Cooler in court

I spent most of the day in an air conditioned courtroom. It was a blessing to be at work :-) By the time I got through that and the grocery shopping, a cooler front was moving in and I've managed to ride Tia and Tetley this evening.

Tetley lunged perfectly sound, I can't see a thing wrong with him. If he is well tomorrow and it's cooler then I'll be loading the lorry. He did a bit of superb walk work and then some "trampoline trot" - where you ask them to go very low, but still round, and keep it slow, and it feels like riding a trampoline. He did it brilliantly so I stopped and gave him his beloved shower :-)

Superhubby spent part of today buying 4 wooden jump poles from the local agricultural merchants. We went up with our decrepit old Landrover to fetch my poles home last night but all but one had disappeared. We brought that home, chucked it onto the arena - and watched it break neatly into two :-(((((( Anyway, Superhubby went and bought some, cut the 12ft poles down to 10ft to match my plastic ones and we jumped Tia over some tiny jumps using them.

She was in a completely different frame of mind from yesterday and tried hard. I decided that she has to work it out for herself, and to a great extent left her alone. She got worried when we made it a double (still tiny) but after knocking it a couple of times she realised that with poles that heavy it HURTS, and started to work out what she had to do to clear them. She kept sticking two short strides into the double so we reduced it in distance from 25 ft to 23 ft and then to 21 ft to find the right distance for her.

All in all a MUCH more promising day than yesterday. Which is just as well because I have a great start time for Malpas on Saturday week and I'd really like to get on a cross country this time....

C