Relationships

Have been thinking a lot recently about how to make my relationship with my horses better. Take Kinna's recent problems, the first time I went to see her after she got sore, she didn't want me anywhere near her at first, she didn't trust me not to hurt her so I had to give her the choice to walk away and after trying for about 20 minutes to get a headcollar on her, I rethought it, and just went for a leadrope round the neck. Even this wasn't pleasant for her, she still wouldn't let me touch her head to put cream on, but she did let me treat her legs and under her tail.

Usually of course  I have daily contact with her so would it have been easier if she'd stayed at home?  She clearly didn't want poor Sarah anywhere near her but then, she doesn't know Sarah like she knows Ali and me.

I have just read a book by Joe Camp called Horses and Stress. He and his wife came late to horse ownership and because he never had any preconceived ideas on how to do it, he questioned everything and chose what he sees as the best way to keep his horses. So he keeps them out all the time in a herd, moving about, barefoot, unrugged, just like mine. One of the things he says is "Time in the saddle, in the arena, and on the trail are important. But I believe the most important time is in the pasture. Just hanging out. It has done wonders for us, and our horses". He does this thing called "No Agenda Time", more on that on his website, which is essentially being with a horse and doing nothing to it, expecting nothing of it, and waiting for the horse to choose to come and interact with you.

We all talk about the importance of groundwork, training, leadership etc, but before all of that we don't take time simply to be with a horse. We expect things, we need to do things, achieve something, teach them something, practise doing something, whatever.

Today something cool happened when I was down at Tanya's cleaning the paddocks. Her little pony, Polo, has real issues with being caught. He doesn't like adults, he doesn't always want to be caught even by his rider, he is very wary of strangers and often of people he does know. He can't really deal with any kind of pressure. For months he  avoided me, except for when I arrived with his food. More recently he has consented to let me go up to him, but hasn't exactly been happy and relaxed with that. Mostly I just need to check his fly mask, pick out bits of stray hay in it, that kind of thing. I have just got on with things around him, tried to put no pressure on him and leave him alone and I see him watching me out of the corner of his eye a lot of the time.

But today, he chose to do something he's never done before. He actually asked me to do something for him. After I'd picked the hay out of his mask, I scratched him on his wither like I usually do and then he took a few steps forward. I thought he was going to head off to the hay but her stopped in front of me and looked back. I get this a lot from Tari and with her it means "scratch my bum". So I scratched Polo's bum and he pulled the "that's good" face, the first time I have ever seen him do that.

Result :-)

Kinna update (with yukky pictures)

Went down to see Kinna again, last time her skin had gone all crispy and this time, it's all fallen off!! So she still looks like a welfare case but is itchy rather than sore and let us slather her new pink bits in Sudocrem......

You can really see how the black bits have stayed on and only the white skin has peeled off. I even got a chunk of it to keep ;-)

Strangely, the skin round her eyes has grown back pink, makes her look a bit different!

Squaw's blood tests show that she is allergic to St John's Wort which is the probable culprit so had been eliminated from the paddocks. Kinna is back on form and was bouncing around (even in this heat) playing with the mule. So we'll know for the future to keep an eye out for SJW in any paddock she's in......

Scorchio!!

So this is how the weather has been for the last week and it looks like there's at least another week of it on the way......

Great for holidaymakers, not so good for those of us wishing to actually do stuff with our horses :-/

So the other day we brought the girls back to the house so they could escape the heat in the barn. Elentari's first experience of being on a road went rather well, she spooked at the first car that went past, then decided as Sky hadn't reacted, these things weren't really worth worrying about :-)

Those white lines on the floor were definitely suspicious though.....

Then today, having brought Gandalf home too, she did her first ride and lead. Unfortunately, he has decided he doesn't like her much, and tries to bite her if she gets too near his head (I guess he's had enough after all these years of Sky and Kinna biting his neck) so she was a bit hesitant to follow along at first and kept trying to get back to Sky. Maybe I'll have to do a R&L with just the two girls, that could be, um, interesting!! But for a first time out, she wasn't half bad.....

She even went under the railway bridge......

....and jumped the ditch :-)

We had to go early to beat the heat, got out at about 7am, would have been earlier but we had to wait for the SNO to decide which shoes to wear. Apparently pink flowery sandals are just the thing on a bicycle....

Talking of footwear, Ali and I found some shoes to go with the black studded dress, how about these?

Half price too :-)

In other news this week we have been to see Kinna again and she's looking a whole lot better. In fact, she's showing signs of wanting to break out of the "invalid" paddock and rejoin the others. She was happy to have a headcollar on this time so she must be less sore.  Her skin is all falling off though, it's really weird, the stuff coming off is as stiff as a board and there's new skin growing underneath it.

The vet called with Squaw's blood test results whilst I was there, her liver has been affected by something which is why she's so photosensitive (couldn't get a needle anywhere near Kinns to take blood, but it's got to be the same, the symptoms are identical). Vet reckons it was millepertuis (new bit of vocab for me) - St John's Wort. But why would they eat that with all the grass in that huge field? Or is it just the pollen as there is so much more of it around this year due to the wet weather and it's flowering later than usual?

Why I hate shopping. And dressing up......

Later this month, my mother in law is celebrating her 70th birthday. And we can't get away with simply going out for a nice meal or taking the old dear on a day trip. Oh no, because she has gone to enormous trouble and spent an absolute fortune on organising what we have dubbed the Three Day Event. Now I have absolutely no problem with a solid weekend of partying (although my liver would probably disagree these days) but it's all the other poncing about that she seems to expect that is causing me grief.

Friday night, the dressage phase, will be fairly simple, a meal at the village restaurant, catching up with the huge entourage of friends and relatives who are jetting in from the UK for the weekend. Should be fun actually, might have to put on a clean, horse-hair free t shirt, maybe even one with out a rock band or sci-fi show logo on the front, but we should be able to manage.

The final day of the event should be fine too, as it's a hog roast in the garden. So maybe a second tshirt will be required. And there really will be showjumping as we are hoping to slope off to a comp in the morning up at the club before the do starts at lunchtime......

No, it's the Saturday that, in true cross country style,  will be the real test of endurance and ability to overcome large obstacles. Due to the words "formal dress" on the invitation, two words guaranteed to strike fear into my heart. Not just for myself, as being fat and over forty means I never look good in anything, whatever I wear. Which means I might as well be comfortable, which is why I usually slob around in jodhpurs and the aforementioned t shirts. Why go to the trouble of getting some posh clothes on? Because posh just really means uncomfortable. Skirts and dresses are not comfortable, I don't care what anyone says. Shoes that aren't joddy boots or trainers are not comfortable. And also not suitable for wearing near horses so why would I bother? But OK, I can probably scare up something I wore to a wedding a few years ago that has been gathering dust in the back of the wardrobe ever since so job done.

No, the real problem is Aliénor. She is a true chip off the old block and likes to wear jodhs and tshirts. She never wears dresses or skirts either. In fact, she'd probably be happier in a tux. As would I, frankly. And anyway, what exactly does "formal" mean? Black tie? White tie? Tails? No idea. Friend of ours has an amazing Tuareg outfit he got in Niger, he was wondering if this would be formal enough...?

But I digress. It was with a feeling of dread that I took Ali shopping the other day to find some "formal wear". I rarely ever enter a French clothing shop, and here's why:

 And these are just a small sample. There is some serious crap out there at the moment. Florescent orange looks good on my hi viz "don't run me over" gilet but on a dress?  And why would anyone make a dress out of loud floral fabric then decide it isn't busy enough so add random buttons/embroidery/ribbons/sequins til it looks like a Christmas tree?  I mean, I thought the French were supposed to be fashion icons, so why are they wearing this stuff?

Anyway, after a couple of hours wandering around in a daze and totally failing to find anything Ali would be prepared to wear out in public, we happened on a boutique (that's just a posh word for dress shop) selling some vaguely decent stuff and she tried this one on, which met with approval. Because it's black and has studs! And were it floor length probably wouldn't look out of place in Servalan's wardrobe.......

It looks a lot better on, but she's not prepared to model it before the Big Day.....
So flushed with success, we returned home, feeling relieved. Until someone said "you'll have a job getting shoes to match". We have to get shoes as well? Aaaaarrrrgh.........

Warning: hardly any mention of horses in this post......

So we all know I'm a bit of a sci-fi geek. OK, more than a bit, actually a huge geek, have been ever since Kerr Avon first hit our screens back in 1978 (and I remember my parents used to insist on me getting my very boring history homework done every Monday night before I could watch Blake's 7). I love it all, Star Wars, Babylon 5, the Battlestar Galactica reboot, Star Trek, especially the reboot (but not DS9 or Voyager, too boring). Then there's the funny stuff, Red Dwarf, Spaced, Galaxy Quest.....

So how did I manage to miss Firefly for over 10 years? Just watched it for the first time and there's spaceship AND horses! And some complex, dysfunctional  characters, witty dialogue, great quotes and an amazing ship. I love Serenity, in how many other spaceships do you get to see bog roll? Mal Reynolds actually goes to the toilet!! Never saw Roj Blake ever do that........

So obviously, the whole thing got cancelled after just one series. Bummer. Still, at least I have the Blakes 7 reboot to look forward to. It could be amazing if they get it right, so why hasn't anyone asked Joss Whedon to do it? And I want Richard Armitage to play Avon, he's already got the black leather look from Robin Hood and he was a total badass as Thorin Oakenshield......

That's why I love all these series so much really, for the badassery. Who wouldn't want to be able to say stuff like

"If anyone gets nosy, you know, just... shoot 'em."

Or

"Staying with you requires a degree of stupidity of which I no longer feel capable."

Or

"you get more with a kind word and a two-by-four than with just a kind word. "

Or

"Ten thousand light years from nowhere, our planet shot to pieces, people starving, and I'm gonna get us in trouble?"

Plus there's the (often outrageous) outfits, the big guns, the fights (especially in Firefly, I think Mal Reynolds gets beaten up/shot/tortured in pretty much every single episode) the high body count, the heists, the sex, the monsters......

Dunno why people think being a geek is so dull, personally......

And sometimes there's even a horse or two :-)

Out of my comfort zone.....

So the people up at the stables are on holiday for a couple of weeks and guess who got the job of doing riding lessons?

Decided to put the girls through the torture I'd suffered at their age, namely jumping with no stirrups and reins, and naturally, they loved it....

And so for the second session this week I saddled up the old boy to see if I could have a go without falling off. I'm no good at jumping, never have been, (more on that here) but they seemed to be enjoying it and I thought if I'm supposed to be teaching them I ought to lead by example......and it did look like fun......

And actually it was!

I even pointed G at a bigger jump before I'd really given myself time to think of a reason not to and we managed it OK

Be a while before I could contemplate tackling that one with no stirrups though.....

In other news, Sarah tells me Kinns is looking a lot better and Sheila came to visit yesterday and asked me to sign Seraphina over to her so now I know our star girl has a brilliant forever home. Happy :-)

Poor baby Kinna

As you may recall, Kinna went off down to my friend Sarah's for summer school a few weeks ago. Not for the first time either, she and Sky were there for the summer a couple of years ago, with no problems at all. So we were a bit surprised when Kinna suddenly started getting a scabby nose. Sarah thought it might be sunburn at first, but then it spread to the rest of her head and her legs which started to swell up.

She also has these strange ridges on her skin

Just after she started getting these symptoms, Sarah's coloured mare, Squaw, got the same, but only on her white bits. The vet came, and Kinna was her usual "cooperative" self, which meant it took two and a half hours to get her treated :-/. After the struggle they'd had to get a needle in her she decided after that she didn't want anyone doing anything else to her, not even putting cream on her.

So Ali and I went to visit her yesterday and it took us about 20 minutes to convince her to let us put a rope round her neck and take a look at her. No way was anyone going to be putting anything on her head. But looking like this, who can blame her?

The vet came back and took bloods from Squaw but couldn't get anywhere near Kinns, not even after we'd put sedative in a feed for her. She remembers the EIA incident only too well......and has never been good with needles, ever since the vet hurt her doing her microchip.

So it looks like she's going to have to  come home, trying to arrange that for next week. It's bizarre as she spent the whole summer there in 2011 with no ill effects, and Squaw has lived there for years and nothing like this has ever happened. The other 2 equines are dark skinned and absolutely fine. Could it be the buttercups/St John's Wort? Maybe there are just many more because of the wet weather we've been having......