Gentleman's Agreement

I've noticed the past month or so that suddenly the geldings' side of the barn has gotten tidier. Keil Bay has always been, at best, a slob in his stall. He was like that when he was stalled for portions of the day/night, and he has remained that way with back doors perpetually open to the great wild yonder.

To be fair, he's a big horse and if he turns in the stall he tends to stir up any manure, hay, whatever is lying in there, into one big swirl. Though if he would choose to drop the manure along the stall wall this swirl would be much less likely to happen.

Cody is the neatest of the geldings. He has selective areas for urine and manure and he doesn't get hay all over the place. His water bucket stays clean too. No hay dunking for him.

The pony is neater than Keil Bay, but to be fair, he IS smaller and so it's easier for him to move around without stirring things up. He tends to clean up every strand of hay and that too makes his stall a bit nicer.

We could speculate that the manner in which these guys keep their stalls is directly related to how they have been kept in their lives.

Keil Bay has always had people coming in and mucking up after him a number of times a day. To put it another way, he is extremely accustomed to maid service.

Cody was young when he came to us, but based on what I saw when we bought him, I suspect he spent much of his young life in a stall, with very specified turn-outs. If one stays in a stall more hours than not, keeping it tidy is a sort of self-protective mechanism.

The pony lived out for the most part. Being in a stall at all was relatively new to him, and he seems half-annoyed and half-intrigued with the notion of being in a "room." He definitely does NOT understand the concept of "room of one's own" and is constantly barging in and out of Keil Bay's room and Cody's room, which as you've read before, creates a problem sometimes.

I've noted before that the three of them tend to play musical stalls when the back doors are open. They often sneak out of their own stall and drop manure in each other's spaces.

But recently something different has been happening. Out of the blue, they seem to have come to a gentleman's agreement. Manure goes outside the stalls, underneath the shelter, to the right. Urine goes outside the stalls, underneath the shelter to the left.

Sometimes the agreement shifts. Today the manure went outside the stalls to the right, but urine went in the end stall along the back wall. As it happens, that stall is the pony's and it had more/deeper pine bedding than the other two.

I wonder what Cody and the pony had to do to get Keil Bay to concede to this agreement?

Did the pony agree to stay out of Keil's stall if Keil would knock off the slob behavior? Did Cody mediate and use his low-man-in-the-herd status to sneakily get the two squabblers to come to a truce?

Did Keil suddenly decide to have a slightly-past-midlife crisis and change his ways?

I have no idea, but I can tell you - maid service has gotten easier!

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learning to leave well enough alone

I was absolutely intent on getting back in the arena with Keil Bay today, and instead of going out to the barn and riding this morning, which is what we'd been doing, I ended up getting caught up in my own silly desire to make everything better.

First, I took my iPad to the barn and after feeding them breakfast I sat with my tea by the arena and checked out the new dressage test app I bought. I hadn't really looked at the new tests and as I was reviewing them I decided that Intro A, B, and C would be really good ways to continue getting both of us back in shape. This is an example of me going over the top with goals - instead of picking one of them and learning it, I figured I could do ALL THREE. Today.

Fine. At that point, I was already in over my head as far as getting things done before actually riding, but it wasn't obvious to me yet. If I was going to be doing the tests, I wanted to put the dressage markers back out in the arena.

Again, fine. Except then I decided before I put the markers in place I would get the leaves up underneath the two oak trees at H and F. There were 4 wheelbarrow loads of leaves so that took a little while.

Then I started obsessing over Keil's wither adjustment. What if my newfound springing into the saddle had put it out of whack to begin with? My practical, sensible daughter said she doubted that was the case, and she's probably right, since I was springing into the saddle from the equivalent of a 3-step mounting block. But in my obsessing I decided to raise the mounting block another entire step, which required moving some cement blocks from the barnyard to the far end of the arena.

About the time I finished all of this I realized I was getting a sore throat. I've held off the mild flu bug everyone else in my family has, but it hit sometime mid-day. But I really really wanted to ride.

This evening I went out and got Keil Bay ready. I realized I was going to have to abandon tests B and C and just ride A. I jotted down the test on a piece of paper so I could check it if needed in the saddle.

Off we went to the mounting block. It was so high I was almost unable to climb up onto it. However, it worked.  The mounting block is so high now there is no hesitation on my part at all - I couldn't wait to get off that block and into the saddle! My sore throat went away and the arena looked nice. The sun was out of the arena for the most part and there were no bugs. Salina and the donkeys came from the front field to the back field to graze alongside the arena and keep us company.

We did a long warm-up and then our usual transition into trotting. Keil went from 0 to 60 in terms of alertness and responsiveness about halfway into the ride, which I wasn't expecting. Instead of enjoying his energy and his movement, I got very caught up in that stupid dressage test and wanting to be able to do it - well, not perfectly, but - better than respectably.

The crazy thing is that I switched gears suddenly.  He revved up energy-wise and I took that right into the test. We were doing our usual routine and then I turned down center line. Keil knows the dressage tests, or at least he did know them until they changed them - so he was trying to do what he thought I was asking him to do, but it wasn't right. Because I was going by my piece of paper.

In hindsight I should have just done the old test at least one time. That would have been a compromise on my part. But.

I got a little agitated. Partly it was me not feeling well, but ignoring that, and part of it was wanting to do a good test. We did it once passably, but there was not much relaxation going on on MY part. Keil was confused at first, then he got annoyed, then he went into high gear.

We went into a second try and about halfway through I realized how ridiculous I was being. We've had a number of days off, a big chiro adjustment for Keil, NO chiro adjustment for me, and I know I need one (it's scheduled, my last one had to be canceled so I'm about 5 weeks now without one), and today I probably had a low grade fever by the time I got in the saddle.

Thankfully I just stopped riding the test, put my cheat sheet away, and finished the ride we should have had from the beginning - a low-key, let's get back to work but from a place of relaxation, this is for FUN kinda ride.

Instead what we got was like using the big Kitchen Aid mixer and accidentally turning it on high without locking it down. Neither of us were quite ready for the energy today but it's good to know it's there when we ARE ready.

Of course, even though I was pushing both of us to do something on a piece of paper, which is actually less than what we have been doing on our own in terms of complexity and actual work, I got agitated in the process and made it much harder. Still, when we finished and I got off, Keil Bay googled his eyes at me, licked and chewed, rubbed his head on my shoulder, and when I put both hands in between the side pieces of his bridle he wiggled his head up and down giving himself a nice scratch.

I thanked him for putting up with my nonsense. He was pretty gracious about it.

And then he sauntered into the barn aisle and stood at the feed room door, waiting patiently for his snack while I untacked him.

After he finished and went out with the herd,  I should have come inside and taken a hot bath. But my crazy obsessive mood today kicked back in and I cleaned my boots, his bridle, and the saddle before coming in! And now my sore throat is back and I have the whole nasal thing kicking in as well.

Possibly this is what I get for going 90 miles an hour into October. When I don't slow myself down, my body does it for me. :)

Singing Hanoverians, part three, and fall is HERE!

Here's the third segment of the Singing Hanoverians.

Otherwise, we are all enjoying a huge dip in temperatures, but would be enjoying it more if it were not accompanied by RAIN. Oh, well.

The chiropractor was here today and Keil Bay had a weird sort of hip rotation but the main out of whackness was in his lower wither - he absolutely wanted it adjusted but it was sore, so he would bob his head (do it! do it!) and then step away when she did. After a couple of tries, he stopped and let her really fix it, and I let him stay in the barnyard and near side of the barn alone all morning while the rest of the herd went out. Around here, staying"in" like that is actually a treat, so he was happy as could be.

He's moving with his panther swing again and we'll see how the next ride goes in a couple of days.

Salina got her adjustment as well - she had a minor hip rotation, a couple of neck things, one lumbar thing, but all were minor and she is in fine form today - she has dapples all over her coat, which is nice and fluffed with the chilly weather, and she was really perky and moving fast. The donkeys had themselves a rodeo, and in general, the entire herd was really up and silly.

It's nice to see some frisk after the long hot summer of 2012!

We have hoof trims tomorrow and Thursday is our busy day, so by week's end we should be back to riding around here. I'm looking forward to it.

the Singing Hanoverians, part two

We've had a short warm spell here this week, and yesterday my time got used up as I gave Salina a nice shampoo bath in advance of the cold front that is moving in tomorrow. It was warm enough that I opted not to ride, and I think Keil Bay was relieved that we were taking the day off.

There are very tiny gnats plaguing all of us, but hopefully the cooler temps rolling in will take care of them.

Meanwhile, I'm uploading part two of the Singing Hanoverians. In this one you get a taste of what they sound like, and also a sense of how patient they are with their Very Slow Woman who often gets caught up in the minutiae of preparing the tubs and loses sight of the end result: breakfast for hungry horses and donkeys!

Here you go, part the second.