On Lessons and Laziness

Saturday: Cadence and I had an awesome lesson.  Started to work on transitions again, and did a wee tiny bit of collection in the canter to improve her anter-trot transitions.  Her trot (and canter for that matter) have remained light and relatively relaxed, and she's been going beautifully & sans clammer 100% of the time.  Her trot-stretches still suck, but she's nice and supple (and sensitive... no grabbing/laying/ignoring going on) for her walk stretches.

Sunday: The Mare got the day off.  I came out to walk her & check her back, & all was well.  We went for an in hand hack through the corn field, and had a total spaz attack because one of the boarder's trucks was parked in a different spot.  A sure sign of the apocalypse...

Monday: Since all was well with Cadence's back, we went ahead with out plan to start jumping again.  Unfortunately, we could NOT have picked a worse day to start jumping again.  The wind was blowing at a gusty 50 miles/hour, which was causing the three big doors on the arena to bang and creak.  They had been opened because we'd been having such nice weather, but that meant they were only loosely chained shut... and thus the banging and creaking ensued.  To make matters worse, a few pieces of aluminum siding on the doors had started to come loose, & with the bad weather the BO was only able to do a temporary fix.  Thus, the noise built.  So with all that going on, I tacked Cadence up complete with a standing martingale (just to be on the safe side), and a fly veil to (in theory) muffle the noise.  I lunged Cadence briefly, and as she appeard calm, I hopped on.  Let the games begin!  Actually, the games never really started.  It was as if I'd forgotten to light the torch, or had thrown a bucket of ice cold water on top of it.  Banging doors and creaking metal could have been butterflies and daisies.  Actualy, the latter would probably have been scarier.  Either way, Cadence was so calm she didn't even bother lifting her feet over the small cross rail I'd set up to warm up over.  She went so far as to seem insulted by its insignificant size.  After a few more tries (I had to make sure that her lackadaisical jump wasn't an anomaly) I relented and set up a tiny 2' vertical.  She hopped merrily over this, and was so chill with it we even tried it in the canter.  That was a little more... exciting, and in typical Cadence fashion she grabbed the bit and dragged me to the fence.  We worked a little on settling that, and called it quits.  Overall, I couldn't have been happier with our ride!