Crazy Week and Crossed Wires

Well I tried to make this past week productive and sort of like boot camp but it didn't really turn out that way.

As mentioned I had two lessons last week, one on Sunday and one on Tuesday and didn't ride on Monday to give her that time off. The plan was to lunge on Wednesday, do a longer tougher ride on Friday and an outdoor ride on Saturday morning (still work but not as focused) when I could ride outside without the bugs being too bad.

On Wednesday I lunged as planned and Katai was clearly tired but was a good girl. She got Thursday off and then on Friday I showed up ready to work.

Pulling out all the stops in the bug battle this year.
The farm is in a marsh so they seem to be particularly bad.
These boots are working really well!

I'm a bit OCD about my horse things. I'm not that way with anything else in life but everything at the barn has a place and I put stuff back the same way every time. I was surprised to see the crank noseband on my bridle fastened differently than normal. However, since I'd lunged last I thought maybe I'd done something different than normal when I put it away and just didn't remember or that someone was checking out my bridle which I never mind.

However, that night Katai was REALLY weird to ride. Very unlike her normal self and very tired and behind my leg. She kept stopping and spooking at the end with the door and she never does that, or almost never, and never this bad. I kept it pretty short but was nervous that she wasn't feeling well. Because of that I decided to do another quite day on Saturday and gave her a bath and hand walked her down the road and let her graze a bit. It was really good for both of us but not really the way I pictured the rest of our week going. With that being said I still got to the barn 5 days so that felt good.

All geared up minus her fly mask :)
For a $25ish fly sheet this one has been doing great so far!
Please ignore the horrible angle, she's not nearly this downhill.

Sunday I got to the barn in the evening and planned to do a ride outside. Jane had put together an arena outside and I really wanted to play ride in it. While I was tacking up Jane came out to feed and walked straight over to talk to me. I found out that we'd had our wires crossed and she'd thought I was out of town last week so had my fellow boarder K ride Katai on Friday. Jane felt so bad but I wasn't worried about it and honestly was just glad that I had a reason for Katai's weird behavior on Friday.

the new arena!

I then went on to have an AMAZING ride! Katai has SO MUCH FUN riding outside and I need to remember to do it more. I played around with transitions and asking her to be consistent in the trot but we didn't ride for too long. In the span of about 5 minutes we had attracted a nice little herd/flock/murder of horse flies and they were plastered to her ears. I seriously don't know why she didn't just buck me off and run for the hills but she didn't. Instead she was a princess pony and just kept listening and playing along. I didn't want to make it a miserable experience for her though so after a couple of really good transitions I called it, we went for a little walk loop past the outdoor "arena" and then ran for the barn. I was covered in biting flies, horse flies, and mosquitoes so I was ready to be done as well.

Sort of working but I'm going to try a different type of lotion next time.
This would all be easier if spray bottles were a thing...

Next time I'll use her cute little fly bonnet but it's bad enough out there that I'm not even sure if that will really fix it. At any rate, she was a total princess and I had so much fun!

Now this week I've already been prevented from riding tonight (I'd planned another good long ride) because it's in the 90s and extremely humid again with impending storms. I had wanted to at least go spend time with her but an hour in the car just to go rinse her off for the second time in three days just didn't seem like the best idea. It looks like it will be cooler for the rest of the week so I'm planning to continue my boot camp through Sunday and then I'm off to Seattle and pony will have a few rides from K but mainly a vacation :)