My next bad fall and my first re-rider show...

December has now been dubbed BGM (bitchy gray mare) because she doesn't have the most pleasant of personalities now that she's not half starved. She makes faces when you get near her food, when you saddle her, if you look at her too long. She's well trained and actually has good manners about it at least. She looks away from you when she pins her ears and makes her nasty faces. She stands quietly in the barn. Her ground work and lunge line work is solid. She leg yeilds, side passes, shoulders in like a dream. Her gaits are light, balanced and she's a lovely mover. I just can't frickin' stay on her when she gets scared.

Unfortunately, I've fallen off of her twice since my last post. :( I've been discussing it with a trainer through her blog (Mugwump Chronicles) and she says I need to ride like Ben Cartwright. That I need to learn to stay on this horse so I don't ruin her by scaring her by falling off all the time. I told her I may need to duct tape my ass to the saddle.

*sigh*

I've never been afraid of a horse before. My last horse was, as my trainer liked to put it, "quirky". He was hard to ride and I wouldn't let most people on him. I put up with him because at the time he was what I could afford and because at shows he was all business. Like a whole different horse then at home. I can probably count the times I fell off him on my fingers in the whole 10 years I owned him. I rode a full sideways spook on Tax at a gallop in the field a couple of weeks ago when a hawk took off shrieking because we disturbed him. December is another story and I'm not sure why.

So, I messed up my knee the second time I feel off her which was last Thursday. I was preparing for a schooling show on Saturday. I managed to take enough Advil to ride on Saturday with my swollen knee. The good news is we actually got one ribbon in an English pleasure class and she didn't kill me. The bad news is that I fell off again when she reared because a horse she knew was taken into the barn without her. At least we were outside (not in one of our classes) and I didn't get hurt again.

Here's actual pictures of me riding her in the class we placed in. She was focused in her classes and good for me in the ring.

This is our friend, Kara, riding her after our classes ended.

Promise is making lots of progress. He used to wig out if you went in his stall and he was in there. He acted like you were going to beat him and escaped out the back door the first chance he got. These days when I'm cleaning he'll come in and check out what I'm doing. He even comes over to get his nose scratched. Yay!

I haven't been doing much with Tax lately. It always seems like time is an issue. We've been working on lunging nicely and stopping with a verbal command. I also took him trail riding a couple of times. It was good and bad. He isn't very spooky but he's hot as heck right now. He always knows when we're headed back to the trailer and jigs the whole way. Why is it he can only perform a half-pass in the passage on the trail when I'd like him to walk nicely but won't move laterally for me in an arena? Also, he really doesn't like moutain bikers and has decided the best approach is to crush them with his chest. Yep, crush them, as in jump in front of them to try to run them down. You haven't lived until your staring down a speeding mountain bike!