In which this is another post about horses, horses, and more horses

Here in the Swampland, we're a little bit confused by blue sky weather, but we know EXACTLY what to do when the sun comes out:

That's a (well-behaved) stallion off the port bow
...and Fiddle doesn't even care.

go riding, of course.

Photobomb!

Friday afternoon, Duana and I took a lesson.

In the outdoor arena.

Duana and Hana are making amazing progress together

In the sunshine.

It doesn't happen all the time, but increasingly often
riding the Dragon feels like dancing

O.   M.   G.

I had to take a break after 20 minutes and put on more sunscreen.  

Then it was Becky's turn for a quick lesson.  It's been two days, and I'll bet money that Becky is still feeling the sore muscles from Dory's warm-up routine.

This one builds core and inner thigh muscles.

But riding was only part of the excuse reason for Becky's visit:  she wanted to see some Standardbreds!  I'm sure she plans to blog about the trip in detail, so I'll only post a few teaser pics here.

Heart to Beat.  If she ever makes an endurance horse,
she needs to register with AERC as "The Roller Derby Queen"

We headed north, to the boarding stable in Langely BC that houses Greener Pastures Standardbred Adoption Agency.

We saw lots of standies, and each of them tried to convince us that she (or in the case of Chester, "he") was the most charming.

Yes, Chester is a red standardbred!

But the clear winner of the "charm" tiara is a filly called Red Star Vamp.

Alina takes seriously her responsibility to make standardbreds adoptable!

Vamp is only 2 years old (3 year birthday next weekend), so she's technically younger than Becky's ideal horse.  However, she seems to come from the same line of standies as Sky's mare Cricket, who convinced everyone that she was an adult horse at age 3!

I really hope Becky puts the video of Vamp on her blog.  If she doesn't, I'll post it here in a few days--nice moving horse!

"Take a picture of me looking too big beside this horse."
Huh?  Looks fine to me!

And she's a sweet one, too.

Becky and Vamp are both pretty sweet!

Too much cuteness and sweetness?  The Dragon has a cure for that.

I took her out for a final spin before I pack up all our gear for the Mt Adams Endurance Ride next weekend.

All business, no cuteness.
At least, not where anybody will see it.

Undeterred by the return of the rain, the Dragon and I had a great quick ride this afternoon: almost 9 miles in about 90 minutes.  Not bad at all.

But of course, Fee is proudest of her Eating Skillz.




All on a loose rein, obviously--my hands were on the camera!

It's.  Just.  All.  Good.

In which we discuss the education of horses: who teaches whom?

 Today's ride was more about learning than about mileage and conditioning.

Blue skies, good friends, and great horses.  

Duana and Hana have been learning all kinds of skills.

Hana waits patiently, but is no help if Du needs extra TP

The main skill, of course, is getting the rider to understand how to present a situation to the horse so that the horse will respond properly.  It sounds so easy.

Training while trail riding:  Patty and Du discuss
the mechanics and uses of the half-halt

Duana has three excellent mentors:  Patty, of course, has trained a lot of horses, and she's also helped a lot of riders.

Today Flower ate and drank along the trail...and offered to roll in the puddle, too!
Uh, thanks.  But no.

Du has been taking a lot of lessons with Dory, and that's helping a bunch.  Duana's skills in the saddle have increased hugely--and so has her confidence.

Six months ago, Du would've been much too nervous to mess around
with her phone while holding onto Hana's lead.
Now, it's no big deal.

Hana herself is the final member of the mentoring team. Hana has plenty of experience doing the more complicated stuff that Du wants to do...but she doesn't just give stuff away.  You have to know how to present situations to Hana, or she'll just shake her mane and pretend she didn't hear you.

Du is learning...a lot!  It's wonderful to watch her and Hana together.

The Usual Suspects on the trail.

People aren't the only "learners" in the group, of course.  We all constantly work to improve things with our horses.

Flower has gained all kinds of skills since Patty bought her.

Posing for the camera:  it's a skill!

Today she faced a large log over the trail. Flower has never seen a log over the trail before, but Patty walked her up to it, let her look at it, and then told her to move forward and over it...and over the log went Flower, like a not-very-green-horse-at-all!

Of course, I will never be finished with Fiddle's training.  She's physically so talented,  but was emotionally stunted by hormonal malfunctions most of her life thus far.  Now that the hormones are out of the picture, however...

Ariana on the left, Fiddle on the right
They can trot side-by-side now, without fear of Dragon-fire

...she is able to be much more "socially appropriate" with other horses as well as with people.

Sirie and Ariana.  There's a reason we used Ariana for so many
Endurance 101 photos--it's impossible to take an ugly picture of her!

Today, for the first time, Fiddle and I played the "Pass-me/Pass-you" game with Sirie and Ariana.

This is the exercise where horse/rider teams ride in pairs, and then one horse moves ahead for a few yards then slows down to allow the other horse to pass by and lead for a few yards before slowing down to be passed.

When doing this exercise with a horse like Fiddle--a confirmed kicker who is the equine equivalent of a fear-biter--I must be extremely diligent and not shy about yanking her off into the bushes if she gives me any hint of fear/aggression.

With the combination of a LOT of practice (it's been six years!) and her new hormone comfort level, Fee was able to stay relaxed through the game for several miles, alongside a horse she doesn't usually hang with closely.

I don't know if I can begin to describe how gratifying that is for me.

  Fiddle's standard reward for good behavior:  "Foooooooood!"

I knew that the spay surgery would help her physically, and I hoped it would help her mentally, but I wasn't prepared for the amount of emotional relief I see in this mare now.  She's still pretty intense, compared to most Standardbreds...but compared to herself at this time last year, she is positively Zen.

Would she have gotten to this point without the surgery?   Probably not.

Would she have gotten to this point without a continual training program aimed at getting her here?

Definitely not.

Did I have to push my own learning curve almost every day to try to figure this out--helped every step of the way by the Usual Suspects?

Yep.

Was it worth the time, the expense, the worry, the effort?

Hell, yeah.

Somebody give me an "Amen!"  Because I think the Dragon has earned one.

In which we get some cheap Cheeps...because how can we say "no" to cheap Cheeps?

This is not Luna's lunchbox.

"Mmmm.  Smells good!"

 We stopped by the feed store on the way home from running errands.  We needed weed killer and dog treats.  We came home with this:

Didn't you know that chicks come in 6-packs?

How could we resist?  They were on sale!

"Hey!  I called window seat.  Push over!"

Chicks normally cost $2-$4.  These chicks are "big" (i.e. a week old and costing the store too much to feed them), so they were on sale for $1 each.

Cheap Cheeps!

It's been a long time since we've had chicks.

Jim and I have been talking about getting some replacement birds this Spring, anyhow.

The Minervas are four years old now (!!!) and we lost some a few months ago to egg-boundedness when some hens who hadn't laid much during winter started producing eggs but were unable to expel them.  Egg-binding isn't easy to treat, and we euthed a hen whenever one was obviously not going to recover.

(No, we didn't eat them.  We gave each a "flying burial" into Sherman's Marsh at the bottom of the property, where I'm sure something ate them, but it wasn't us)

The survivors (we still have 5 Minerva Louises, including Twelve) are the hens who kept laying through the winter, and they are each still producing 4-5 eggs per week.  Four of them live in a chicken tractor--a portable pen that we push around the yard so they are constantly on fresh grass and can eat up greens and bugs and worms and stuff.  Chicken Twelve runs around free, outwitting the elements and the predators because she is just too weird to die.

Still, they are clearly perimenopausal, and it's time to start raising up their replacements.

Meet Eleanor Sackville-Baggins.
All the Cheeps have the same name, because
we can't tell them apart.

Since we only have one teen at home now, and she and her appetite will be off to college soon enough, we decided to get a smaller batch this time.

Six Rhode Island Red pullets

We hope they are pullets.  Roosters will be euthed and eaten, I have no need nor patience for roosters!

A Rubbermaid box will house them for the first week or two.

The box is inside the henhouse, which is inside the fenced garden,
which is inside the fenced yard.  It's as safe as we can make it.

When they outgrow the box, they will live in the Winter Palace for another month or two.

The Winter Palace is spacious, but protected from hawks and weasels

When they get to "full chicken size" we'll move them into the Tiny White Van, and then they can join the rest of the flock back in the Winter Palace when it's, you know, winter again.

But we're not thinking about that season today.

Blue sky over the Winter Palace

Because today is sunny and warm.

And tomorrow:  we ride!

In which photos with blue sky and ears means that my life is very good

Suddenly, it's Spring in the Swamplands.

Pre-ride photo

The skies are increasingly blue, and the temperatures are finally above 50 degrees during the daytime.

The Usual Suspects hit the trails again

It's still cold at night, of course, and we have heavy frost on the ground most mornings, so I have to wait another week to plant the beans and tomatoes--those don't go in the ground until Mother's Day at the earliest, even though the forecast says we may hit !! 80 !! degrees !! this weekend.  

It's pretty obvious how I entertain myself while waiting for the approved planting dates.

Ears!  Sky!

Patty is getting Flower ready for their first long-distance event:  the 25-mile Limited Distance ride at Mt Adams.  She's pretty excited--Patty, I mean.  Flower isn't a tremendously excitable mare...which is a virtue as far as I'm concerned!

Patty and Flower

Sirie and Ariana will be going along on the LD as the "anchors."

Sirie and Ariana

Looks like Monica and Danny will be doing the same distance, as well as Duana and Hana, which makes a nice mix of "green" with "experience."

Post-ride photo

I wasn't sure that Fee and I were going to get enough "trail time" after Home on the Range to prepare for Mt Adams.  Luckily, the weather has cooperated since I returned from Texas, so we're going to enter the 50-miler.

Ready for a challenge

Dory and Spot did well on the 75-miler at HOTR, so they're signed up for the 100.

Mt Adams is the ride where I did my first-and-so-far-only 100 back in 2007, with the Toad.  It took us almost the full allotment of time, but we finished, and it is truly a beautiful ride.  Someday I hope to do it again--with Fiddle!  But not this year.

Fee is not only fit for a 50, she's also also showing advanced signs of the improvements we've seen since her spay surgery almost exactly 1 year ago:

"Give us a snuggle?"

Patty would never have wanted to hug the Dragon last Spring.

I've worked for years getting Fee to accept human touch, but until about 6 months ago, she never really enjoyed it.  Fixing her wonky hormones made a huge difference to this mare--and to everyone else around her!

I've been doing a lot of solo riding as well.

Clear blue skies, and a view of Puget Sound from the top of the Monument hill

Fee and I really love getting out for a few hours, away from everybody and everything.

Camera flare is always so dramatic.  

Biggify the picture and you might be able to spy Mt Rainier
floating on the horizon above Fee's ears

And of course, the Dragon especially enjoys what happens when we get home:

"Foooooooooooood!"

 Do you know this part?  About it being good?  Because it really, really is good.

In which Texas is home to a bunch of very friendly equine folks!

I managed to find horses in the middle of downtown Ft. Worth (okay, it was actually in the historical "Stockyards" district, but still well-within city limits) which was good.

You gotta cookie in that hat, lady?  I like cookies!

The livery in the Stockyards houses all the animals used in various parades and other tourist-y activities.  We even met the bulls that get saddled up so folks can have their photos taken while sitting on a realio trulio bull, while assisted by a wrangler (high school kid) and surrounded by dance hall girls (colllege kids).  These bulls are born and raised in the Stockyards, and are exceedingly tame.  They live mostly indoors, which is kind of sad...on the other hand, one of the  bulls we met is 17+ years old and still "working" (i.e. standing around smiling for the camera) one day each week.  So it's not a terrible life.

We also saw the traditional Way-Out-West pack animal

You no gotta cookie, I gives you a kiss anyhow!

Wait.  A camel?

Apparently, "Truffles" is part of the petting zoo, as is the camera-shy "reindeer" (on this continent, they are technically called caribou, just so you know).

Yes, Fort Worth had a bunch of old secrets, some of them out-in-the-open for the average tourist, and some of the quite well hidden.

Our tour leader is a librarian from Fort Worth Public Library.
He showed the group how to find a geocache.

I took the early-morning historical walking tour, and not only located several geocaches in the blocks surrounding the Ft Worth Convention Center, I also learned a lot about the area.  Coolio.

But, readers of this blog aren't necessarily here for the historical or literary content.  You're really here for the horse stuff, right?

Well, I gotta tell ya that the best horsey part of the trip came about because of this nice lady:

Michelle and Encore

Michelle Morgan is the heart and soul of Mandolynn Hill Farm, outside of Aubrey, Texas.  When I wrote in a horse-spit-deficit panic to my friend Merri Melde, pleading for the contact info for anyone, anyone at all  in the area who could provide my missing element, she suggested that I contact Michelle.

One of the stallions.  This guy is a flirt with everyone, even the guinea hens and me.

Merri stayed at Mandolynn in 2012, and took some amazing photos while she was there.  The pictures are linked from her blog post HERE.  Have a drool rag ready.  These are "eye-candy horses" like you can't believe.

The babies were happy to provide horse spit.

"Come on out," Michelle wrote to me.  "I'm leaving for the Bluebonnet ride on Saturday morning, but you can stay in the guest house and hang out with the horses as much as you like!"

So I did!

I'm sure Merri or Monica  could have taken thousands of gorgeous photos,
given the quality of the models just standing around waiting for their turn
in front of the lens.  I lack the talent and the hardware to do them justice...
all that "pretty" barely fits in my little camera!

Michelle breeds Arabs for flat-track racing, but not every horse on the place has a spot reserved in the flat-track winner's circles.  The culls from her racing program often end up doing endurance...and doing it very well, too!

For Sale, just in case you know somebody who needs an awesome horse?

Michelle doesn't compete in long-distance rides.  She does the occasional limited distance endurance event so she can spend the weekend with friends and her horse.

However, I did leave a copy of Endurance 101 with her.  Perhaps we'll see her out on the 50 mile trails in future years?

This mama ended up with three "duckling" foals
while the other mamas hung out in the shade and napped.

She certainly breeds the right kind of horse for the sport!

Born prematurely, this little one is still trying to figure out how knees work

Y'all know that I'm more of a Team Sensible gal, and not-so-enamored of Arabians.  But I won't deny that the Arabs totally corner the market on good looks...and charm.

And, let's just say that if any of these fellows accidentally showed up at my barn, I wouldn't throw them out again!

We would fit in the overhead compartment, right?  Take us home, lady!

I admit that I am easily charmed, but these Texan people and critters went out of their way to be kind to this visiting Swamplander.  Why, I even made friends with the funny, bratty bird!

"Hi, Honey!"

...and then, I retired to the comfortable porch of the guest house to write for a few hours.

I wrote a bunch of chapters on the new book while relaxing and watching horses.
Happy sigh.

As for life?  Well.  It's good.