Must. Ride. This. Horse.

Wow what a week.  On Friday I made the 9 hour trek to PA to look at houses. It went well and we actually put in an offer on a house.  It is on a smaller lot than I wanted, on only an acre, but the house is amazing and has been cared for exceptionally well.  It will certainly reduce the amount of daily work that I will have and leave more time for things like riding my horse.  We should hear this week, we expect a counter offer so let's see what happens!  Getting real folks, this is getting real.

I came home Monday and couldn't bring myself to do much of anything so last night I went ahead and rode.  I mean, I have a show in a week and a half.  I might as well put it off riding as long as possible, right!  I hadn't ridden since last Wednesday and that was a trail ride so I wasn't expecting a fantastic ride.  Which is good because I didn't get one.  Mia wanted to GO, didn't want to bend to the inside and had zero desire to keep herself balanced.  Ugh mare.  The zipper of my schooling boots won't stop splitting so I grabbed my dressage show boots for the ride.  Well, those don't have spurs on them at the moment and I didn't take the time to put some on so I fought the entire ride with just a whip.  Stop setting yourself up for failure girl!

After some arguments about speed, that we should not plow forward the second I stop pulling on your face and that your shoulder should in fact stay under you on a circle, Mia actually gave some good moments.  Our free walk is coming along quite nicely now that I am requiring her to put and keep her head down.  Or else lol.  Her right canter is much better as well, I was expecting fast giraffe with her head in my lap and amazingly enough she gave a pretty decent canter.  We even did some speed transitions using my seat and she listened!!! I was able to slow her right lead canter down to a slow trot speed for a few strides before letting her go with just my seat, that is progress my friends!

We didn't have a lot of beautiful dressage moments but for not riding dressage in over a week, it was a pretty good ride.  Due to my extremely busy schedule, I am not able to ride again until Friday however I plan on riding every day from then until the show on the 12th.  I even signed up for schooling on the 11th so any jumping issues should be well ironed out before the show.  Hopefully the weather is better than it has been for shows, the first horse trial was miserable with very heavy rain and 40 degrees.  Well, last weekend I was originally supposed to go to another horse trial but ended up going to PA instead.  Do you want to know what happened at that horse show?  It was 40 degrees again and rained so hard that they not only canceled cross country but didn't even finish all of the divisions over stadium.  They scored 3 divisions as dressage only and the rest as combined tests because the footing was SO bad.  AND it was a USEA show which are so much more expensive.  I would have been so upset at the weather and the canceling of the show if I had gone.  Though after seeing the show pictures, I likely would have scratched anyway.  The footing looked awful, just downright awful.  Way worse than the first horse trial and I am not sure I would have risked the injury.

So that is the happenings around here.  Apologies for the blog silence, hopefully things will slow down enough that I can blog.  Unfortunately the few times I have time, I have only my phone and, like many others, I despise blogging on my phone.  Hard to type, hard to edit, hard to format.  It isn't like I am World's Best Writer anyway, doing it on the phone just makes it so much worse.  So here's to updates and more updates!