One month left…how is it going?

Tristan

• Get to First Level – November was pretty much a total loss. Tris was lame for a good chunk of it and then Thanksgiving happened. And I’ve been just slammed with orders.
• Take 12 lessons – done
• Volunteer at 6 events – officially canceled, sigh.
• Get & share 1 video per month of rides – My November video is of my lame horse, does that count?

Other

• Finish house interior work – Not going to happen. Damn.
• Finish funding emergency fund – DONE!
• Pay off vision correction surgery – DONE!
• Try 24 new recipes – DONE!
• Write 20k on Morgan book – I won’t hit this goal but I have made really good progress.

Business

• Get to 500 sales on Etsy – 534 sales! Holy SHIT that holiday rush, though. I am still digging my way out.
• Separate website and social media for business
• Take accounting class
• Develop 3 new patterns
• Have a total of 7-10 items for sale

Is my horse lame and if so, how bad, and if bad, where exactly is the problem?

Let me spoil it for you a bit: yes, my horse is lame. He came out on Sunday last (11/10) with a hitch in his right hind. It was most evident in the walk, but did not seem to be causing him a great deal of pain or other problems. Mostly it looked like a mechanical hitch: he just wasn’t using his leg as thoroughly or as through as he might.

On the longe, he was sassy and pissy and freely offered a canter when I asked him to move out. In the trot, he just shortened and quickened his hind legs rather than take an obviously off step. (I mean…feature or bug?)

We gave him two days of bute and then I went out again the following Saturday to longe him again and here’s what I got.

(Ummmm, the thumbnails are upside down for some reason but I promise, the video is right side up.)

So…still a touch off. You can see it most evidently in the walk tracking right.

My feeling: he’s tweaked something up high, like stifle or SI. Possibly he did it rolling or in turnout. It is getting better, and I am so stupid busy right now he can certainly afford some time to laze about and heal.

The plan is to check him again on Friday morning and at that time make a decision whether to add him to the lameness vet’s list for Monday.

In the meantime…it’s snowing and cold and I have enough Etsy orders to keep me working far into the night, every night, which is great because yay people like me, they really like me! and also it means I can set aside some money for the vet visit if it happens. But also: tired.

I keep describing this to people as an accidental renovation, which then causes them to make a disbelieving face…but I promise, I did not intend to do this quite yet!

About three weeks ago, the upstairs tub faucet started to drip. A good drip, the kind that was easily filling a bowl every 2-3 hours. Some months ago I had already had a conversation with a plumber about some intended changes to the tub to get a proper shower in it, and when I called to have him fix the drip, he said “well, sure, but you know we can do the shower part for basically the same cost as fixing the drip?”

Sold.

So, about two weeks ago, I stripped the first layer of wallpaper and opened up the wall above the tub to get access for the plumber. That’s where we stand right now. In the coming weeks I’ll strip the remaining wallpaper, paint the walls, remove the existing tile, replace the tile, paint the vanity & other things (towel rack and toilet paper holder), and think very hard about doing the floor.

I’d love to have it finished by mid-December, but we’ll see.

Before & in progress photos below.

 

Tristan

• Get to First Level – Forward is coming along, and I’m really happy with our transitions from free walk & stretchy trot back to the more collected gaits
• Take 12 lessons – 12/12 and done!
• Volunteer at 6 events – 1/6, not going to add more at this point
• Get & share 1 video per month of rides – I got video in October but it’s still on my trainer’s phone so…I saw it but you can’t.

Other

• Finish house interior work – Some progress on this! Upstairs bathroom is started and will finish in November, which leaves just three rooms to go. So it won’t finish in 2019 but it has moved along at least.
• Finish funding emergency fund – DONE!
• Pay off vision correction surgery – DONE!
• Try 24 new recipes – DONE!
• Write 20k on Morgan book – Up to 10k total, and in December I’m hopefully going to draft out an article that might hit 10k words to complete this, but overall – I’m feeling surprisingly good about this goal

Business

• Get to 500 sales on Etsy – 439/500, this is officially within reach and the holiday push has begun!
• Separate website and social media for business
• Take accounting class
• Develop 3 new patterns
• Have a total of 7-10 items for sale

I’m going to try to pick these up again! After my dad died, I lost a lot of my motivation to keep working on the house. It was one of the things we did together.

But in the last two months or so, slowly, slowly, I’ve started to pick up and plan projects together.

One of the things that needed to be addressed quite urgently was our deck. It turns out when the geniuses who built it placed the posts for the stairs, they did so by digging a shallow & narrow hole, pouring some concrete into it, sticking the post in, and calling it a day.

Not only is that not code (though I suppose it may have been at the time) it’s not a good way to ensure longterm stability.

So, in August, my brother came up and we took apart that portion of the deck, re-seated the posts in proper sono tubes to a proper depth with a proper width of concrete, and then rebuilt the deck.

Except…we forgot one piece. So part of the deck started sagging again. Then this morning, my neighbor came over to help me lift that last piece, add the wood bracer back in, and now it’s more or less set – and I just need to make a trip to the hardware store for more screws to finish securing it.

 

Home stretch! It had to be finished before the snow starts falling, which is…depressingly soon.

L. said it a little while ago: after bright resurgence (due, among other things, to the final collapse of LiveJournal)(damn, I miss LJ), horse blogging is starting to fade again.

I’ve been putting myself on a bit of a media diet, and have been trimming out dead blogs from my RSS reader, as well as a variety of things I just don’t need to be exposed to (I’m looking at you, Harvard Business Review).

But checking and reading blogs is still very much a part of my daily routine; trimming doesn’t mean I don’t want to read them, just that I want to focus on quality content that makes me think.

So, to that end: recommend a horse blog or two to me. What are you reading now? Whose blog should everyone be reading?

I’m still thinking and working hard on my posting mechanics: how do I move as quickly as my trainer wants me to, and build a better and more stable posting base as we re-establish Tristan’s baseline for forward and through?

For about a month now I’ve been attending CrossFit classes locally. (Well, not quite CrossFit, but an intro/on-ramp/learning class that is designed to teach CrossFit basics as well as do a workout.) I am…not really an exercise person, but I am enjoying it. And I’ve already noticed that it has given me additional strength and body perception. So my plan is to keep going with it as long as I can; it’s really, really hard to fit in schedule-wise and budget-wise but it’s also become very important to me very quickly. So, one more end of the candle to burn. (I need more candles.)

I’ve been working hard on a couple of things:

• flexibility and strength in my hip flexors, and thinking more of my hips as a hinge, warming them up by almost over-following the walk and then using a controlled open and close during posting
• focusing hard on stillness in my lower leg; my trainer took a video of me posting and I was horrified at how much I was still flopping my leg around and over-exposing him to my leg aid. So a quieter lower leg, sometimes almost off the saddle entirely
• thinking a lot about weight down through my leg as distributed, not just into the stirrup. Early on, I think, we over-focus on “drop your weight deep into your stirrup and down through your heel” and for me that developed into a lifelong habit to rely too much on weight in the stirrup. Because the more I weight the foot in the stirrup the more I use the stirrup to shove me up out of the saddle, which leads to more movement in my lower leg and if that’s where all the thrust is coming from – it’s not a stable base to move from, it’s too tippy.
• stupid #@!$#@$@ hands and keeping them still which means opening and closing my elbow joints
• sliiiiiiiightly tipping forward to stay off his back to encourage more hind end activity. it feels like I’m going full hunter but I’m probably only adding 1 or 2 degrees from straight. it’s also a better place to react from if he does something like trip or leave a hind leg behind so instead of caught behind the motion and sitting deep and back for a second I can maintain a stronger position over the saddle and flex my arms more easily to allow him the space he needs to have his dramatic moment but then bring him back quickly.

Whew. Boring, sorry, but it’s been an intensely thinky and physical couple of rides for all that we’ve mostly just been doing trot sets once we warm up.

 

I’ve been able to stack quite a few lessons recently, so here are a few good takeaways from recent ones.

• if I feel like he needs more bend (especially to the left) what he probably needs instead is to have his haunches moved over and be traveling straighter
• shoulder-fore to a turn on the diagonal, repeated in sequence for 5-6 times, is a great way to sharpen him up and get him lighter off his shoulders
• to quote S., “both of your hands are too low when they’re on the inside, but your left hand is criminal.” so yeah.
• in general, focus hard on hands closer together and higher up and more actively following, not buried in my lap waiting for, I dunno what, an imaginary down bank or something?
• if he offers to break to canter when I’m asking for more in the trot, then ask for the exact same thing I’m asking for in the trot – forward, into the bit, and supple

Kind of a thinky dressage-y post ahead; you’ve been warned!

One of the things I’m working on hardest with Tristan right now is establishing a new baseline for forward. He is not a naturally forward-thinking horse (pretty much the opposite, actually), and when I was starting him I was coming off some bad experiences – so I unfortunately throttled any of his possible natural tendencies early.

Right now I’m starting off every ride with isolating and re-confirming driving aids. It’s occasionally ugly, but spending 10-15 minutes saying “yes, legs mean go immediately” and repeating that for driving seat and clucking, can make a big difference. We start on the buckle – I pick the reins up only if he’s going completely to the middle of the ring – and once he’s responding and moving out I take in enough rein just to feel his mouth and start over. By the end of that he’s usually warmed up enough to really pick up the reins and start asking him to bend and be supple.

(side note: some of you who have horses who just…do stuff?…for strides and strides at a time? and don’t need to be re-convinced every other stride? like they just go…straight when they’re pointed straight or…they keep walking after you’ve asked them once?…what is that even like?!?!?)

One of the things S. has been hardest on me about in lessons is my posting.

It goes something like this: in an ideal forward horse, you’re using the energy and thrust of the horse to propel your body forward out of the saddle. You’re kind of recycling that energy around and through. When I’ve really been in a groove with this it feels like my posting is more horizontal than vertical, and like I’m barely coming out of the saddle at all.

On Tristan, I have two big challenges in posting the trot.

First: my posting mechanic is reactive rather than active. I’m following his motion and staying out of his way, rather than recycling his energy. I’m using my own muscles to post and focusing on rhythm to match. That means it’s a relatively slow post, and based more on caution than active riding.

Second: at any given second, it’s very possible for Tristan to trip either in front or behind. He’s just a klutzy horse, especially before he’s been put together; if he gets too on the forehand he’ll just randomly put a front leg in an imaginary hole. If he gets left out behind, it feels like the whole back end vanishes and then in the next second he surges forward to make up for it. When I’m sitting that’s fine – I follow it and I’m pretty used to it. When I’m posting, if that happens when I’m up out of the saddle, I tend to drop him and abandon my posting rhythm because it’s really easy to catch him pretty hard in the mouth when all of a sudden half the horse underneath me is gone. And obviously I want to avoid that.

I’m making him sound like a lot of fun to ride, huh?

Anyway: in service to both of these things, S. has me trying to actively post faster. The things preventing me from doing that are both of the former things – and also some of my own body mechanics. She thinks I’m posting too up and down – like my back is too straight. And that makes more distance for me to cover when I’m out of the saddle, and thus it’s harder to move faster. So she’s got me tipping forward a bit – to me it feels like way too much but apparently it is only like an inch or two.

I had a small breakthrough last week but I’m not sure if it’s a correct one. I was wearing some super-sticky silicone full seat breeches, and concentrating pretty hard on my body mechanics, and found that it was much easier for me to post more quickly if I almost…use my calves to pull myself back down into the saddle.

I’ve been playing with that feeling more, and thinking about Jen’s recent post about posting mechanics, and about lowering yourself into the saddle versus letting gravity bring you down. That makes a lot of sense to me – but I can’t wrap my head around the quickness of it. I just can’t get out of my own way to move as fast as I’m meant to, without pulling myself back down. And I’m just not sure that using my calves to do that is the best thing to do.

I did bring it up with S., and she’s pondering it and we’ll address it further in my next lesson, but…in the meantime, any ideas?

Tristan

• Get to First Level – I’ve run through each piece of a First Level test individually. We don’t have much of an extension, but the stretchy circles are terrific. The necessary level of collection comes and goes, as does the degree of forward.
• Take 12 lessons – 12/12 and done!
• Volunteer at 6 events – 1/6, no more yet
• Get & share 1 video per month of rides – I set everything up to get video of a dressage school and the camera batteries were dead BOOOOOOOO.

Other

• Finish house interior work – I’ve been dragging on this, sadly. Not sure it will get done, but I’m hoping to make a push in October.
• Finish funding emergency fund – DONE!
• Pay off vision correction surgery – DONE!
• Try 24 new recipes – 24/24 and DONE!
• Write 20k on Morgan book – I need some quiet time (HA) to take this to the next level, as I have 4 talks on this scheduled in October & November. I’ve started reading some of the horse books I asked about in my recent post for comparatives

Business

• Get to 500 sales on Etsy – 398/500, bracing myself for the holiday season…
• Separate website and social media for business
• Take accounting class
• Develop 3 new patterns – calling this done
• Have a total of 7-10 items for sale – canceling this one