Dressage & Ballet [video]

May the odds be ever in your favor...

Sorry, I'm just geeking out about the new Hunger Games movie. Much better than watching re-runs of Jersey Shore with the roommate haha! Somebody please name their next gutsy eventing mare Katniss! For me? Anyway, if you have not read the books, then shame on you. They're excellent.

AND another book I want to shout out about is The Eighty-Dollar Champion: Snowman, the Horse that Inspired a Nation. It reads very much like Seabiscuit and not like a Saddle Club novel haha! It's a very good book. I smell yet another horsey movie in the future!

Speaking of movies, my new favorites are The Queen (a few years old, but just now saw and loved it) and the newest Jane Eyre movie with Mia Wasikowska. It's very well done and wonderfully romantic, and gave me the same feel as the book. Kudos.

And now... pictures from this morning of Greta and I jumping up to about a foot! She is the BOMB!

This is Stylish: Hang On

Greta August 2011

Couldn't get video of her trotting up and down the rocky gravel road today like it was nothing! Woop-woop rock-cruncher feet!

Beach Polo with RL

"Though the sand hastens the pace of play, it also allows for the ponies to exhibit one of their most spectacular traits: agility. "It's a test of stamina and strength, requiring you to take your strongest horses and rewarding the best riders," says [Jack Kidd, captain of the English squad]. "The smaller pitch makes for a more physical game and a lot more contact."

I had never heard of this before, much less of England having warm beaches to play on! But most of all, imagine that stamina that must take on behalf of the horses! For any of you who have ever played beach volleyball as compared to arena volleyball, you know what I mean. Sand can be a brutal workout. Even on Sandbanks Beach.

Click on the pictures for a link to the article by ESPN writer Morty Ain. Photos by Lee Collier.

This is Stylish: RL "Collis" Slippers

Gotta love my home-skillet-biscuit, Ralphie Baby!

Busy!

In this past week, and definitely into next, I am transitioning quite literally into college life, even though I have not moved in yet myself haha! Poor Greta was being ridden parctically every day of the week this summer with a day off each week, and then she moved and I went job hunting and got a great job with great people (a few horse people, too!) and my favorite brand (yay!) and have only been able to ride her four times haha! She has now been moved into a relatively large paddock that is built on a hillslope and has rocky ground (yes! Her hoofies will love this!) and since there is no roundbale (fed great hay three times a day) then she doesn't have the opportunity to simply sit in a stall for half of the day and then around a roundbale for the other half. She has four other older mares with her, no fighting from the start, and Greta likes to take care of the oldest mare. It's terribly sweet.

When I did ride her, we've been focusing a lot on straightness, and she has improved in that field. Her biggest challenge is 20 meter circles at the canter, as it's a much tighter circle for her and requires a lot more bum-work! There's a big jumping arena next to the dressage arena, and I like to warm Greta up on a loose rein in all three gaits there, and that helps a lot. AND There's about a two mile stretch of rocky road that runs adjacent to the property that we're allowed to ride on, and it's on an incline! Conditioning area FTW. We're going to have a blast!

Thankfully, once school starts I will be closer to both the five-minutes-away job (driving an hour and a half to get there, but I knew it would it be for less than two weeks, so I said I would take it!) and the thirty-minutes-away stable so life will be so much easier after Wednesday!

Ah, being a big girl is going to be interesting! Seeing Greta tomorrow, maybe I will finally get video of us running around wild since I actually charged the camera?

Updates on Greta's New Place

No pictures of our fun times yet, sorry! BUT Greta is settling in quite nicely, and after a very tense walk-only-and-let-me-show-you-around-the-arena ride on Tuesday (she was well behaved, but she was so tense about it the new place that it felt you I was sitting in a canoe or something haha!) we had a lovely ride today. She also got turned out into her new-new digs in a great-for-her-hoofies, oak-covered, two-nice-shelters pasture with four other mares. It was pretty anti-climatic, as Greta just minded her own business and they minded theirs. She will come in if the weather becomes bad, but seeing as we are not predicted to have rain at all this winter and into next year (no bueno!) then that probably will not happen. Ever.

But she seemed pretty happy, and I love the group of riders out there, and the place is just the perfect compliment to our experience at the old barn! Very happy! Will get pictures of us riding or something of that like soon (free jumping anyone?)

This is Stylish: Pony Pullover