That Axel never ceases to amaze me, sometimes good and sometimes not so good, of course. Tuesday I decided to go out to the barn and try and have a lesson, even if it was dark. I rushed through grooming and tacking and jumped on right as it was getting almost too dark to see. I thought we'd be okay since it was a full moon but it ended up being cloudy. I had 15 minutes before Tricia was due to arrive so I set out to warm Axel up a bit. He was so good. He was walking out like he had a mission, even in the dark. We did a couple walks around the "arena" in both directions. I barely had to ask for a trot and off he went. We did a couple figure 8s at the trot and when he'd stop without being asked, I'd ask for a back up. He's not great at backing so we have to keep working on that. We moved up to the round pen where I thought we could see better. Axel wasn't terribly excited about the round pen but we made a couple circles around at the walk when Tricia arrived.
We went up to the paddock to meet her and I think Axel decided he was done at that point. Maybe he should have been but we had only worked for 15 minutes. To make matters worse, Tom came out and fed the rest of the horses right as we were getting started. We moved into the other pasture and started at the trot extending on the long ends. Then we worked on spiraling in and out on a 10m circle. It took quite a bit of work to get Axel to spiral in and out the right way. After we did that in both directions we worked on some 10m circles trotting before we finished up.
A gal came out to meet Cody. She might be interested in leasing him part time which would be a great help to me. I'm hoping if someone rides him on a more regular basis he'll shape up nicely. Right now he gets ridden less than once a week, and though he's probably happy with that arrangement he needs more work than that. He was kind of acting like a fool when she came out to see him though. He was mad he wasn't out with Kiko eating hay. He wouldn't stand still and kept rocking back and forth. She was trying to groom him and pick his feet but he wouldn't pick them up for her. So generally just being the embarrassing child in front of guests. I invited her to come ride this weekend so she can get a little better taste than just seeing him in the barn. Hopefully she'll take me up on it. Granted having the extra money would be great but having Cody back working on a regular basis would be really great.
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