did it, a car would drive up or down the street behind him and he'd flick an ear backward. A vehicle drove past literally every five seconds. I'd get him to put his ears forward, and just when I pressed the shutter release, a car drove past and the ear went back. It was crazy. I live on a dead end road with only four other houses. What's up with all this traffic?

I know. I've got to move. Easier said than done for more reasons than I can count. Right now I'm concentrating on changing careers so that I don't have to work such long hours and have half a dozen people all talking to me at the same time while I'm trying to do my job. If I can be under less stress with my job and have more time to work with the horses, I can probably handle all the neighborhood noises and distractions better, because I won't feel so overstimulated all the time and won't be under as much stress to hurry up and make the best out of what little free time I have.

Just Me and Gabbrielle

Since Sunday turned out to be much hotter than the forecasters predicted at a whopping 81 degrees in mid-April, I did not blanket the horses during the night. I left their blankets hanging on their stall walls.

On Monday, the third day of my vacation, I was all alone at home while my son was in school and my husband was at the office. I went outside to let the horses out of their stalls for breakfast, and this is what I found in Gabbrielle's stall...


She ripped her blanket off the wall and tore the strap and D-ring that I hang it from. Bombay did that once when he got his leg caught in a strap of the blanket, so I examined Gabbrielle for injuries, but there were none. I think she just got cold during the night and tried to put the blanket on herself. So, for now on, I have to go the extra mile and either put the blankets on the horses or remove them from their stalls.

While the horses ate their breakfast, I steam vac-ed the carpet and mopped the kitchen and dining room floors -- not exactly how I want to spend my vacation, but my job doesn't leave me much time to clean house, so I have to do some cleaning when I get time off.

When the horses finished breakfast, I hosed off and scrubbed down their blankets. Just when I was about to catch Gabbrielle for some ground work, my neighbor came out of his house, opened his garage and started his noisy routine of loading up his truck. I went inside to take care of a few more tasks, and when I went back outside, both of my neighbors were gone. Woo-hoo! That means I can work with Gabbrielle without spooks, without her being distracted, and without me feeling creeped out.

I saddled her up, spending more time on getting her past her cinchiness - another word for bitchiness when you tighten the cinch. I also spent quite a bit of time on getting her to lower her head for the bridle. I lunged her and worked on all the gaits, as well as whoa. I knew I shouldn't ride her with no one home. She doesn't even have 10-days under saddle and anything can happen, but my neighbors weren't home and I had to take advantage of it.

As soon as I put my foot in the stirrup, BLAM BLAM BLAM! My neighbor came up the street in his rickety old truck hitting every pothole along the way. "ARGH!" I said. "This man has the worst timing on earth!"

He did his usual routine of sitting in his truck for 15-minutes staring at me instead of going into his house. I really did not want to climb into the saddle only to find out that he's about to pull out his power tools or knock the aluminum ladder off the roof of his truck. I can handle Bombay and Lostine's spooks, but Gabbrielle bolts from 0 to 60 MPH in 1 second flat, and no one was home to scrape me off the dirt.

So, I took her for a walk and led her around, staying behind the barn as much as possible so that my neighbor couldn't see us. He finally lost interest and went in his house, so I led Gabbrielle through the gate of the round pen, and Bombay -- ever the perfect gentleman -- closed the gate behind us. I thanked him and latched it, and before I could have any second thoughts, I was in the saddle.

By now a wind was blowing in, announcing Tuesday's storm. This was my last chance to get some training in under saddle. Gabbrielle held still for the mount and waited for her cue to move forward. She did move forward without taking any steps back and I was ecstatic. That's really an exciting development in her training.

However, once we got moving, I was really disappointed in her steering. I'd be turning her to the left and she'd be turning to the right and vice versa. I had only spent two years ground driving this horse, so that the steering aspect would translate to the saddle. I had to lower my expectations and just be happy that she was now moving forward when I clucked my tongue and squeezed my legs and stopping when I sat back and said whoa. I didn't have to pull on the reins anymore to get a stop out of her like the day before.

Then we started having problems with the dreaded step stool again. She knows I use it to get on, so she thinks she has to stay near it so that I can get off. Not true. I never dismount onto a stool. I always dismount onto the ground, but she doesn't have enough experience under saddle yet to know that. I hate it when she straddles the stool, because a step in any direction will result in her knocking it over and possibly getting her feet tangled in the metal parts. It's a fold-up step stool. I really should get myself a solid mounting block.

So, I had to work on pushing her to the outside of the round pen with my inside leg, and holding the outside rein out to the side to open the door. As soon as she moved over to the rail, I sat deep and she halted, and got to rest. I thought I hadn't been working with her very long, but it turned out an hour and a half had passed. You should really only ride a green horse for 20 or 30-minutes at a time.

What made me dismount was the lunch hour. Around noon every day these UPS and FedEx trucks come barreling up our dirt road making a racket and totally ignoring my 10 MPH signs. I saw the FedEx truck stop at a house down the highway, and I know that one of my neighbors gets deliveries every day, so I dismounted before the truck could startle my horses.

I'm just happy that I was able to ride Gabbrielle with no major incidents, because you know that if she chose that day to buck me off, my husband would probably never let me ride alone at home again. Overall, Gabbrielle is a pretty sweet mare. I don't think she would intentionally hurt me, but she is emotional and not shy about expressing her needs. Her speed is also a bit gut-wrenching. She'll make a fantastic endurance horse some day. That's the sport she was bred for. But right now I've just got to get a routine going with her and keep the lines of communication open in both directions.

Lostine Rules the Ranch

Despite all her efforts to avoid being ridden, I caught and saddled Lostine this weekend for a workout. She was pretty hyper, because she was still worried that I was going to load her into the trailer. In fact, as soon as I untied her and started to lead her through the gate into the paddock, she went in the opposite direction and headed for the back of the trailer. Once I've caught her, she's really good about getting into the trailer, but I know she hates leaving the property.

Anyway, I didn't want to bore her with the round pen, so I rode her around the paddock. We trotted all over the place without any spooks, because she is now officially used to the latest pile of garbage that my neighbors have shoved up against my fence. It's so nice to be able to ride my horses anywhere on my property without being teleported sideways.

I had left the gate to the round pen open, and Gabbrielle was trying to take my step stool apart with her teeth. So, I rode Lostine into the round pen and said, "Everybody out! Everybody out!" while herding both Gabbrielle and Bombay out of there. Then Lostine helped me close and lock the gate so that they couldn't get back in. I love herding the other horses around when I ride Lostine. She definitely rules the ranch.

Lostine was showing signs of tiring. All the horses are out of shape and need gradual conditioning before I ride them too hard. I was also feeling tired after my hike and riding Gabbrielle, so I stopped to rest and to let Lostine rest.

That's when the cutest thing in the world happened.

Gabbrielle walked up to us and laid her head in my lap while I was sitting in the saddle on Lostine. I stroked her face, forelock and mane. She let me play with her ears, even though she's been sensitive about having people touch her ears after having the tip of one cut off. I rubbed her all over her neck and back with my riding crop, and Lostine stood patiently while Gabbrielle inspected the tack with her muzzle.

Then my neighbors had to ruin the precious moment by driving up the street and onto their lot. I tried my best to completely tune them out and pretend like they weren't there, and I continued on with our love fest. I heard the engine turn off, but not the noise of a car door opening or closing, so I knew they were just sitting in their car having one of their stare-a-thons.

About five minutes later I heard a door open and close and saw the woman heading for her front door. I thought they were leaving, but then several minutes after that I realized that I never heard the front door close, so I looked up and saw the woman standing on her front porch staring at me and the man sitting in the driver's seat of the car with his legs hanging out the open door staring at me. I didn't feel like putting on a show for them, so I rode Lostine behind the barn where they couldn't see me, and the other two horses followed. Only then did I hear all the doors close.

We all just kind of hung out back there for a while as I enjoyed the view of the mountains and watched the cars drive by. I half expected the woman to walk her dog behind my barn to see what I was doing back there. She didn't show up then, but she did come out to do that when I pulled my wheelbarrow out to clean stalls. As soon as she walked behind the barn, I pulled my wheelbarrow around behind it to clean up some manure instead of going into the stalls where she can spy on me through the slats of wood. She quickly pulled her dog along and moved further down the road, pretending like she was taking a walk. At least I know it's easy to flush her out of her hiding spot now. She's figured out where to stand to be just out of range of my camera. I may have to get a second one to get fuller coverage.

I fed all the horses some bran mash. Lostine is such a slob. She gets it all over her muzzle, drips it all over the ground, and gets it all over her body when she bites her itches while eating.

Gabbrielle's First Ride of 2010

Between the weather and the neighbors, I thought it would never happen, but I finally got to restart Gabbrielle under saddle after many false starts last year thwarted by a series of injuries that put her on the bench for the season. The neighbors with the loud machinery finally shut it down and restored peace to the neighborhood on Sunday afternoon.

I found that she's developing a pissy attitude about having her cinch tightened, so I had to take that step extra slow. I even went so far as to hand her a peppermint to distract her each time I tightened it.

I lunged her in a saddle that had a horn bag attached, because I wanted her to get used to the rustling noise and the feeling of things shaking around in a bag on her back. She handled it really well. However, when I moved her up to the lope, the bag came untied on one side and started flying up into the air, so I stopped her to remove it.

I had asked my husband to come out to remove the step stool from the round pen once I mounted, because Gabbrielle thinks she has to stay by it so I can get off. When I mounted, Gabbrielle was a bit wiggy, so I asked my husband to just lead us around for a little bit.

She was being stubborn at first, refusing to move forward. Then she resorted to trying to bite my husband as he led her. I corrected her for that in my big bad no-no voice and she didn't try it again. Once I felt she was responding to walk and stop on the lead rope, I had my husband detach the lead rope and take the step stool out of the round pen.

At first she had no steering, but caught on to my leg and rein cues pretty quick. I had to break her of the habit of backing up when I squeezed my legs. I had inadvertently taught her to back up when I squeezed my legs, because I wanted to reward her for any movement at all by releasing my legs when I first started training her. Unfortunately, her first movements were always backwards, so I released my squeeze to say, "Good, you moved."

However, she was moving in the wrong direction, so I knew I had to fix that by continuing to squeeze until she moved forward. It worked. After each stop, she'd take less and less steps backwards before moving forwards.

I was also surprised to learn that she didn't understand whoa from the saddle. She is so good about stopping immediately when I say whoa from the ground. The word isn't any different from the saddle, but for some reason she ignored me when I said it from the saddle. I tried sitting back while saying whoa, but she still wouldn't stop, so I had to resort to tugging on the reins until she stopped, and then releasing them.

We just practiced stop and go forward, stop and go forward over and over. At one point I was squeezing her forward and she did a pirouette. I was a little scared and feeling off balance, but I knew I had to keep squeezing until I got the correct response, which is to move forward. We spun in a tight circle a couple of times and then she moved out and we both relaxed.

She only had one big spook, and that was my fault. When the horses spook, I react by sucking in a breath really fast and audibly. Of course, I'm spooking at their spook, not at anything outside of us, but it reinforces the horses' belief that something scary is going on. Unfortunately, I also suck in my breath really fast and audibly when I am about to voice my excitement about something. Gabbrielle had just done something really good and I inhaled to praise her. She bolted and nearly bowled my husband over. She didn't get far, but it is a bit intimidating that this horse can go from 0 to 60 in one second. The G-forces are incredible, so I have to be conscious of squeezing with my thighs and knees to hang on at all times.

Here she is shaking it off after our ride.

I thanked her for not doing this while I was on her back this time. In the picture below you can see that she managed to shake her saddle sideways, because one stirrup is hanging a lot lower than the other. She's in a stage of growth in which her back is very round, so it doesn't hold a saddle well. I also didn't want to tighten the cinch too much, because that would only add to her anxiety.

I just wish I could get more than a couple of days off from work, so that I can keep up her training on a daily basis instead of just on the weekends.

Job's Peak Hike

Saturday was the first day of my four-day vacation from work. I've got to take a couple of days off every now and then to maintain my sanity. In vacations past, I had great expectations to train Gabbrielle under saddle in my round pen, and then my neighbors started some noisy construction project that totally thwarted my plans. So, I was glad that I spent most of Saturday out on the trails riding Bombay, because when we got home, we got home to quite a racket. My next door neighbors had a construction crew over there and they were installing new windows on their house.

If my neighbors knew I was taking a vacation to work with my horses, I'd swear that they do this on purpose just to piss me off. But I know the reality is that they have probably been waiting for a sunny weekend to do this construction project just like I've been waiting for a sunny weekend to train my horses.

On Sunday, my son wanted to go on another hike/photography expedition with me. I wanted to check out some meadows in Hope Valley, California where my farrier said he likes to ride. I brought my camera with high hopes of being able to photograph some flowers, but it's way too early for that. The meadows were still covered in snow.

We stopped at Horsethief Canyon and considered hiking the trail, but I got a bad feeling about it. No other hikers were around, the mountain was very steep, it was cold because we were just below the snow pack level, and I knew there were mountain lions and bears coming out of hibernation probably visiting all the tributaries the run alongside the trail.

So, we opted to hike the well-traveled Job's Peak Ranch Trail closer to home. We live down there in that valley...

And over there in the tree line is where I rode Bombay the day before...

This was the start of the hike...





My son started getting bored, which usually leads to him getting silly and trying to ruin my photos...

But, as usual, he made them better.



Unfortunately, this isn't an equitation trail. It's got stairs...


I always know it's time to go home when he starts climbing trees...



Next time I'm wearing tennis shoes instead of hiking boots. My right boot nearly rubbed all the skin off the top of my second toe. I was amazed at the number of people over the age of 40 who passed us at a jog. I didn't even make it all the way to the top of the trail at a walk thanks to my boots, and these men and women passed me in both directions jogging. Wow.

I'm happy to know that when the noise gets too loud in my neighborhood, there are places I can go with my horses and dogs to experience some peace and quiet together. We drove around the corner to our home and the first thing I saw was the neighbors across the street unloading some large piece of machinery off a truck. I can hear it grinding away through the windows of my house right now. I think I'll load the horses up in the trailer and go somewhere more quiet this afternoon.