Beautiful Day!

 I'm glad I did all my 'chores' yesterday, because the sun was shining for the whole entire day today! That's a big deal in winter around these parts. I always get a kick out of seeing how busy everything is on sunny days - my mom works in retail and says even the stores get busy when the weather's nice. Shopping wouldn't be my choice of things to do on a beautiful day, but hey, whatever works.  I have to wonder just where everyone goes when it's dark and rainy - do they really all hide inside all day? I don't notice the gym being overly busy, and I'm usually riding by myself. I very rarely see other hikers as well. Maybe I'm just not popular enough to know where the cool kids hang ;)

Today, I took Ginger down to the ring to check out where we are at with her leg. She was feeling good - a couple of days off for her makes her seem like she's on crack. She's had almost two weeks without a real workout and I'm pretty sure she wasn't even part of this world this morning :) Eventually she came back down to earth and I got to see her moving out properly. I'm happy to report she seems  totally fine. I hopped on and had an alright ride, maybe 30 mins or so of walk/trot. Alright because she was wanting to burst out of her skin and there were tons of distractions -the place was busier than I've ever seen. For the casual observer our ride probably looked a bit of a tense mess, but she really didn't put a foot wrong and tried super hard to be good so I can take that and be happy. I sure wish we had Trainer Girl here - she would have been able to take today's ride and make a complete success of it - left to my own devices I always feel like I didn't quite get there. We didn't canter today - I wanted to keep this ride easy in case she is still a little stiff somewhere. Things didn't feel quite relaxed enough to really take  a chance and go there anyways. It's funny, with Lainey when she's feeling up the best thing I can do is put her to work and canter, she relaxes into it and burns off steam, then we are ready for nice trot work. Ginger is the opposite - if the trot feels tight and funny, the canter is going to be truly awful and then she gets really worried. The best thing for an anxious Ginger is a half hour or so of walking with a few trot or halt transitions to keep her attentive to me. Time consuming and a bit boring, but it works!

We hung around and chatted with some friends for a bit after our ride and she was also very good  then - she's grown up this past year and is much more patient. She also isn't herd bound at all anymore - people and horses can come and go and she's not too worried by it. The reason I take the time to write about all these little things is to remind myself we are still making progress. I'm not even sure why I put pressure on myself to keep improving - in real life I am totally uncompetitive and a bit of a slacker ;) When I posed this thought to G, he reminded me that I've previously said "I don't want to let Ginger down" and that "I want everyone to see how wonderful she and the Welsh Cob breed is". He might have a bit of a point there.

On tomorrow's agenda: I'm going to ride one of the barn owner's horses on a trail ride with another boarder, then grab Ginger and take her down to the ring. School is back in session ;)
I don't really feel right about posting about the other horses I ride (even though it's all good) since they are not mine. Suffice to say there are a few needing to get out and about for some miles on the trails and now and then I take them - it's good for them and good time in the saddle for me.