Bloghop: 2010s Photo Challenge

2010

 This decade started a whole lot of changes in my life. Gwyn was already in it but 2010 saw me saying goodbye to her and my zoo job in Florida as Eric applied for and got a job with Boeing and they moved us to Washington (for the first time)

2011

This was the year that Cheri's house got hit by lightning and she was desperate to find a place for all three horses. I was offered Gwyn and within the month she was shipped to me, arriving a few days after her birthday in May. This picture was taken the day she arrived.

2012

This year was when Kaylee arrived. Gwyn immediately treated her like part of the family.

2013

Having a young baby kept serious activities to a minimum but the barn I was at was great at providing fun clinics. We tried cattle sorting and never had to leave!

2014

This was the year I tried endurance for the first time! We both had a blast, doing a 15 the first day and a 25 the next.

2015

This year was marked by our move to Michigan and fulfilling a lifelong dream of having a horse in my backyard. This picture was the first day Gwyn and my new donkeys spent at home. Poor scraggly Arwen. She's loving life in her new home!

2016

Hazel was the highlight of this year and once again, Gwyn proved her weight in gold and immediately decided Hazel was hers to protect. She apparently likes nuzzling babies.

2017

 This year I spent working as a microbiologist and enjoying life on the farm. Like watching Hazel share dinner at feeding time or torturing the animals with a neighing demon skeletal pony.

2018

This was the year I finally got to take Gwyn around a cross country course, returning to my Pony Club roots, and we had a blast. It also really emphasized that we needed more dressage work.

 2019

And now this year. We moved back to Washington and this time I moved Gwyn myself and that's best represented by this picture by Devil's Tower with Gwyn.

Christmas Recess and RIP Blanche

The 

We went south to Myrtle Beach (via car) for Christmas, hence the radio silence. I tend to not do bloggy things without at least a laptop and I didn't want to use my parent's computer. All of the critters were in my neighbor's capable hands.

The kids had a good time, I got sick AND injured (though I managed to do quite a bit of exercising which is great for me!) and I'm still recovering from the injury.

Meanwhile, it seems that Saffron decided to be a troublemaker while I was gone! Neighbor texted to inform me that Saffron went on walkabout one of the days, but was caught and returned.

Of course, when we got home (2 am, decided to drive all the way through rather than stop for the night thanks to a vomiting child...) I was rudely woken up early by the news that Saffron was out AGAIN.  And then got a text that she was out a second time in the same day.

It's been about a year since her last escapades but we had discovered her means of egress and blocked it. Her method is once again a mystery.

 And then last night I got a message from Cheri that said that Blanche, Gwyn's aunt, had passed away in the pasture.  They found her down in the yard, with erratic movement that the vet later said indicated a possible heart attack. She was gone quite quickly, which is a blessing. She was a grand old mare, just a few months shy of 27 years old and had done a LOT in her life.

My friend put it best:

3 hours ago, we lost one of the most phenomenal, athletic, and beautiful mares that I have ever owned. Eric and I came home from an afternoon out, to find Blanche down and uncoordinatedly ‘galloping’. In the time it took for us to find her, and call the vet, it was over, and she was gone. The vet says she had either a heart attack or an aortic aneurism; the ‘galloping’ movements being one of the classic signs. Either one, didn’t matter. It was over super quickly.

While I am incredibly sad, I am glad that Eric and I got to be her final owners. And tho I was raised on a horse farm, Blanche taught me so very much. She’s the first senior horse I’ve ever owned. She loved men and children about as much as she loved peppermints and chicken salad sammiches. She was careful with toddlers and new riders, and a fancy, saucy ride for the more experienced. She was always careful when she took a treat from you, and never stepped on someone unless she thought they deserved it. She only kicked me once because I touched her udder while applying bug repellent. She never kicked Eric. She had 7 babies, of which Nyx is the last one. She excelled at combined driving, got 9’s on her trot in driving dressage, and qualified for World. She and two sisters pulled their original owner 3,200 miles across the U.S. to raise awareness for handicapable horse men and women. She also loved to tilt and joust, tho she wasn’t too keen on mounted combat. She loved a good stall, and several times she busted out of her pen and parked herself on a neighbor’s porch. She was an unofficial member of the BCSO Mounted Posse.

Stonewall Blanche, big leopard Stonewall Sporthorse mare, you almost made it to 27. You were amazing. Gonna miss you so very much.

I dug through my past photos to find the ones of Blanche. They were taken when film was still better than a cell phone.

That's a young Gwyn on the left, Blanche in the middle and Blanche's daughter Nyx on the right

But at least she's with Stella again. <3 

And now I'm finishing my vacation glued to the couch, foot elevated and KT-taped while watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy. And I'm going to hug Gwyn tonight and teach the new foster child next door everything she could ever want to know about horses.

Day 7 - Favorite Ribbon

Day 07- Your favorite ribbon won at a show and why


From Clover Ledge Farm

This, for me, is really easy to answer. Clyde and I struggled through Pony Club. As an off the track pacer with only Pony Club instruction we made slow progress through the levels and showing. There was one 3 Day PC Event where I was begging the Technical Delegate to let me continue with the Stadium Phase (It was a true 3 day, Dressage on the first day (DQ'd because I brought in a whip), Cross Country on the 2nd Day (too many refusals) and then Stadium.

Anyway, this isn't about that event, but it does kind of inform you, this horse and I struggled. I remember being at Pony Club camp and we had to switch horses and I was practically gleeful at how easy it was to canter the horse around and around and around the arena.

So back to the story at hand.

Every fall, a farm would host a schooling show with flat and jump classes. It was very popular with the pony clubbers. If you entered the series of the same category you could qualify for a champion ribbon.  You had a flat class, W/T/C, then jumping and maybe a third, I can't remember it's been well over a decade and a half. But I entered all the classes. I dolled Clyde up and into the ring each time we went.

He jumped his heart out, we were on point and we came away with the Reserve Champion Ribbon. Some of our critics were there watching, people who would ask my parents why they didn't just get me a better horse when they saw us struggling in lessons. At this show, they congratulated us on how far we'd come and how well we did. Suck it, Glastonbury. I was a chubby middle class kid on a free horse who could barely canter competing against upper class kids who wintered in Wellington and Ocala on 5 figure ponies. And I fucking won.

That is my favorite ribbon.

Day 5 Blog Hop for NaNo

Day 05- Your first fall

From Clover Ledge Farm

I'm gonna break this up into two categories:  My first fall and my first fall off of Gwyn.

My first fall was when I was taking lessons at UConn. We were learning how to canter or do sitting trot or something and I just could NOT figure it out. They pretty much had me drop my reins and hold onto the pommel of the saddle to pull my butt into the seat.

Long story short, it didn't work. I didn't really develop a good seat until much later and many more lessons on Clyde. I did have a spectacular fall at UConn though, that ended with me at the ER and on crutches because I bone bruised my hip. Thankfully that's the worst I've ever had falling off a horse. It's not the worst I've ever had horse related though, that honor goes to Clyde and getting him to cross a bridge and he stepped on top of my foot. Not just the toes, the whole foot. No break but I couldn't walk on it for a while and used crutches until it healed.


Now, the story about the first time I fell off of Gwyn is hilarious.  Gwyn was still basically a baby and being broken and this was in Florida when she still belonged to Cheri. We were riding in an empty lot of land that was for sale and it was all overgrown grass. Like past the draft horse belly high. Gwyn and I were in the lead, just trying to enjoy ourselves when Gwyn tripped. Her feet had gotten tangled in the grass. She went down to her knees and I kind of rolled over her shoulder and gently landed on the ground.

Gwyn didn't know what to do. This was the first time anyone had fallen off her and boy was she concerned. Like checking up on me concerned. She hadn't moved her feet since I'd left the saddle and was sniffing me. I backed her out of the tangle and went in search of some kind of elevation in order to remount. But this is Florida and old orange groves and that was easier said than done.  We walked back out to the dirt road, which was a few inches lower than the grass but it wasn't enough to give me the height advantage I needed to remount.

Cheri ended up getting off to give me a leg up. She hoisted and up and into the saddle... and over the other side I went. Falling off Gwyn for a second time in less than ten minutes.

At this point Gwyn just looked perplexed and impatient. Like, "Come on guys, this isn't a very fun game, get back to riding already"

We ended up using the bed of a pick up truck from Cheri's husband as he drove by and all was well.

NaNoWriMo: Blogger Style!

Day 1 - When & Why You Started Riding

Via Clover Ledge Farm

 My mom has pictures of me at the local fair, you know, the one that comes to the suburbs and sets up in a parking lot, not even in a field because there's no open field big enough, riding the ponies that go around the modified hotwalker at a glacier pace.

I was obsessed with horses for a long while. I pestered my parents enough that my birthday presents were often trail rides at the local-ish riding stable. And then finally a series of lessons through the summer program at the University of Connecticut when I was ten. And I'd beg to go to camps where I could ride horses.  I have a picture somewhere of me at Asthma Camp (no joke! lol) that happened to have horses and I got very attached to a nice morab.

Then a lady at my church kind of heard that I was horse crazy. She invited me out to her farm where I met Baron and Pooh Bear, an ancient chestnut morgan gelding and a nearly ancient spitfire little black shetland. She taught me how to groom them while my Dad cleaned their stalls. It was under the pretense that I would draw Baron and Pooh, since she had won that in a church fundraiser auction. I did eventually get her a drawing.

But then one day a new horse showed up. He was a big, beautiful bay Standardbred and we just... connected. He was off the track, but he had the most wonderful heart and personality. I was the only one who could touch his nose and his whiskers and he whinnied every time he heard my Mom's car.

I started riding him. And he was mine to ride. No one else's. Then Jane, the old lady, suggested that I join the Pony Club. They were Proper. She had already taught me how to groom the Proper way. 

Clyde

So I joined the local Pony Club and started taking regular lessons. Jane would pick me up after school in her big red diesel truck and I would ride, either in her kind of grass arena or on the trails behind her property that connected to a local state park. I had miles of trail to explore. I was distance riding before I knew what distance riding even was.

My 'arena', not level, single dirt track, a couple of homemade jumps

 But I joined Pony Club and Clyde and I learned together. And we evented. Clyde LOVED cross country. Not so much dressage. He had trouble cantering and not pacing (off the track, remember) but we made so much progress together. He's who I credit with how well I ride now.

Standardbreds Can't Jump? I never knew that was a thing. This horse was excellent at it.

I threw my all into Clyde and Jane and Pony Club. They helped me survive my teen years. My one regret is that I wasn't able to take Clyde for his retirement. He lived out his days with Jane, she was forever homes for nearly all of animals so I know he was loved until the end. But she always said that I could have him if I had a place for him. I got Firefly too late. He had already passed.