Saddle sore

E. and Curly had two afternoons of riding and one 4H ride night this week. The weather has been nearly perfect - in the high 40s and low 50s - plus the sun stays up in the sky later and the arena at the horse barn has dried out enough from all the snow and rain that we don't have to haul animals out to the fairgrounds for lessons. I love this time of year!

E. still has to work very hard to control Curly. She is sore in both her upper and lower body from the workout he gives her. He's still the naughtiest animal during her group lessons, but every ride gets a little better. I just have to keep telling myself that one day he'll be a fabulous animal! And he still looks great. :-)

Remember the "Zane Magnet" from one of my blog posts last summer? Well, he appears to have been abandoned by his current rider (she hasn't been out to care for him since January) so many of us out at the barn have sort of made him our pet project. I pulled him out of his stall the last two afternoons we were there and brushed all the dreds out of his mane and tail. What a job! I spent a whole hour working on just his tail - and I won't say it was fully brushed out even then. He is a real sweety and is so much easier to handle on the ground than Curly is. He's a little high energy under saddle, however, so I don't know if I would feel confident riding him. Maybe I'll try that next week...... (M. asks "Are we buying another horse???) :-)

Q is healing quite nicely and was ridden for the first time in three weeks yesterday. Fifteen minutes into the lesson, however, he bucked L. off! No one saw what made him behave so badly, unfortunately, but L. wasn't hurt, fortunately. She finished out the hour doing no more than a walk since coach A. didn't trust him after that incident.

Just how many bales can go in the truck?

Turns out that we can haul 32 bales! What a sight! They were stacked so high that we couldn't drive into the horse barn and had to shave off a whole row from the top of the stack. It's much less fun to transport the bales one at a time by wheelbarrow back to the hay storage area. Matt has perfected the art of dropping a bale from 15 feet up so that it lands almost exactly where he wants it - I only had to do a little rearranging today.

The girls didn't get to climb the huge stack of hay bales at the grower's barn today, but they did get to see some of his newly born calves. Just like most baby animals, they were incredibly cute as they ran around their mamas.