In which Zorro gets a rosette for being special

[glenatron]

Last night, Zorro had the evening off from work but got groomed to within an inch of his life. It took an hour and most of a tube of Cowboy Magic, but sleepsy_mouse got from this:

To this:

It was quite a change- by the end his feathers, mane and tail were lustrous and shining and the rest of his coat had been shredded and scrobbled and brushed and generally polished to a fine sheen. That done we headed home for an early night, leaving them out in the field for the warm Spring evening, although Zorro had a rainsheet on to stop him from making his coat too muddy again.

We got to the yard at 7am in the pouring rain. It was absolutely tipping it down. Zorro's rainsheet is waterproof in theory much more than in practice, so he was pretty wet as well. We towelled him off a little, put a chilly Small in his stable to dry off for a couple of hours, and bundled into the lorry to go to the showground, a couple of miles away in a nearby village.

We were the second people there, by about two minutes, arriving with a little over an hour in hand. By this point the rain had stopped and so we unloaded and took the opportunity to show Zorro around. He was very interested by the cows who were watching with vague interest from the neighbouring field, so I took him over to meet them. When we are riding out the very smell of cows is enough to stop him in his tracks, but here he just got very tall and looked at them and after a while we could go a little closer and look at them until after a couple of little approaches he could touch noses with them, at which point one licked his nose. After that he was quite unconcerned with them. We took a little while to comb the dryer parts of the pony then got him tacked up and me dressed in my proper camp dressage clothes and I hopped on.


Why yes, we are a very camp dressage team.

That is actually the only picture I have as yet. There may be more later if I can work out how to make my dad's video camera talk to a computer.

I was surprised, actually. I expected Zorro to be very up and on his toes, but after the first couple of minutes he was very calm and serene. This meant my strategy of "concentrate on accuracy because the event will give Zorro lots of extra impulsion" had a major flaw.

Not to worry, though, because the outcome was that we did a slightly slow test, but we mostly stayed in the right gait except for a couple of times, and mostly in roughly the right place except when Zorro thought that the arena markers needed to be stomped on as we trotted past, and I did manage to rememeber the whole thing quite well. Big thanks to whoever suggested drawing it out for that- it was a big help.

So looking back at my original post on this I can see that having gone there, performed the correct test and nobody having died counts as extra-double-highscore! This was very nearly the Judge's opinion as well, except that their take on extra-double-highscore was 42.06% ( the .06 is important! ) which placed us at around 8th in the class. There were eleven people originally signed up for it, but I'm not sure they all turned up.

The score sheet ( it was a Classical Riding Club test, so the scoring isn't quite the same ) contained a lot of fours, a couple of fives, for "Responsiveness and Attentiveness" and "Balance" on Zorro's part, "Accuracy of Test and Figurework" on my part and a single eight for "Harmony between Horse and Rider". What pleased me there was that those are probably the things I have been really working on. I was also very happy that the Judge's comments included "quietly ridden" - that's pretty much my goal in riding right there.

As it my first ever show and as far as we know also Zorro's we got a special rosette. You can tell it is special because it says so.

It was really good fun and I'm sure there'll be more of this in future. Having a goal in our schooling forced Zorro and I to make progress and make it fast and actually we came through on that.

Also sleepsy_mouse was an excellent support team and a really big help.

We were home before midday, putting the ponies back out in their sunny field. Zorro's response to going out without a rug was predictable:

"You appear to have cleaned me by mistake- let me fix that for you."


After that, all that remained was for us to pop home, stop at the local cafe for a late breakfast, sleepsy_mouse to take Small out for a rampage on the common, me to walk from our house to the yard, us both to go over for a lesson with Julian and then return to feed the ponies (who were somewhat put-out to find a lot of Duke Of Edinburgh awards students camping and making a fuss in the next field but pleased to see dinner), and then home in time for tea.

As you might imagine, I'm pretty sleepy now, but I don't see how we could have fitted much more into one Saturday...

Comments

[glenatron.livejournal.com]

Thanks. It will be interesting to see how things come out on a more regular test next time.

Ahem.

Assuming there is a next time, of course ;)