She's here and she's awesome!

Tuesday was one of the busiest days of my life, honestly. We moved from our temporary apartment in south Reno to our real apartment in north Reno. The temp apartment was furnished, so we only had to move clothes, food, and house pets. (Only! Hah!) And of course Dixie showed up Tuesday afternoon. I didn't get to spend much time with her Tuesday, but I did get a few pictures.


Here she is exploring her quarantine pen.



Her mouth looked really tense and nervous. I'm not very happy with her feet, but we'll get them fixed.



I love her face!



Anyway, I made sure she was eating and drinking and went back to the delightful joy of moving.

Yesterday I went on a short trail ride. The BO, S, rode her stud, and another boarder, M, rode her gelding. Dixie was in front, cause she's the only gaited horse and her walk is so much faster. She really was fantastic about the whole thing. Still nervous, didn't know what to make of these hills and these strange new plants. She had to sniff every new thing we came to very carefully. And she got quite worried about a very large horse-eating boulder, but I coaxed her past it.

Then she sniffed the sandy trail, once, twice, and collapsed to roll. None of that elaborate pawing and slowly folding up her legs, she just WHUMP went down. My feet hit the ground on either side of her and I flung myself off to the left, convinced she was about to roll onto my leg and crush both my leg and the saddle. That spooked her a bit - what just exploded off my back!? - and she stood back up and I stood back up and we just stared at each other. Poor thing, she was clearly wondering if she'd just fucked up royally and if she was going to get beat for it. I burst out laughing, calmly grabbed the reins, and asked her to please not do that anymore. She stood quite well for me to tighten the girth and climb back on - not perfect, but just amazingly well for Dixie.

The boy horses had watched all this with great interest. The stud was entirely too well mannered to try to repeat it, but the gelding tried to roll at the exact same spot! M was ready for him and a swift kick in the ribs reminded him that he was at work.

We only saw one jackrabbit. I went out a couple times before with S, on her mare and gelding, and saw mule deer, tons of jackrabbits, chukar quail, and hawks. Plenty of time to see horse-eating deer and carnivorous quail, though. Dixie wasn't worried at all about the jackrabbit. And the jackrabbit wasn't worried at all about us - he broke cover from maybe 15 feet away and ran all of 10 feet off to the side.

I'm glad we had a short sweet ride. Dixie's a bit out of shape, plus she's gone from sea level to about 5,500 feet. A short slow ride was good for both of us, I think.