Day 79

It was way too hot out today for my liking and wearing jeans certainly didn't help, but what could I do? I have to save my cotton breeches for tomorrow's riding lesson.
I was actually pretty thrilled last week when I went on Dover's and got two pairs of Kerrit's breeches for less than the price of one until I got them in the mail and the "specially made Kerrit's fabric" turned out to be mega heavy. Well...I guess I got two nice pairs of winter breeches! Still stuck with my holey, singular pair of summer breeches. What a sadness. Paycheck, please be enough! Momma needs two new pairs of breeches!

My brother rode Nina today and it looked like he was doing a good job. I was lucky enough to be in the arena for that. I didn't ride Harry today; rather, I lunged him for a good 45 minutes. He's doing fantastically in the counter-clockwise direction. It's the clockwise direction that he gives me problems with. He was so good in the counter-clockwise that I was able to step away from the pole and lunge him for about 5 minutes and he behaved. Let's see, the number of times that he pulled out on me in the clockwise: probably about 6 times. The number of times those pull outs were rears? 3 times. I know he's playing games with me and being lazy in that direction. All I can think of to fix it is to keep working on it. At the end of it, he was doing a couple of good height rears where I had to run to one side to pull him back down. There was no way he was getting loose AGAIN. We finished pretty calmly, walk-lunging around the pole and he got a nice shower.

I was so thrilled to ride Brie today. She was fantastic. We did two warmup laps in the indoor and then headed to the outdoor arena. On her way out of the outdoor in an attempt to turn to the pasture, she ran back into the indoor arena but I just pushed her right back around and out we went. We went into two of the paddocks where the gate was left open and explored the trees next to the creek (she wasn't too keen on that) and then headed out to the front hay field. We were so polite, we even got to wave to a guy in his truck! We kind of skipped back to the main drive and then walked behind Gary's house and then back to the barn. She was so good today, it really made all my annoyances with Harry vanish.

On a non-horse note, I can smell changes afoot in the barn. Ray's been a real jerk to everyone lately and now he's starting up with Paco. Everyone is fed up with him and I'm surprised that he isn't gone yet, because Andre was no where near as disliked as Ray (he wasn't even disliked at all, it was his family situation that caused him to leave) and the amount of crap that Andre had to put up with over little things like not being there on Sundays is tremendously ridiculous compared to the pushovers that Ray's turned the boarders into. It's sickening. Ray's taking advantage of all of us (well, not us personally, we fired him) and trying to create problems amongst us boarders, not to mention the back-progress he's done with Gary's horses (which included gelding a formerly magnificent stallion that Andre had looking like a million bucks). I can only hope that he leaves after Nationals and that we can finally get some peace and a non-confrontational trainer, even if I won't be using him or her.