Marking Time

In about two weeks time, Dante will be coming to his new home at Windover Farm in Middleburg. I can't begin to explain how lucky I feel to have found this facility. It's small, private, with only a couple other boarders. Yet it has fantastic care, beautiful individual turnouts with run-ins, a full size dressage ring with lights and all-weather footing, and other amazing amenities that will help Dante and I in our quest to ride at the top levels.

(The lovely hack down to the dressage arena.)

As the time gets nearer, I get more and more impatient. At times, it often feels that I will never get him back, and that the two-ish weeks before I see him will last forever. It reminds me a lot of waiting for Christmas when I was a kid. Each delay (which is less and less each time) seems to feel like a bigger and bigger deal. In October, a too-short trim immediately delayed his return to me by at least a month; at the time, it seemed no big deal. This past week, when I tried to schedule a reshoeing for this Monday, I discovered the farrier-vet that had done his feet before would be out of town until the following Monday. A week's delay! I felt like throwing a fit, until I realized that I am a sane and rational person (right?). 

 This next week may be the toughest yet, but I will attempt to distract myself by retrieving my trailer next weekend from Destination Farm and making my first attempt at bringing it into Windover. (The one drawbrack to the farm is the tight entrance for my 26.5 ft trailer; I figure this can only force me to become a great trailer drive quite quickly!) Some of my gear is already set up at the farm; the rest will follow next weekend.

(Dante's individual turnout.)

I'm trying very hard to further distract myself by reading riding theory books. I've finished the German Dressage Federation's Principles of Riding, and have moved onto Common Sense Dressage by Sally O'Connor. It's surprising how much I never thought about theory and how much I plan to incorporate it now, particularly since I will be riding more on my own than ever before. Since I won't have mirrors, I will have to learn to feel what I need, rather than see. I've bookmarked pages in 101 Dressage Exercises and 101 Jumping Exercises, and decided to do quite a bit of pole work based on my auditing of the Nicola Wilson clinic.

In addition, I've been mostly faithfully doing the P90X workouts. When I rode a friend's horse a few weeks ago, it was almost shocking how out of shape I was. While nothing substitutes adequately for actually riding everyday, at least I can get my wind and some of my tone back. I've been at it for about 2.5 weeks now, and my body is much trimmer already. I'll need to cut back a bit once I start riding simply because of time constraints, but this is much better than starting off cold.

So here I am, marking time until Dante gets here.

Instructions on How (Mostly) Not to Spend a Weekend

How Not To Spend a Thursday:

Go to work. (Actually, you should do this. Otherwise, your beloved pony will be very perturbed when you tell him there is no money for treats this month.)

After work, go to the DMV. (First mistake.) Spend lots of time on the Internet verifying that you have all the documents you need to get title and registration of your new used trailer. (No matter how much time you spend researching, the workers at the DMV will curtly tell you that you do not have everything you need and make you leave.) Leave the DMV in a bad mood thanks to the realization that your trailer title is invalid due to the presence of white out that neither you nor the seller realized was cause for invalidation. (No, neither of us knew that, but apparently the rest of the world did.) 

Get on the phone with your SO to vent while you drive home. (He'll be super happy to listen to your rant when you wake him up after pulling the overnight shift at the hospital.) 

In the middle of the phone call, on the Inner Beltway of D.C. right before rush hour, suddenly feel your engine lurch while simultaneously the check engine light comes on. (@#%&! %#$$#*$! $%*@#!) Hang up on SO after hasty 'I gotta go', pull over to the side and listen patiently to the nice highway service man talk. (No sir, I can positively guarantee that despite the fact that I am a young woman driving a diesel truck, I did not put gas into my tank.) Call AAA and arrange a tow to your local mechanic. (Free 100 mile tow = winning.) 

Have a small mental breakdown before the tow truck comes. (#@$*&*!) 

Enjoy the nice tow truck and the entertaining stories the tow man has. (Your eighty-year old mother tried to walk three miles to a hotel in how many feet of snow?!) Arrive at the mechanic, arrange for a rental car. (Remember how to drive a vehicle that isn't a diesel.) Call previous owner of trailer, who is the nicest woman ever, and figure out a game plan for getting a new title for the trailer. Get home, drink a beer. (Beeeer.)

How To Spend a Friday:

Go to work. (Again, necessary.) Get a text with your pony's four feet now clad in shoes for the first time since July. (At least one thing is going right!) Get a call from the mechanic. (The repairs to Casey will be how much?!) Text friend who is an assistant trainer to say I will be coming by tonight for entertainment. 

(Dante's new kicks.)

Go to said friend's farm after work. Ride her lovely horse, and jump for the first time since early June. (Wheee!) Stop missing at the fences. (Er, sorry horse.) Have major issues dismounting and vow to return sooner to ride horse. (Too bad hot tubs aren't standard on horse farms.) Stick around and watch Sylvester for the first time. (Being from Texas makes that movie extra hilarious.)

How to (Sort of) Spend a Saturday:

Wake up earlier than planned to go get truck from the mechanic. Drive truck almost all the way home, only to feel it lurch again while the engine light comes on again. (#%^%@!) Limp home, call mechanic, ask if it's safe to drive back. Cancel first appointment to see horse farm.

Drive back.

Hang around for a bit until they decide it won't be done until Monday, then head back to the rental car company where you just dropped off your rental earlier that morning. (Weren't you here earlier?) Drive all the way back home, then head to your second and third farm appointments.

Long story short, I found a home for Dante, which pretty much made everything okay. The new place has the following:

• Bank barn that's cool in the summer and warm in the winter with clean shavings.
• My choice of feeds, beautiful hay, Dante can be fed on the floor.
• Tack room with room for saddles and bridles.
• Areas to cross tie and tack up in.
• Storage room with room for tack trunk and blanket bars for blanket storage.
• Wash rack with hot and cold water.
• Individual turnout in green, gently rolling field.
• Paths between all the paddocks and around the entire property to hack and trot on.
• Full size, fully lit dressage arena with good footing next to large grassy area with jumps. 
• Second small arena with good footing with jumps.
• Access to miles and miles of trails.
• Large, gently rolling gallop field.
• Pull-through trailer parking included in board.
• No in-house trainer, so I can take lessons with whoever I like. I can either trailer out or bring them to me.
• No specific farm vet or farrier.
• Seven minutes from my house.
• Within budget! Slightly on the high end, but well worth it.

And another great part is that the owner's willing to hold a stall for Dante! She has two left. There's only room for nine horses total on the farm, and her four stall barn is rented to a family of eventers, so I'd be with people of my own sport. Her own five stall bank barn has two therapy mares, her personal dressage horse, and two stalls open for boarders, one of which would be Dante.

It's absolutely lovely and I was nearly jumping up and down with glee afterwards. Now I'm truly counting down the days until Dante arrives. Now that he has shoes, S is starting light flat work with him. Dr. Newton will look at him at the end of this week and we'll decide how far out we are from there.

The Beginning of the End

Dante has finally begun walking under saddle! The other night, Stephanie of Graystone Stable in KY got on him for the first time and proceeded to walk him for 45 minutes. According to her, he spent about twenty minutes pretending he had never been ridden, then settled and was fine for the rest of the ride.

This ride marks the beginning of the end of Dante's vacation. For the next couple of weeks, he'll walk under saddle for 30-90 minutes, followed by 10-15 minutes of trotting on the lunge after the shorter rides. Dr. Newton decided to keep him barefoot until after the holidays; as soon as he re-evaluates Dante, we'll add shoes after the first of the year. If all continues to go well (and at this point, there's no reason to believe that it won't), he'll get a new set of shoes in early February. At that point, he'll come home to me in Virginia.

Having a tentative date set for his return to me is a huge relief. I know that if anything goes wrong, that date will be pushed back again. I know most of you are aware that Dante has been living in Kentucky while I'm starting my new life in Virginia. What I haven't been very frank about is how much I miss him, the horse, and not just riding. Since I bought him almost six years ago, I haven't gone without seeing him for more than a couple of weeks. He's been with me through three cross country moves (not counting this latest ones), four relationships (with the fourth still going strong!), and two years worth of vacillating over my future. Not having him with me through this latest upheaval in my life has been a lot harder than I thought it would be.

So it's with a great big sigh of relief that I have a tentative date. And with that date, I can start planning for the show season in 2013. I already had my official USEA schedule worked out, but now that the local farms are putting out their schooling show schedules for winter, I can start penciling in dates for February and March. The vet is on board with my show schedule, provided all continues to go well, and hopefully we'll begin making appearances at dressage schooling shows at the end of February, with our first official USEA event scheduled for Loudoun Hunt at the end of April.

In the meantime, I have the holidays to distract me, and after the New Year, I'll put my nose to the grindstone and find Dante a place to live. At the beginning of January and February, I'll be helping out at Destination Farm's schooling jumper shows. Over MLK weekend, I'll head up to NJ to see my SO. The end of January brings Nicola Wilson to Locochee Farm, and I plan on auditing every second. So my time will be filled, and hopefully time will fly by!

(Dante pretends that he has no idea what is going on. What is that strange saddle thing?)

Much Ado About Nothing

So. Pretty much what the title says.

Not much has been happening on the Comedic Eventing front since I bought the trailer. I haven't seen it since yet, since it's living about an hour away from me and it's not as if I really need to go SEE it.

Dante was doing very well, but had a set back when the farrier rasped his feet too short in mid-October. The farrier had been doing a good job until this point, but suddenly quit/retired without warning to any of his clients shortly after doing Dante. When Dr. Newton came out a couple days later to look at him, he was lame in all four feet with 30% less foot than he had had before.

Le sigh.

In terms of setbacks, it could be worse, really. It's an easy fix, just wait for his foot to grow out. Again.

When Dr. Newton looked at him a few weeks ago, he was 90% back to where he was before. He said at that time we could put shoes on and see how the horse was, or be conservative and wait a couple more weeks. I figured I'd waited this long, might as well let the horse be 100%. He'll be out to look at Dante again on Friday, and hopefully we'll move ahead on shoes.

We updated Dante's FEI passport as well. This is so important to keep updated, even if your horse is currently being a pasture puff. The officials can give you the hairy eyeball if there's a gap in your horse's vaccinations, and possibly eliminate you. We had a scary incident last spring where almost half the kids at the barn were almost retroactively eliminated at an FEI competition after dressage due to a secretarial clerical error on their passports that said the horses had been vaccinated less than seven days before the show. This wasn't the case and they were allowed to complete after much hoopla, but there were a lot of tears and heartbreak before the whole mess was sorted out. Moral of the story, keep your FEI horses religiously updated on their vaccines!

I haven't looked at a single barn yet. Since Dante had a setback, it's likely he won't arrive until late January now. I can't quite bring myself to go look at barns until I know for sure he's coming, or at least until he gets shoes.

I've been running quite a bit, trying to stay in shape. The hills of Middleburg are kicking my butt! It's hard to stay motivated during the week though, when I arrived home and it's already completely dark and cold. I'm looking into buying a P90X or similar program, that I could do inside.

I've been traveling too, went to Vegas for a high school friend's wedding, and up to NJ over Thanksgiving to be with my SO for the holiday. I managed to run my two miles on both occasions!

(The most awesome window display ever in Vegas.)

In October I was lucky enough to score some tickets to the Puissance at the Washington International Horse show. It was quite entertaining to take a subway to get to a horse show, not to mention all the stalls in the middle of the street. This weekend I am excited to witness the Middleburg Christmas Parade, something that apparently can draw over 10,000 people! Thankfully I automatically have parking at my house! So I'm finding ways to fulfill my horsey fix. Hopefully the wait will be over soon.

Getting Mobile (Or, How Hurricane Sandy Messed with My Head)

After a mildly obsessive search that included cross-referenced Excel spreadsheets, daily repetitive searches on the usual websites, and maybe $100 worth of fuel costs, Comedic Eventing is finally mobile!

I liked to joke earlier this year that I may have been the only Advanced Level eventer in the entire country to have neither a truck nor a trailer. Now obviously, that is a completely wild guess, but most people at that level at least have one or the other.

In June, I partially rectified the matter and made the first big purchase of my adult life, obtaining my truck. I was halfway to freedom.

On Saturday, I kissed goodbye to my savings account and bought a 2004 Hawk two horse straight load, one of the brands and models I had been lusting after. It has almost everything I wanted: a rear ramp, dressing room, gooseneck hitch, water tank, fan in the horse area, extra space in the horse area, and above all, a side ramp. (You see, Dante has never quite gotten the hang of backing down a rear ramp with any sort of coordination. Every time I remove him from the trailer backwards, I live in fear of him being an absolute ding-dong and injuring himself somehow. Hence, the side ramp.)

(Look at the shiny! Or rather, the matte aluminum skin...)

As a bonus, there's also a large gate in the center that I can shift between two positions, so I can haul two horses in the rear, with the gate shut and equipment or hay in the front. I can also shift the gate back a couple of feet and haul one horse loose in a box stall configuration in the front and haul equipment and hay in the back. Or I can remove the gate all together if I like, or even remove all of the gates and hardware to form one giant box. (I'll never have to rent another Uhaul trailer for moving ever again!) Another bonus was the ability to plug the trailer into a hookup and get power for two outlets.

So on Saturday, I bought the trailer (name still pending, and yes it needs a name, I name everything), and took it to its temporary parking place out in Poolesville, MD. Then, mindful of the impending inclement weather (Some of you might have heard of Sandy?) I tried to get it insured on Sunday.

Turns out the insurance companies stopped binding all policies on Friday due to the expectation of a hurricane.

Lesson learned. Never, ever make a big purchase that must be outside two days prior to a hurricane arriving. You will spend the entire storm obsessively checking the hourly weather where said purchase is located and hoping that the wind gusts aren't strong enough to knock over any trees and toss them onto your trailer.

Well, you'll be checking obsessively until you lose power, of course.

Luckily, for those of us in NoVA, the wind and rain was not too bad, and although there was some damage due to downed trees and power did go out mostly overnight and some on Tuesday, we largely escaped Sandy unscathed. I got the report that my trailer was fine, and I breathed a sigh of relief. And promptly on Wednesday, got the thing insured.

The Fairest Hill of All

This past weekend YB and I trekked up to Elkton, MD for the annual Fair Hill. This gave me mixed feelings, as I would have rather been competing this weekend in the two star. However, I felt like I kept the blues at bay quite admirably, mostly through being tired, coffee, great spectating, coffee, crab bisque, and coffee. Oh, and being terrified of getting shanked in the sketchy motel. (At least we didn't stay in the motel where someone was murdered on Monday night...) And instead of using my pen as a tool to convey how the weekend, I created the following video blog.

I also taped a TON of riding. The next five videos include CCI** XC, CCI*** XC, Jogs, CCI** SJ, and CCI*** SJ. Youtube only allowed me 10 min per video, so I had to cut a couple of SJ rounds, but I tried to get much of the top riders.

Enjoy!

The Second Horse Itch

There comes a time in every rider's life when the eye starts to stray. Often it's during a period of rest or injury for their horse, and the lack of riding is slowly driving them mad. Sometimes it's because the horse is getting up there in years, or isn't quite tackling the course the way they should. Other times, it may simply be because the rider misses the ways of the baby horse.

At this point, many riders are struck with what I like to call the Second Horse Itch.

The pesky Second Horse Itch starts as just a little tickle. It may start at a horse show, when you see a particularly nice Novice horse float across the ground in front of you. It may start at your barn, when a fellow barnmate buys a new one and the excitement spreads around. It can even start in your daydreams, as you race across the Rolex course on a horse you made yourself (in your mind).

That tickle grows slowly, slowly. You might begin surfing the web for horse ads. At first, you search Dream Horse for all the horses worth $50k or more, finding your perfect upper level school master who takes you to the autumnal woods of Fair Hill and the balmy sands of Galway. With your perfect $75K purchase, you head to England to compete with William and Mary, and the Netherlands to joust with Michael Jung and the indomitable Sam. You ride down centerline at the London Olympics, having just performed the test of a lifetime. This dream horse and you are unbeatable.

Reality is an enabler for the Second Horse Itch. Reality brings you back from the horse-saturated landscape of Europe and places you firmly on solid ground. That four star packer is out of reach, financially.

But you can afford a baby.

It doesn't hurt to look, right?

It starts off with the fantasy of importing a phenomenal young three year old. You watch video after video of Irish Sport Horses cantering and free jumping. One or two catch your eye, and you again daydream, this time of pulling a fancy young horse off the trailer, freshly arrived from Ireland, with a moniker to match. You think of hacking the baby through the hills of Virginia, teaching him to be brave and strong. You think of bringing him to schooling shows and training him so carefully that his first debut at a rated show goes perfectly, and the pair of you spend a lifetime going perfectly up the levels.

The you look at the cost of a plane ticket for a horse.

On to square three. The Second Horse Itch needs attention, and at this point you can't help but scratch it.

You think of buying a young warmblood from a breeder in this country, a progeny from Brandenburg's Windstar or Salute the Truth. You drool over Riverman offspring and covet those sired by A Fine Romance. But the bottom line looms.

Inevitably, your mouse hand drags you to the CANTER sites, where you peruse the ranks of young OTTBs. Not all of them are to your liking, or even many, but finding the proverbial diamond in the rough is part of the game. At this point, the Second Horse Itch is a constant, nagging thought.

You find a thoroughbred to fit your criteria, who looks perfect on paper and in the photos. You even have his purchase price in your savings account. The Second Horse Itch compulsively pushes your hand to the phone, ready to call the trainer.

Then you look at your bank account. Work out your finances. Realize that the expensive part of owning horses is not the purchase price, but the upkeep. Sadly, you put the phone down.

But you come back to that photo of the young, OTTB daily. You both dread and can't wait for him to be sold. Finally, the ad goes away, indicating he is no longer available. You think you're free of the longing.

But you're not. There's always another Dream Horse, another import, another fancy youngster, another OTTB.

The Second Horse Itch never truly goes away.