This may amuse

[glenatron]

On Wednesday we were finally confronted by Zorro's arch-nemesis, the hedge monster, as we rode along the doom-laden side of the school and- with a fearsome rustling sound - a small blackbird popped out of the hedge, landed on the post by Zorro's head and glared at us. Although the noise perturbed him slightly he didn't seem overly nervewracked by the bird itself which wasn't a whole lot bigger than one of his furry ears. The blackbird was clearly a somewhat lairy individual though as he hopped from fence post to fence post as we went along, glaring at us.

The memory of this trauma obviously stuck with Zorro because on Friday we had a bit of excitement on the ground and then, after calming down from that, a couple of spooky moments when I was riding. For your entertainment, some of these were captured on low-quality digital camera video:

Watch on YouTube

I'm well aware that my lack of riding skill and experience will stick out like a sore thumb to those of you who have expertise in that direction so I'd prefer not to have my manifest failings pointed out unless they're subtle ones I'm not likely to be conscious of.

I was quite impressed watching the second spook frame-by-frame to see what an angle Zorro drops to and just how much scenery is visible between me and the saddle three frames later...

Comments

[glenatron.livejournal.com]

I'm just working to get him confident, to make sure that we don't stop working when it happens and ignore it as best we can. Once he feels brave he wont do it unless he has learned he gets some benefit from it.

He was a lot worse for a while than he is now- things were really exciting a couple of months back.