November 28, 2007
Last week the girls gave me a hard time for wanting to go out to the barn. I say I wasn't forcing either of them, they are big girls! Anyway, Tricia trailered Oly over to ride. My black stirrup leathers finally arrived so I put those on my saddle. And I decided to try out my new bridle. Unfortunately it is a bit small so I'm not sure what I'm going to do about that. By the time we had the horses tacked up it was already mostly dark. And the wind picked up, a lot. We figured it would be less windy if we went down the back hill and rode down there. It was slightly less windy and a lot more dark by the time we got down there. Axel and I stumbled around for a while. He kept flipping his head since the bridle was too small, the brow band was the worst followed by the nose band. His head is just a bit too big for a regular bridle but probably too small for a draft size. He needs horse and a half or something. So Tricia and Oly and Steph and Kalani wandered around a bit as well before we decided we were cold and it was time to go back up. Sadly I couldn't tell if there were any changes in Axel since it was dark, the ground was full of holes so he kept tripping, and it was too cold to really do much. We fed as usual and when Cody was done eating I did a tiny bit of lunging with him just to remind him of the whole respect thing.

December 5, 2007
This week Tricia ran into some possum issues at her place so she wasn't able to make it out. Steph didn't sound terribly interested but she came out anyway. I wanted to get a hair sample of Cody's mane for a gal I ran across online that's doing a research project on lethal white overo. I groomed him and pulled some hair off him and then lunged him in the round pen for a while. He did pretty good so I tried free lunging him for a while. He did really well in one direction but wouldn't turn into the circle in the other direction without the lead rope. He turned fine to the inside in the one direction so I assume it was just a side favoring issue and not really a respect issue.

After that I groomed up Axel and Steph brought in Corey. We jumped on bareback with just halters and lead ropes and cruised around the round pen for a while. Axel felt pretty good but once again it's hard to tell without having the space to really move out. Maybe we'll get a chance this weekend. We pulled up all the ground poles from the round pen so they won't get frozen to the ground in our way, fed everyone, and went on our way .. to the bar.

Corey is going to WCR this weekend so things are going to be interesting next week. I'll have to make sure to keep up the ground work with Cody because he's the likely horse to step up to herd boss and that could have some adverse affects on his attitude. I guess we'll see.

When I left work it was 14F. When I got to the barn it was 4F. When we left after riding it was -4F and when I got home it was -10F. But that -4F felt more like 10F because it was not windy at all. Hopefully Sunday will be nice enough, Jeff wants to come with and try out his new camera.