goofball

Sam is such a doofus, bless 'is heart.

for those who don't know, Sam is one of the horses at the barn. he's four or five years old, so he's still young. i've been riding him lately, both in lessons and on my own time. i'm not leasing him though, he's still all Dawn's horse.

so, why am i riding him? well, simply this: Dawn has slightly less experience riding than i do, and she's a bit nervous. Sam is young, and even though he's trained, he's inexperienced. little things like consistent speed around the arena, keeping his head in one place at the trot, picking up his feet so he doesn't trip over himself every five minutes, flexing around turns, that sorta thing. he's laid back for such a young horse, but riding him isn't at all like riding Diamond or Romeo or one of the older lesson horses.

so, we have an underconfident rider and an inexperienced horse. see where it's going? Dawn gets nervous riding him, so she doesn't ride him much, so he doesn't get experience. when she does ride him, she's not sure what she's doing sometimes. it snowballs, and it's frankly kinda sad, since Dawn obvious loves Sam and wants to give him a good life, and Sam likes his work.
he does enjoy being ridden, believe it or not. yes, he gets tired and tried to pull my arms out of their sockets, but he doesn't get frustrated and throw temper-tantrums like Roxy does sometimes.

Dawn rides about the same time i have my lessons (when she does ride him), and Alethea told me when she explained the setup that Dawn started to admire my riding. Alethea must've recommended me to her, too. either way, a few weeks ago Alethea asked me if i wanted to ride Sam for a while. i'd get to ride a horse for free when i rode him on my own time, it would give Sam a much-needed workout with a more confident, more experienced rider, and it would hopefully make Dawn more confident when she'd get on him. a win-win-win situation, as i saw it. so i accepted.

Sam is entertaining to ride. his little "baby-horse" habits, as Alethea calls them, keep me on my toes. the few times i've been able to work with him, he's been getting better. he's getting used to flexing and doing serpentines and figure-eights, which are the bane of stiff horses. yesterday when i had my lesson on him, he did his best yet with the serpentines and rounding.

yesterday, we also did something relatively new: poles. Alethea put the big lengths of PVC-piping we use for jumps flat on the arena floor and had me walk and trot him over them. Sam got really into it, he was having so much fun! you should've seen him, it was a hoot. sometimes he can get a bit sluggish going into the turns and on the short sides of the arena, but rounding the turns at C he was stepping out like i've never seen him do before. he was having a blast going over those poles! it was so cute. once we graduate to actually raising the poles off the ground with the blocks, i can already tell Sam's gonna love jumping. he's still got the youngster's energy.

part of it may be the cold, but i think it was mostly enthusiasm. last night he didn't start yanking on the reins like he usually does when it gets close to time to end the lesson; he does that when he gets tired. and i didn't have as much trouble getting him going as usual, though i'm sure that was the cold.

he did spook when Haley, the one who had the afternoon shift at work today, dumped a wheelbarrow of stall-mucking refuse in the piles behind the arena. it took fifteen or twenty minutes to get him back on track and to make him stop shying away from that corner of the arena, but eventually he got over it. goofy horse.

y'know, it was really cold last night. down below fifty, almost forty degrees. but when you're riding you don't notice the cold. despite the common belief, the rider works just as hard as the horse. i work harder riding Sam than riding Roxy, 'cos Sam is the baby horse. (really he's not a baby anymore, but Alethea's pet-name stuck. Dawn calls him "Little man," which doesn't really help.) when i was grooming him after the lesson and putting his sheet on, i could see my breath. still inside the barn, though the only thing that does is protect from the wind. there's no temperature insulation in that place.

that's pretty much all i've got to say. spent the whole blog talking about something half or more of my readers don't understand much of besides the articles and conjunctions. oh well.