Jen's What's happened since Ride and Tie

We just finished the last lesson of the year, now it’s time to winterize and move the horses back to Colo. I hate the thought, but let’s face it, it really is that time of year.

Here’s a little of what has happened since the Ride & Tie: unpacking from Special Olympics, moving horses, meeting the new crew at Stagecoach, a new Morgan gelding (Alex), new litter of seven kittens, Kris, Helen, Dani and I went to the World Equestrian Games, Linda covering classes for us while we were at WEG, the best group of volunteers that we’ve had, several new riders, and an arena that has now been treated with a dust control product (thanks Stagecoach!!!).

Kris just returned tonight from a trip to Brazil, where she was able to visit friends and also gave a presentation (including a lesson demo) on therapeutic riding—hopefully we’ll hear more about that later! What she didn’t realize was that she was going to be on TV. It sounds like she’s now inspired to tackle the Jungle fence now that she has seen the real jungle. So if anyone wants to learn the fine art of fence building/repair, let us know! Once we have a good hard frost (tonight?) we should be able to see how much the pasture fence was damaged by flooding this summer. Wear hiking boots and blaze orange!

I was able to spend a few days doing chores (yeah!) while she was gone. Coffee, Kyle, Dandy, Miracle, and Peanut were glad to see me. Maybe because I feed them twice as much as normal? Or else because I make a pretty good scratching post? Hagrid and Bindi the Jungle Kitty and her daughter were glad to see me, too. Last time I brought them some treats and they remembered. They were disappointed this time, though. I just refilled their bowls and gave them one treat.

Dani will be going to NARHA’s national convention in Denver in November. We’re looking forward to her report back.

We really want to give everyone a huge thank you for helping out during session 3, especially while we were at WEG! It was the first time that we were all on vacation, and we couldn’t have done it without such an awesome group of volunteers! And a huge thank you for Linda, too—we can’t ride without our NARHA instructors! This was my first non-family, non-Scout vacation, and the first time I’ve been on vacation with horsey friends. It was great!!! Well, the horse part, the sleeping part didn’t go as well as planned. We were wondering where the bluegrass was—apparently they’ve had a drought this summer, so it was more green at home in the fall than in Kentucky.

I survived the city driving after performing a few “cutting horse maneuvers.” We had a behind the scenes tour, played around in the museum, and did a little bit of shopping. I was able to beat Helen and Kris with the video game horse race, retired a winner, and took Helen and Kris’ picture when they were racing each other. Once they got the hang of the controls there was some serious competition between the two of them. Kris was pretty bummed when her camera ran out of batteries during the tour, but I think we got enough pictures for now anyway. I even took a picture of the graffiti on a table in Millionaire Row (where the celebs get to eat and play). Helen was pretty bummed that she didn’t get to see Rachel, one of her favorite racehorses. Turns out she arrived at Churchill as we were sleeping less than a mile away.

And then there was WEG itself. We’ll be talking about it for a long time! Just be cautious if we start showing pictures. I took over 370, Dani has over 1,400. I’m not sure yet of how many Kris and Helen took. We were able to be within 5 feet (or less) of the driving teams—close enough to feel the ground shake or get sprayed by water as they went by. When we were finding the perfect spot to sit at the first obstacle a lady we had just met was bragging about almost being hit by one of the eventing horses the week before. She wasn’t kidding about being close to the action! At the final individual jumping competition we were in the 5^th row right in front of two fences. We learned that “Ho, ho, ho” is a universally understood word in the horse world. We were also able to translate a few words (like “jump” and “hold on”) from several unknown languages. We were a little farther away during the team finals, and it was incredibly dusty with a hint of bus exhaust. We were wondering if we were all going to have to share my inhaler when they started jumping. Who cared about breathing after that.

Vaulting was really cool, their surcingles are a little more massive than our vaulting surcingles. I’ve actually done one or two of their vaulting movements, unfortunately not on purpose and nowhere close to being as graceful…and more often than not they were performed shortly before I’ve “inspected the arena footing, counted the earthworms, parted company with my mount,” etc. Hence my Girl Scout camp nickname of Dusty… At the barn for retired champions we watched Funnycide get his bath, nibble on roses, get lightly scolded, and then decide to play with the sweat scraper and hose instead. Cigar posed for pictures as he totally ignored his caretaker calling him into the barn for breakfast. He finally turned around with an expression that Dani and I know all too well—that here I am, you can come and get me but I’m not going to lower myself to coming to you look. It was great to know that these guys can still be a horse.

We’ll probably tell more later (after all, we have over 1,800 pictures to show…) but for now I’d better wrap up since it’s a work night. We should blog more during the winter, after all, we tend to have a little less to do when we’re knee deep in snow. There. I finally said the “s” word. If anyone gets bored during the winter, let us know. We do have a ton of indoor and fair weather activities that can be done. And if nothing else we can always get together and talk a few hours. Like I said, we have a few pictures…