Friday, November 2, 2012

Red letter day!

I`m pretty sure a red letter day is a good thing... which is why I called today that.  Not all of it was great-- Walter collapsed today and passed out in the morning and was rushed to the hospital by Carlos and Rodrigo.  It turns out it was nothing serious, dehydration and stress most likely, but it can`t have felt very good and we were all worried!  Hopefully Walter will be feeling better soon, love having him around the barn, even when he is making fun of me (okay, less so then.  It`s not much fun to have him rubbing his hands gleefully at the thought of you falling off... the tradition here is that you buy the barn guys pastries when you fall off, so they don`t see any harm in suggesting that you try it.  Funnily enough, there doesn`t seem to be a situation in which they buy us pastries... maybe passing out in the wash rack should be the new standard!)

The rest of the morning was great though!  Martin, Alice and Katie took six of the young horses to a schooling show off the property, and I stayed behind to help Rodrigo with the youngsters and start riding the other horses.  It was really hot and sunny and basically a perfect day weather-wise.  The young horses were all great, and I rode Pastrocito, Georgia and Herodes before the trailer got back, and then hopped on Holendesa and Jour to finish up the non-series horses before riding Mauro with Katie and Alice.  After lunch (which I must say, I was ravenous for!) we rode the last three left: Picaro, Benito and Justinian.  Martin gave us a flat lesson, which I really really enjoyed.  The focus was on discipline with figures in a dressage ring set up, and Justinian was perfect: forward, light and attentive the whole time, despite the now stifling heat!  I definitely sustained some sunburn despite copious amounts of sunscreen slathered all over myself.   The sun here is truly something else...

Well, up early tomorrow for another show!  I promise a blog post with some more meat in it sometime this weekend.  I`ll need to think about some kind of training philosophy to pontificate about, or something.

PS... I was super jealous of my ultimate team last night... not only did they hose the opposition at the Golf Dome, they had ex-Blue Bomber Milt Stegall sub on our team!! I may not be a football fan but I can still feel really jealous of that!

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