Injured reserve

Dixie has been on the IR list. I rode Wednesday, to vast (but not unexpected) amounts of drama, and she whacked her front right heel bulb pretty good. Discretion > valor and all that, so I elected to lay her off for a while. I think perhaps it's unnecessary.

Wednesday was a lovely day, so I went out to do some hills. Dixie was forward and moderately obedient going away from home, but as soon as we turned toward home (whether we were actually going home or not) she got really hot and wanted to zoom home as fast as possible. I was riding in the snaffle and part of me deeply regretted it, but mostly I realized it was a good teachable moment, and she can't just run through the snaffle. (And I do realize I bring this on myself, letting her canter home some of the time. I absolutely deserve the horse I ride.)

I let her make her mistakes - for HALF A MILE, every time she'd break above a walk I one rein stopped her, had her walk away from home, did circles, etc. It did no good at all. Finally we got back to this one road that goes up a hill for about a half a mile before it goes private. So we did hill sets. HARD hill sets.

We cantered (then racked, then halfass trotted) to the top of the hill. We turned and walked partway down, then she broke to a pace and wouldn't slow back to a walk, so I wheeled her dumb ass around and cantered her back up the hill. Rinse and repeat at least ten times. She's not the kind of horse who ever hunts the woah, but I tried. I got some really snappy canter departs, halts, walks up the hill toward the end of our fight, and I did, eventually, get her to walk home on a loose rein. It was a very snappy animated speedy running walk, but by god it was a four-beat head-nodding walk.

Anyway, in the midst of all the wheeling around, she slammed her right heel bulb with a back hoof and split it open. Not a bad injury, but I thought I should let it heal and watch her for a couple of days.

Thursday was trim day. We've been using the same absolutely amazing saint of a trimmer for nineteen months now, and Dixie has gone from being a horrible yanking falling-over stomping bitch to, finally, on Thursday, yawning a lot and nodding off. Must be time to leave, move to California, and find a new trimmer for her to yank stomp and be a bitch to, now that she's finally used to Jim. :)

In between horse stuff, I've been demolishing where the pool used to be and painting the Dr. Seuss room. The room is tan now; it just needs one more coat cutting in and it'll be finished. The pool area is almost transformed - I posted a "free" ad on CL and a guy should be coming tomorrow to get the materials I ripped off of the upper deck.

So here is a video of my poor injured pony. The heel is not swollen, not hot, and clearly not bothering her, so I think after the guy clears out the deck boards tomorrow I should ride her. A long way. A really long way.

What set this off? Banders, mighty hunter, snuck up on the chickens and they eventually noticed him and started squawking. Yes. Chickens squawking caused this fine display of wild mustang behavior.

Note: I'm trying out uploading the video straight to Blogger instead of posting it on Vimeo. Vimeo takes forever to process, so we'll see how awful the Blogger quality is...