A fine weekend
25 May 2009 23:34![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
glenatronWe've packed quite a bit into the last week or two- ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sleepsy_mouse went off on holiday last week and I sneakily enlisted a bit of help to get the bedroom redecorated in her absence, which we just about managed. Our internet connectivity problems are temporarily fixed by a 3 mobile broadband modem, which offers pretty good performance and should fill the gap for the ten million years it takes the bumbling nincompoops at BT to do all their obscure little voodoo dances required to switch on a phone line that is already switched on and works fine. I would swear at them, but to be honest I'll probably just detail the facts at some point and allow those to speak to themselves.
So anyway we redecorated and I narrowly avoided electrocution in my investigations of what those weird plastic things on the bedroom wall are- whatever they are they are live and full of electricity. Probably they are wall-lamp sockets that go back to the house's high-tech-for-the-1950s original design.
Then on Saturday we piled into the car and went to visitskiesfirepaved who is entirely as charming as she has always seemed through the interwebs.
Sari (skiesfirepaved ) currently has charge of a big, charming, Shire mare by the name of Beatrice in addition to her own retired pony Pepsi and she very kindly took us out on a circuit of her village with sleepsy_mouse and I taking turns to ride Bea on the way round. She really is a lot of horse!
Crossing a ford
Posing in the big field near where the ponies live. Not a great pose as Beatrice was on the way home and really didn't see why I had asked her to stop and look grand for a moment when she could be getting back to her field and trashing it through the medium of scratching on stuff. The trouble with an itchy shire horse is that they tend to break everything if they are itchy, but the nice thing is that you are their instant best friend if you give them scratchies.
After our little perambulation we set up in the village and had a picnic that Sari had procured. It was very tasty and featured various inquisitive animals, some odd jelly puddings and fortune cookies. Apparently I'm going to take a chance on something in the future. Really, fortune cookie? That is a revelation.
We were staying at my uncle's house near Peterborough, so we set off there in the evening and it was nice to showsleepsy_mouse around another place I spent much of my childhood.
In the morning, we picked up Sari and headed down to near Luton where Tom and Sarah Widdicombe were teaching a clinic to watch a day of that. It was really nice to see Tom and Sarah again and to watch them work with some different horses and riders. It was also amazingly hot in the arena, which is panelled in so it can be used for Polo training and was in full sunshine the whole day. I narrowly avoided burning to a crisp by wearing long sleeves and a hat and using lots of factor 30. I think Sari andsleepsy_mouse both got more toasted.
Tom teaching in the sunshine. I think Sari got a bunch more pictures, so I'm hoping she'll share a few of those. She has a proper camera with an epic lens that makes mine feel rather inadequate. It was interesting to see them working more with developing flexion by asking the horse to bend rather than working in a back and forwards axis as they might have a year or two back. It was enjoyable to watch and I certainly came away with some ideas to work on around using that bend but it would have been nice from my point of view if there had been some more varied work, just so Sari could have seen a few more different things. That's not a criticism, mind, clinics are all about the job in hand, it's just that most people were at a fairly similar place so they were working on quite similar jobs.
It certainly set me up in the mood for next weekend's clinic.
I came home to find that I had some new stirrup irons and saddle pads waiting for me, so I could go and play with my new saddle, so today we had a bit of an experiment with that.
The saddle seems quite comfortable for pony and I enjoy the feel of being back in western tack, although I'll need a few rides to get back into sitting properly on it.
I think the stirrups are still a little long here. The irons are actually almost exactly the same size as the ones I had but they are a tiny bit wider across the tread, which was enough to make all the difference for my feet.
I still have to get used to the feel of all that fender between my leg and my horse, certainly makes it a little harder to use more subtle leg cues, but the structure certainly feels more secure when mr grumpy decides to throw his heels in the air a bit, which he does when I ask him to go away from his happy corner of the arena into the big wide scary world down towards "M"...
We embark on our next Steve Halfpenny clinic on Wednesday, through until next Sunday, which will be the next time I ride which is a good chance to talk through this tack with a bunch of people who know western equipment through and through and make sure we've got it all configured as well as we possibly can.
sleepsy_mouse went off on holiday last week and I sneakily enlisted a bit of help to get the bedroom redecorated in her absence, which we just about managed. Our internet connectivity problems are temporarily fixed by a 3 mobile broadband modem, which offers pretty good performance and should fill the gap for the ten million years it takes the bumbling nincompoops at BT to do all their obscure little voodoo dances required to switch on a phone line that is already switched on and works fine. I would swear at them, but to be honest I'll probably just detail the facts at some point and allow those to speak to themselves. So anyway we redecorated and I narrowly avoided electrocution in my investigations of what those weird plastic things on the bedroom wall are- whatever they are they are live and full of electricity. Probably they are wall-lamp sockets that go back to the house's high-tech-for-the-1950s original design.
Then on Saturday we piled into the car and went to visit
skiesfirepaved who is entirely as charming as she has always seemed through the interwebs.Sari (
skiesfirepaved ) currently has charge of a big, charming, Shire mare by the name of Beatrice in addition to her own retired pony Pepsi and she very kindly took us out on a circuit of her village with sleepsy_mouse and I taking turns to ride Bea on the way round. She really is a lot of horse!Crossing a ford
Posing in the big field near where the ponies live. Not a great pose as Beatrice was on the way home and really didn't see why I had asked her to stop and look grand for a moment when she could be getting back to her field and trashing it through the medium of scratching on stuff. The trouble with an itchy shire horse is that they tend to break everything if they are itchy, but the nice thing is that you are their instant best friend if you give them scratchies.
After our little perambulation we set up in the village and had a picnic that Sari had procured. It was very tasty and featured various inquisitive animals, some odd jelly puddings and fortune cookies. Apparently I'm going to take a chance on something in the future. Really, fortune cookie? That is a revelation.
We were staying at my uncle's house near Peterborough, so we set off there in the evening and it was nice to show
sleepsy_mouse around another place I spent much of my childhood.In the morning, we picked up Sari and headed down to near Luton where Tom and Sarah Widdicombe were teaching a clinic to watch a day of that. It was really nice to see Tom and Sarah again and to watch them work with some different horses and riders. It was also amazingly hot in the arena, which is panelled in so it can be used for Polo training and was in full sunshine the whole day. I narrowly avoided burning to a crisp by wearing long sleeves and a hat and using lots of factor 30. I think Sari and
sleepsy_mouse both got more toasted.Tom teaching in the sunshine. I think Sari got a bunch more pictures, so I'm hoping she'll share a few of those. She has a proper camera with an epic lens that makes mine feel rather inadequate. It was interesting to see them working more with developing flexion by asking the horse to bend rather than working in a back and forwards axis as they might have a year or two back. It was enjoyable to watch and I certainly came away with some ideas to work on around using that bend but it would have been nice from my point of view if there had been some more varied work, just so Sari could have seen a few more different things. That's not a criticism, mind, clinics are all about the job in hand, it's just that most people were at a fairly similar place so they were working on quite similar jobs.
It certainly set me up in the mood for next weekend's clinic.
I came home to find that I had some new stirrup irons and saddle pads waiting for me, so I could go and play with my new saddle, so today we had a bit of an experiment with that.
The saddle seems quite comfortable for pony and I enjoy the feel of being back in western tack, although I'll need a few rides to get back into sitting properly on it.
I think the stirrups are still a little long here. The irons are actually almost exactly the same size as the ones I had but they are a tiny bit wider across the tread, which was enough to make all the difference for my feet.
I still have to get used to the feel of all that fender between my leg and my horse, certainly makes it a little harder to use more subtle leg cues, but the structure certainly feels more secure when mr grumpy decides to throw his heels in the air a bit, which he does when I ask him to go away from his happy corner of the arena into the big wide scary world down towards "M"...
We embark on our next Steve Halfpenny clinic on Wednesday, through until next Sunday, which will be the next time I ride which is a good chance to talk through this tack with a bunch of people who know western equipment through and through and make sure we've got it all configured as well as we possibly can.