And here's a picture of the little psycho!

New mare has some interesting issues.  I spent probably half an hour brushing burrs out of her mane and tail and put her in the stall while I gave a riding lesson.  When I came back I pulled her out of the stall and put her back into the crossties and resumed grooming her.  Another five minutes later she has a sudden meltdown and rears up and jerks back breaking one side of my crossties.  I’m amazed I didn’t get kicked by her explosion since I was brushing a front leg at the time of the episode.  I have no idea what sparked her sudden freak-out but needless to say I’m not happy about it.  Where in the world did that come from?!  Well, looks like this mare is going to need a lot more work than I thought!  You’d think a horse who received “professional training” years ago wouldn’t be such a psycho.  That trainer needs fired….

Well  I went and picked up a new horse for training today. She’s a cute little 15hh Quarter mare. Her name is "Kisses" so I'm going to make her show name "Kiss my Sass." She's a total mess; she’s covered in burrs and dirt. It’ll take a while to get her all cleaned up! She’s been trained in showmanship and I’m going to put her into western pleasure style riding. She needs a lot of work! She doesn’t load AT ALL (she was a total monster!) so that is going to have to change! I’m hoping this mare will come around and be a nice project for me, though. Fingers crossed.

Costume freestyle reining class at the fair this year. Took first!

GORGEOUS sunset over the barn tonight as I rode my hunter mare!

                                                     Bonfire night with my boyfriend. :)

                                          It was a beautiful day at Muskingum University!

I worked with Storm over fences yesterday.  Set up some more frightening fences for him to work on his bravery and he did great.  He didn’t even balk at the corner fence (a barrel with two poles coming off of it sitting on cones), which I thought he’d try to refuse!  He looked at it and sailed right over without a second thought leaving room to spare.

As he got tired, he got lazy and tapped fences and rushed fences, etc.  So I know now what I need to work on.  I need to take a break from jumping and work on flatwork to get him to use himself better!  Maybe then he’ll do much better with being round and consistent.  And finally, I need to work him on getting flying lead changes.  He definitely needs more hind end.        

Trail Ridin'

Had a really nice trail ride with this mare today.