And then we had a cat!

 I've never really been a cat person. There are barn cats on the farm, and my sister has cats, but growing up we always just had dogs. Still, I could appreciate kitten cuteness - even if adult cats still kind of puzzle me. I don't really speak cat. Yet.

When we moved to the farm, we quickly amassed a wonderful menagerie of animals. We had two dogs and a pig when we moved in - the pig was unplanned - and I vowed that we would get no more animals. That was another dog, another pig, and four bantams ago, not to mention the beloved's growing chicken farm, although they don't count as pets because they're a business. (Even if they have names and are extremely cuddly!)

Over the last year or so, cats started to come up in conversation from time to time. I was growing more enamoured with them and it seemed like our adorable cottage just had to have a contentedly purring cat curled up on a pillow in it somewhere.

Still, the beloved was fairly allergic to cats as a little boy, and we didn't really discuss it seriously until the mouse appeared. I'm pretty cool with the majority of critters - I enjoy spiders, I love snakes, and when a toad comes hopping into the house, I'm the one who scoops it up and takes it outside. But mice and rats? I can't. I turn into a shrieking, leaping, climbing, howling city slicker in 0.4 seconds flat. What was more, the mouse got into the flour, and then into our clothes, and that was the point where the beloved had had enough. We agreed that I could have a cat.

His eyes!

That is where Noah came in. And even though it'll be a long time before he's big enough to catch a mouse, we are nonetheless thoroughly in love.

His toe beans!!

Noah didn't come from an ideal situation, so we got him a little too young - he's around 6 weeks now. As a first-time kitten mom, the first day or so were pretty nerve-racking for me, but Noah has handled everything with absolute aplomb. He already comes over when he hears my voice, purrs anytime one of us strokes him, and - after a false start or two - uses his litterbox like he's been doing it all his life.

I expected adjusting to the dogs to be a little bit of a challenge. Our dogs have chased the barn cats, but they also coexist peacefully with my mom's house cat, so I knew they could do it. Still, they're not quite sure whether tiny Noah is a snack or a friend just yet. He has a crate for now where they can see and smell each other but Noah has hiding places and the dogs can't hurt him, and actually they've been making good progress.

As for the beloved, he was pretty adamant at first that this would be my cat and my problem. He was still leery of his allergies and didn't want too much to do with Noah... for about half an hour.

The beloved has the gentlest heart of anyone I know. He spent about ten minutes playing with Noah and a piece of ribbon, and now he's hooked. Actually, I think he spends more time with the kitten than I do, and is constantly sending people photos of "his" cat.

I'm still just a few days into kitty ownership, but so far, I love it. Noah is a ray of sunshine and such a happy little addition to our home. He spent an hour or two yesterday afternoon stretched out on my lap, fast asleep in the winter sunshine and purring up a storm every time I reached down to pet him in between my work. It was uniquely soothing.

Most of the time, obviously, he's still a tiny imp of destruction and chaos.

Welcome to the family, sweet little Noah kitty. You're so welcome here! 💜

God is good!

Wordless Wednesday: Friesians and Flowers

And a whole lot of other things, too, of course.

This little sale pony is just too adorable. And this kiddo is going from strength to strength, even though it freaks me out a little that he used to ride in a pony pad not so long ago and now his stirrups are a hole down from mine!

Cute as a button

This divinely beautiful mare has been going so well lately! She's a strong woman, and we're forging the kind of bond you can only ever have with a strong-minded mare.

These ladies came to see the Friesians, and the big group of mares warmed my heart when I called them in the field and they all came running up to the gate together

I absolutely love riding the Friesian livery at my yard, too. Someday I'll have my very own one! A girl can dream.

Holly is one of the kid ponies I ride once a week to keep them tuned up

We have a cat now. Noah will be the subject of his own blog post soon!

Mirror selfies with the cutest little gelding ever. He comes to the gate of the field when I call him, and I just can't get enough of him!

My garden is still blooming like mad even though we've had a few good frosts now. These lobster flowers are my favourite

The canary creeper

The aloe thingy? Honestly I have no idea, my whole garden would be dead if it wasn't for my man remembering to water it (and copious amounts of moo poo making me look like a better gardener than I actually am)

Pretty gazanias

We're only about one month out of the summer grazing, but so far, so good with Skye.

She escaped her field last week and went tearing down the hill looking more sound than she has in years!

Titan completely tuckered out after a long afternoon of driving me nuts while I'm trying to teach lessons

Lessons have been wonderfully full. The kids have interschools coming up, and everyone's been working hard under these perfect skies.

My favourite human sorted out a bigger pen for my little Sebrights. They are like tiny jewels and bring us so much joy!

We spent the weekend farm-sitting for my parents, which included looking after these cuties.

One of my working students grew up to run a riding school nearby, and works off her horse's livery by doing odd jobs for me. She clipped this little gelding, and he came out absolutely amazing.

Golden dapples on silver.

Silver dapples on gold!

My dear man farms with indigenous layers, and they're just too beautiful in the morning light!

Another happy, chaotic lesson afternoon drawing to a close. Winter is good and necessary, but wow, I really can't wait to have my long summer evenings back! It's dark by five-thirty right now.

Scripture reading has grown very poignant to me. I'm reading the last few psalms David wrote during his life, and they are so intimately focused on God's holiness. I will be reading (or rather listening to) Psalm 119 over the next day or so, and I really look forward to experiencing the longest chapter of the Bible in this new context.

God is good!

Wordless Wednesday: Winter is Coming

 I am drowning in deadlines (what else is new) and just don't have the mental energy for a real post right now - so how about just a whole load of photos?

We had our first major frost yesterday morning and it's definitely feeling like winter. The days are short, but absolutely glorious - hardly a breeze, sunny skies, temps around 20 Celsius. The morning sun hits the bed just right, and Isaiah loves this.

We got too attached to Viola to squish her, and besides, only about four or five South African spider species are venomous enough to hurt people. We finally found out last week that she's a funnel-web nursery spider - and completely harmless to people and pets. So she continues to live on the ceiling!

Hera, one of our four Sebright bantams. They are the most adorable little creatures I've ever seen!

Our newest livery, a totally adorable OTTB mare, was absolutely foot perfect for her first ride in our arena. She was perfect the next time for her 12-year-old novice rider, too. Sometimes you find good ones.

Enjoying the sunshine on Vega

I really love these Bridle Boutique leggings - they are unbelievably comfy!

This photo cropped up in my memories. Turns out that it's been five years since the first time I (or anyone) sat on Lancey. Happy riding-versary, Lancey! He makes me smile like this a lot more these days.

The drop-dead-gorgeous Dante.

MS Lady Erin is a little growthy right now, but she's starting to look like a real horse - and move like one, too! You've got to love all that rabicano.

I'm absolutely loving my garden right now! Even though we're well into autumn here, there's still a lot of things blooming - lobster flower, canary creeper, and this weird aloe that blooms super red. The day lilies are also faithfully making a perfect white flower every week or so. This was just a big ol' heap of moo poo (a side effect of living on a horse/dairy farm), and I love that it's covered over with pretty purple flowers now. The lobster flowers are indigenous succulents, too, so they don't care if I forget to water them, which happens way too often.

More substantial content coming soon! I had a great lesson on my favourite Friesian mare today, and it'll be very interesting to write it down.

God is good 💜

A Bunch of Groundwork

 Thunder still has two more weeks of walk work only before we can get back to real work after all his ailments. His sweet itch is a lot better, but unfortunately right now only steroids are really getting it under control and stopping him from rubbing himself raw. At least it's nearly the end of the season now, and the itchiness is definitely linked to insects, so we'll only have to give him a couple more shots before the bugs die. I'll have to save up this winter and get him every fly boot, fly mask and fly sheet under the sun to avoid having the same issue next year - but I think it's the bot flies, hateful things.

Anyway, I digress. Since we can only do walk work, and one of us is kind of a butthead on hacks, we've been getting inventive with what we can do in the arena to spend some time together and maintain whatever strength we can.

Backtracking to my last lesson two weeks ago, I'd been struggling with installing the lateral work on my young Friesians. They're smart, and they were getting the hang of the sideways thing, but not the sideways-and-forwards thing. So Coach J taught me how to do more lateral work in-hand. I've always done turns on the forehand/yielding the quarters, but by the end of three lessons with the babies, J had me doing shoulder-in and leg-yield all over the place. If they could only step away from the whip pressure in a turn on the forehand, they didn't yet understand what it really meant.

"Once your horse will do it immediately, no matter where you ask him, that's when it's established." - the oracle himself

life is too short for matching socks

Also, Coach J said that if I get Thunder's in-hand work really good, he'll teach us both to piaffe in hand. Who doesn't need a piaffing Thunder in their life? We spent this week working on some shoulder-in, leg-yield and turn on the forehand in hand, as well as rein back for his sticky stifle, and he's obviously been amazing. He kicked at the whip once or twice, his very annoying go-to resistance, but that diminished a lot as we went on. I think we might finally be achieving his understanding of the whip as an aid instead of a punishment (and the misunderstanding was my fault in the first place anyway).

Thunder has been enjoying himself, especially because there are so many treats involved. I've interspersed a bit of playing around at liberty into his sessions as well. The first attempt backfired when he climbed under the arena gate to get some nice green grass and I had to do the walk of shame to fetch him in front of half the riding school, but after that he decided that he'd humor me and stayed right by my side.

so blurry, but I love his little face here

Of course, groundwork is also a huge part of my daily routine since I back all the baby Friesians (they are THE EASIEST horses to back! So trusting). We also have a baby in for backing here at the yard, a very special one. MS Lady Erin was bred here years ago and sold as a weanling, and when her owner was no longer able to keep her, my bestest friend (and, hilariously, Lady Erin's namesake) stepped in and bought her. I'm the lucky person who gets to put her under saddle now.

She is only four and still has some of the baby uglies going on, but I'm really happy and impressed with how she's developing. She also has a really sweet and chill personality especially for a half WB, half TB chestnut mare.

screenshots for days

I also schooled Lancey on Wednesday and he was quite brain-tired by the end, so I planned to take him out into the fields yesterday. When a bit of spare time rolled around, though, there were a million kids tacking up and I didn't trust them not to get themselves squashed without supervision, so I lunged the little guy instead just for some exercise.

I really should lunge my own guys more regularly. My young Friesians lunge at least as often as they're ridden to build up strength and fitness; in fact, their ridden work is almost entirely brain-work instead of body-work, so that I'm not overloading brain and body in a single session. But with my two boys, who are a bit further along in their education, I'm honestly kind of lazy about lungeing them. I don't get to work them as often as I would like and when I do, I really just want to enjoy some riding.

I think the solution is to teach my lovely groom to lunge with the neck stretcher, then even when my schedule doesn't go according to plan, he can still give them some exercise.

Anyway, Lancey looked lovely and strong, and he was accepting the contact so beautifully! Plus when one of the kid ponies broke loose and started running around, he stood angelically and watched - being held by a sibling who had probably never handled a horse before - while I caught the pony.

In other news, old Skye is looking AMAZING right now. We stayed on top of controlling her itchiness this summer, so her tail - which she rubbed out almost completely a couple of years ago - is growing back pretty well. She's also fairly fat now, about 7.5/10, but she needs all the weight she can get going into the winter. She and Magic are in my last grazing field, and there's still some grass there, but I think it's starting to get too hard and dry for her old teeth. It's a tell-tale sign when she starts standing next to Magic while he grazes at times; her teeth don't hurt, but I think it just gets exhausting to be trying to grind the harder grass down with those stubby little nubs.

Magic is a fat pig on grazing alone, of course

I bought her a bag of Speedi-Beet in the hopes that it'd be soft enough for her to chew. At first she WOULD NOT touch it at all, but we mixed it with some muesli for a few days and now she's eating it nicely for lunch. I've also added some extra lucerne chaff to her senior feed for breakfast and supper. Ultimately I think we're going to have no choice but to feed her soupy chaff and Speedi-Beet as the majority of her roughage intake if we're going to hold her weight this winter.

the rest of the old age home - Toy Town (21) goes for weekly hacks to keep his old joints going, but Conspicuous (25) and Legacy (21) are fully retired

Today's Scripture reading took me to 2 Samuel 21, where there's a terrible famine throughout Israel. The Psalm that went along with it was Psalm 42, which was written by the Levite musicians instead of King David. The first few verses ring very familiar, but reading it chronologically gave me such new eyes to the context in which it was written. When these psalmists wrote "My soul thirsts for You", they were literally starving. "My tears have been my food" isn't just poetic, it's literal. Yet even in times of famine, these people were hungering after God more than anything.

bonus pic: my favourite weirdo and his crazy little Titan 💜

Mastering the Turn on the Haunches

There are some movements that one can more or less fluff through in Elementary even if one has zero idea what one is doing if one is blessed with an obedient horse - or at least, there were for me. Arwen reliably scored well for her extended walk and her leg-yields and her walk-to-canter transitions, and even I could figure out from the Internet how to halt and be immobile for five seconds.

Turn on the haunches is absolutely not one of those movements, and so ever since I rode my first sloppy, hindlegs-crossing, one-foot-pivoting, unbalanced turn on the haunches, I've been getting 4s and 5s reliably regardless of which unlucky equid finds itself stumbling through the movement with me.

The fact that teenage me thought it would be a wonderful idea to teach poor Thunder to be a reining horse, and accordingly installed the clumsiest and slowest spins known to man, was not even remotely helpful. Thunder thinks he knows exactly how to do a turn on the haunches: swing around as quickly as possible, preferably with at least some pivoting on one hind foot for good measure.

It was a few months ago that Coach J, who must have been ready to poke his own eyeballs out by that point, really addressed the turn on the haunches in one of my lessons. And now with Thunder being in light work for two more weeks before we can return to full work, and one of my favourite Friesians also coming back from some time off with walk work, it's the perfect time to finally tackle this awful, hateful, no good, very bad movement.

Anja is not quite at that stage of her education yet but would like the blogosphere to know that she's adorable

I thought my main problem with the turn on the haunches was that I was either riding a sloppy half circle, with my horse crossing the hindlegs, or a swinging turn, with one hind foot planted and pivoting. While this is true, Coach J was quick to pinpoint the actual problem: I wasn't actually keeping any kind of a walk rhythm. I was just sort of... putting on my leg and panicking.

When I tried to hold the walk, keeping the horse forward through the movement, I just made poor old Thunder jiggy and confused. So coach gave me an exercise that I have ground to absolutely l o v e and that is rapidly becoming a part of my everyday walk warmup.

Navarro is the king of turn on the haunches, thanks for the help big bro

The exercise goes like this:

1. From the corner, let's say H, ride a leg-yield left to the quarter line opposite S. It's important that the horse is really straight and stepping off the right leg. (For me, I have to work hard to make sure I'm sitting on my left seatbone and staying stretched in my left side, instead of collapsing onto my right seatbone. I have to think about leaning left to make myself straight).

2. At the quarter line between I and S, ride a full turn on the forehand left, thinking about making a tiny volte with the horse's nose instead of keeping it still.

3. Without slowing down, ride a half-pass left directly out of the turn, continuing on the diagonal line.

4. At the quarter line between L and P, ride a full turn on the haunches or walk pirouette left.

5. Immediately out of the turn on the haunches, continue in half-pass to F.

The main point of the exercise is never to lose the walk rhythm, not for a single step - and, beyond that, to keep the tempo constant, too. I found that the feeling of traveling across the diagonal and the fluency of going from movement to movement helped the horses and I to think of the turn on the haunches as a more fluid, forward-thinking movement instead of an abrupt change of direction the way it's written in all of the tests. Plus, being used to doing a full 360 degree turn on the haunches makes it really easy to ride the half turn in the Elementary and EM tests.

this mane is so amazing

Navarro and I worked on this today, and I hope to play with it on Thunder this Friday as well. Thunder and I have been doing some in-hand work today, but I'll post more about that tomorrow.

I was listening to Psalm 13 today and it happily coincided (or rather, God-incided) with one of my favourite resources, Daily Grace Co's podcast. Today's episode was about lament as a way to process grief within the context of living as a child of God saved by grace in a world broken by sin, and Psalm 13, as David mourns over the way his own son and his own nation betrayed him in 2 Samuel 13-15, is just such a sincere cry of a heart that feels forsaken yet trusts that God is always good.

bonus pic: my newest livery is a Friesian too and I am totally in love 💜

Psalm 13[a]

For the director of music. A psalm of David.

1 How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?
    How long will you hide your face from me?
2 How long must I wrestle with my thoughts
    and day after day have sorrow in my heart?
    How long will my enemy triumph over me?

3 Look on me and answer, Lord my God.
    Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death,
4 and my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,”
    and my foes will rejoice when I fall.

5 But I trust in your unfailing love;
    my heart rejoices in your salvation.
6 I will sing the Lord’s praise,
    for he has been good to me.

Footnotes

1. Psalm 13:1 In Hebrew texts 13:1-6 is numbered 13:2-6.