New Year's Ride

By some sort of miracle, that sunshine I asked Santa for stuck around for New Year's Day!

Sunshine + Cold = Alert pony

 I've been back of the land of somewhat-gainfully-employed people for a little bit now and the job currently involves walking about 5-6 hours, 30-40km a day (about 25 miles for my American friends). Since we are surrounded by mountains, those miles involve a lot of steep hills and stairs. I'm exhausted at the end of my days and extra motivated to bid on some contracts for my normal career which is coincidentally a desk job :) Anyways, this relates to my riding because A) I'm too tired at the end of work days to ride, B) when I do have a day off to ride, my legs are pretty tired and I'm useless. Also, C) the ponies are very "up" because they aren't used to a 2 or 3 day a week schedule!

Fingers crossed my body starts to find it easier soon and we can get back to normal.

Shadow pony and rider. Both of us are feeling about as out of shape as the shadow would indicate .

Today's holiday brought some sleeping in, followed by some much needed barn time. Bridget and I just popped up to the ring, which ended up being frozen. As such, it was her lucky day and we did not canter. If we're honest, my lucky day too because my legs are about as effective as noodles at the moment. Instead, I really focused on getting her lateral work better and worked on shoulder control by riding squares. She's been having a bit of trouble with the concept of moving forward AND moving her hips/shoulders independently, so I took the opportunity to go right back to basics and just halt and turn her when she tried to run through me. It worked well, and pony put in a couple of half decent squares by the end. Next stop, walk pirouettes and a proper shoulder in? Since Midge is super intellgent, this quickly transitioned into moving her shoulders all the time for every question, so we went back and did some of her hated haunches in spirals at walk and trot before calling it a day. Hopefully we can trick S into thinking we practiced for our upcoming weekend lesson ;)

Your daily ears photo

A not so exciting day, but I'm very proud of her because she was really fresh and impatient this morning, but tried really hard to focus and got to work without too much drama at all when I gave her a job to do. Of course, she was silly on the hack home, but she's got to blow of steam somehow!

Since she was impatient to get home and see her friends, she had to wait and her mane pulled in the sun first. Probably the one and only picture you'll ever see where it's all laid neatly on one side.

Finally, here's a couple of more pictures I've been sent of the superstar pony on her holiday trail ride last weekend. Fingers crossed we eventually get some nice ones of the group too:

Illustrating the mane half on one side thing we're normally rocking

She looks so over it!

See you on the weekend for a lesson recap!