mimi

Play Day

/ Ashley Wingert / Leave a comment

Last week, the barn owner asked me if I would be able to help out on irrigation day (I was going to be in the neighborhood anyway) by opening up the last irrigation ditch port and keeping an eye on the last 20 or so minutes of irrigation.

So just for kicks, Mimi and I “monitored” the irrigation as it came in…by riding in it.  Picture an approximately 4 acre pasture, covered in up to a foot of water in some places.  Because it was so newly irrigated and there’s a mature (if sparse) covering of grass in the pasture, it hadn’t yet gotten muddy.  The ground was firm, Mimi’s bare hooves gave her plenty of grip…so we went out and played.

She waded pretty cautiously at first, testing the footing to see if it was solid.  When we ventured into the deeper section, she sniffed at the water, then started pawing at it.  A couple times, she felt like she was going to offer to roll, and that earned her a swift boot in the ribs.  Funny, because she’s never once tried to roll in any other water crossings we’ve done.  Y’know, ’cause water crossing opportunities are so prolific in the desert… ;)

Flooded-out pasture.  Cell phone with its not-ideal camera
was the only camera I had on me.

It was a good chance just to play.  No pressure, no work, and a chance to remind Mimi that the saddle doesn’t always mean doing boring circles.

"Pony" is a four-letter word

/ Ashley Wingert / 1 Comment

Today was a “pony” day, said with much disgust and shaking of the head.  We were due for it…she’s been an angel for the past couple of months, but the “pony” part of her personality is never far below the surface.  Today, it was standing up and doing the hula.

*blinks*  Now there’s a mental image for ya.  (All of the costume classes I did, I never gave Mimi the indignity of a hula skirt.  Missed opportunity…)

We cranked out about half an hour of arena work, heavy focus on the trot and canter (and some rider torture in the form of riding without stirrups).  Brought my GPS out , just for kicks, and discovered that we covered about 2 miles with our laps around the arena.  Cool.  Better than nothing, and it is a sand arena.

She wasn’t all bad.  I dusted off the jumping hackamore and got it adjusted properly, and she was working beautifully in it.  Seems to be a great choice for arena work, and she was even softer in it than the S-hack.  She had a fabulous whoa today, too…but that might have had something to do with the fact that she “didn’t wanna work.”  I don’t think it’ll translate over to the trail quite as well, since Ms. Curb-Your-Enthusiasm needs a little bit of a reminder that blasting off at Mach 3 is not on the recommended itinerary.

But I like keeping arena and trail gear separate.  It’s something I’ve done for years, ever since show days: western bit for western classes, kimberwick for english flat classes, snaffle for jumping classes, and hackamore for gymkhana.  So it’s a principle she’s well-versed in: “X means fun, Y means work.”

Worked on her hooves…they’re looking really good right now.  Picture taking fail today, since I was pretty much done in by the time I got around to working on her feet and out of patience for messing with the camera.  Her hooves are slowing down in their growth as her system readjusts to the ever-decreasing amount of daylight and redirects its energies towards growing a fine, fuzzy winter coat.  In 95*.  Proof right there that horse hair growth is controlled by daylight hours, not temperature.  At least I don’t have to worry about clipping her this winter, and the subsequent “to blanket or not to blanket” question.

It was also warm enough for her to get a shower (Horrors…I removed her protective layer of dirt coating!) after we were done, which made for east-trim hooves.  She was thoroughly hacked off that I had the nerve to get her face wet, and proceeded to whip me with her (soaking wet) tail during the rest of the process.  Thanks, pony.

All was well at the end, since she did her spiffy little bowing trick for a carrot.  Never mind that she almost fell over, she was so excited to see a rare, elusive carrot appear before her.  Carrots cure all ills, at least in her mind.

Finally Fall

/ Ashley Wingert / Leave a comment

I saw my breath this morning when I stepped out my front door at 7:00.  Yesterday, I got misted on when walking.  Wednesday saw me in a long-sleeved tee (with shorts and sandals, but that’s beside the point).  Is it finally fall?  One can only hope.  I trying desperately to ignore the weather report for next week, the one that says we’re going to be back up in the 90s again.

*plugs ears and hums loudly*

But for now, I’m going to enjoy every single reprieve I get.  This is my favorite time of year, when I can drive down the freeway with my windows down, music blasting, wind whipping my hair into disarray.

View from my front yard.  I live in suburbia
and board half an hour away in quasi-suburbia-
with-large-pastures.

There seems to be another potential storm brewing (maybe the dregs of the one that dumped 2′ of snow in the Sierras and put this year’s Tevis into disarray decided to come south?) today, so I scuttled out of the house around mid-morning and headed down to the barn.

My timing was pretty good…Mimi had finished breakfast, and was just about to be turned out into the pasture.  It’s so much easier to work with her when I can get to her before her pasture time…otherwise, she’s rather put out about just getting settled into the serious business of grazing, only to be interrupted for that silly little thing called work.

The last half a dozen times I’ve ridden her in the arena, I’ve worked her pretty extensively in a bit.  I may have mentioned this before, but she hates bits.  Something about tiny pony mouths, and just a general distaste for hunks of metal crammed between her lips.

Last week, I inadvertently discovered that if I am going to use a bit, she much prefers it to be very snug in her mouth..definitely the “two wrinkles on the corner of the mouth” rule of thumb, and bordering on a third.  Adjusted that way, she didn’t fuss, make too many weird faces, or try to gnaw it in half.  She was also very light in the face and extremely responsive.

Lesson out of all of this?  Don’t be afraid to go against convention and experiment.  Just because something is “always” done a certain way doesn’t mean it’s necessarily correct for a given circumstance.

This week, I decided to use the S-Hack on her.  This is my headgear of choice for when we’re out on trail, and I’ve always had great control with it.  But sometimes, I wish she was a little more sensitive to doing some of the finer nuances of arena work with this set-up.  So that was today’s goal…make her do some actual arena work in the hack.  And she did really well.  She’s pretty stiff and resistant to giving to the left, so we spent a lot of time working on that.

The cooler weather also has her feeling good, and in very good spirits, and she’s a ton of fun to ride when she’s that way.  I don’t have to think when I’m riding her…we’ve been partners for so long, I can just ride her.  And y’know, I really, really like riding that little mare.

spiders and "spring" cleaning

/ Ashley Wingert / Leave a comment

The past week or so, I’ve been bitten by the cleaning and organization bug.  This bug usually hits about twice a year, and it makes me go into a cleaning and organizing frenzy.  Most of the year, I’m a semi-organized person.  I have a method to my madness, and can always find what I need, even though it may not look the neatest or cleanest.  (Except for my closet.  That’s my designated black hole that gets a thorough gutting out about once a year, when I get sick of the mess and fear I’m risking my life just by trying to enter it.)

This time, the bug was directed at two locations: the corner of the garage that serves as a “tack room” of sorts, and my corner of the tack room down at the barn.  For years, I used my horse trailer as a rolling storage closet.  It was easier, kept everything close at hand, and I usually worked out of the trailer more than I did the barn.  With the departure of the trailer this spring, I had to pull everything out and find a home for it.  Needless to say, there was a complete lack of enthusiasm for this task, so everything got shoved willy-nilly wherever it fit.

Last weekend, I tackled the garage.  Pulled everything out, sorted it into piles, rewrapped leg wraps (how many sets of leg wraps does one person need???), threw tons of stuff out (Anyone wanna know what 4+ year-old  EasyFoam looks like?  Not pretty…and I had four or five packs of the stuff floating around.  Don’t miss those messy days.), and rediscovered stuff I thought had vanished into the ether, including a pair of Equipedic splint boots, which Mimi and I are in the process of thoroughly testing.  But I digress.  I’ll talk about the splint boots later.

It was an all-day project (18 years of being in horses means I have a ton of stuff), but at the end of the day, I had an organized garage, with stuff stored in crates and stacked neatly on shelves.

Yesterday, I tackled the barn tack room.  Again, stuff had gotten shoved haphazardly into the corner and dutifully ignored for the past four months.  And something I forgot to mention: The tack room is the preferred location for overly-enthusiastic, fast-reproducing black widows (and other toxic AZ spiders of note).  For those of the spider-leery inclination, I very intentionally did not take pictures.  Six years of being at this barn has me mostly immune to the sight of the black widows anymore.

Still…yesterday was an exercise in caution, gingerly picking buckets up, using a long sweat scraper to get rid of the worst of the webs, and stomping on spiders as they scuttled back to sanctuary.  They really like to lurk under the edges of buckets and containers, which was the impetus for this cleaning binge…I had chased a few spiders (black widows and non-toxic) out of the crevices of my HoofJack and from the recesses of the box where I store my trimming equipment.  Sooner or later, one was going to discover the inside of my rasping gloves…

So the goal was to make enough room inside the cabinet (complete with bug-deterring closing doors) to store my trimming stuff.  And get rid of a few dozen bottles of old meds, shampoos, and the like.  I did it.  Everything I have down at the barn now fits inside a four-shelf cabinet and my tack trunk.  And I don’t have to pick sticky-clingy spider webs off my stuff anymore.

And that was on the heels of managing a whole hour and half of very active riding yesterday.  45 minutes of intense arena work, half of which I made myself do without stirrups (my thighs and I are not on speaking terms today), then another 45 minutes of meandering out around the neighborhood.  Well…as much as Mimi ever meanders.  She had to be peddled out to start, but once we got halfway around, she was much more willing to move out.  The faster we go, the happier she is…everything is going to eat her when we’re quietly walking along, but once we’re trotting, we rule the world.  *eye roll*  I love that goofy pony.

And on a totally different note…it’s Man Against Horse weekend, and for the first time in six years, I’m not up there.  Definitely bummed about missing it…I love being up there, even if I’m not riding, but my vehicle had the final say in matters, what with developing a slow but persistent oil-and-other-fluids leak. 195,000 miles…I guess I can cut her a break.  But a road trip didn’t seem like the best of ideas, either.

crunch, crunch

/ Ashley Wingert / Leave a comment

A year ago, I wouldn’t have batted an eyelash at jumping in the saddle and riding 50 miles.  Sure, my legs might be a little crunchy, but nothing I couldn’t walk off within a couple of days.


30 minutes in the saddle this morning, and my legs are grumbling at me.


Hmmmm.


Someone’s a bit out of shape, methinks.


Yes, I admit it: I’ve spent most of the summer hibernating indoors, venturing over to the barn enough to maintain Mimi’s feet and make sure she has plenty of her flax/beet pulp mix she gets.  But riding?  Eh, not so much.  One four-mile trail ride a couple months ago.  A couple rides around the neighborhood, maybe a miles’ worth of distance.  A handful of arena sessions.


All of this adds up to one out-of-shape rider.  Not that I’m completely out of shape.  I’ve spent a good portion of the summer helping my father with some of the larger carpet cleaning jobs…not exactly a low-impact activity.  Add to that the frequent petsitting jobs and the walking of said pets, and my cardio isn’t doing too bad.  It’s just the riding muscles that are suffering.


I’d like to say that fall is just around the corner, and nicer weather will be more incentive to ride, but we’re nowhere close to being out of the woods yet.  In fact, I think my rearview mirror thermometer in my truck just might have gotten busted today, since it refused to actually register a temperature for outside on the drive home.  Its poor, overwhelmed little brain was giving me an Ice warning.  Hah!


I’m now hugging the a/c back home and downing an iced coffee.  When I left Pony, she was employing the do-it-yourself swamp cooler method: standing herself, still wet from the shower I gave her, in front of her stall-mounted fan.  And nibbling on a cool, salty, bran-and-beet pulp sloppy I gave her.  Not a bad life.


But it’s this time of year that fish pond in the backyard starts looking real attractive.  That, or I contemplate why my parents though a fish pond over a swimming pool was a good idea.


As a final random aside: I know my last number of posts have been completely picture destitute, and as a result, probably kind of boring.  I’m working on changing that.  I have pictures, i just need to get them uploaded/sorted/edited.  But as a preview, Happy!Pony:

That was from our ride out at Estrella Mtn Park in March…still a lil’ fuzzy from winter, but looking so chipper and happy.