All calm-ish again.

I was worried about Tia last night because her foot was raging hot. She walked in the gateway through wet cold mud and yet only minutes later that mud was warm enough to comfortably scrape off with my fingers! I figured she was fighting a nasty bug in there somewhere. I checked her late in the evening and she seemed perfectly happy and was standing on it. To my relief this morning, she was fine. I squeezed her heel and some custard ran out of the hole in her foot :-$ . I syringed it full of hydrogen peroxide and turned her out for a mud poultice. Tonight she seems an awful lot more confident on the foot.

Zip is so cute, he comes up and stands right near you if he is let loose. In the morning when I go out to teh barn, the other two do that too, and then he is dancing around the outside trying to see how he can get in too. I end up with three of them with their heads right next to each other, about a foot away from me. It’s so sweet :-)

I rode Jazz, inside when I would have liked to have taken him out, but the wind was just too strong. I am worried about cramping his paces in such a small space, so I decided to do slow work concentrating on bend and obedience. He is beginning to test evasions, but it is reasonably easy to work out what he is doing because you can feel everything so clearly. And then it’s just a matter of when and where to push or hold, and a bit of guile to make him work through and bend like you want him to. He did some nice work, and ended on some almost perfect halt. I was pleased with that because it has been a big thing with him to evade halt and it shows a real change of mental attitude to offer what he did today.

I have looked at the schedule for tomorrow and the low height class I was going for is a competition not a clear round. That means that he is allowed only one refusal, and at the second he will be thrown out of the ring. Since we didn’t manage to go anywhere and jump school this week, and the class start time would mean leaving home at 8.30, I don’t think I can be bothered to go. We know he will warm up well, he always does, so I can’t see what I’d be gaining. Superhubby could also do with a stress free morning after trying to put right all the storm damage.

C.