Thursday, January 31, 2008

Weekend at the Old Homestead

I'll be heading to the Old Homestead tomorrow afternoon, taking the weekend off. (Nominally off, I still have homework to do. I'll spend a good chunk of my weekend on the laptop revising the paper I posted, since today Traci ruled out internal monologue.)

I've got someone taking care of Monkey, and I've got someone covering my feed crew. I just have to make it through feed crew tomorrow morning and class, without killing anyone, and then I can breathe easy for a couple of days.

In other news, we played tag in class today, and Monkey was getting off on herding the other horses into corners when I was it. He wasn't really sure why we weren't pushing the other horses around when I wasn't it, but he really enjoyed working the others on the fence when I was.

He did give me some really nice turns, nicer than he usually does in the arena, and once he figured out what we were doing he pushed right up on the horses I pointed him at to trap them on the fence. I did wind up being it a few times because he broke out of the trot... once was my fault, I was trying to push for a longer trot and he was all "well if you want to go faster, lets just jump ahead." The other times were pretty much he didn't like the other horse crawling up his butt.

In other news, Etta is being ridden. She's really stiff to the right and E is getting a little frustrated, but she hasn't offered to buck once, even when the other horses are going nuts. I'm proud of her for that fact alone, and we'll see if she figures out not to pull to the outside over time. She should make a nice settled horse, and if nothing else she can be my project next semester.

More other news, one of the girls is going home, due to an injury from her own damned stupidity, so there's a spare horse. Since Sparky has the world's most stubborn pony right now, Marilyn has given him the choice of which horse he wants. He's going to consider it and let me know. He wanted me to make the decision for him, but it's his choice. We'll see.