Solo bike ride and a good lesson

I went on a solo bike ride yesterday. I had a lot to drink on Saturday night, so I was really not feeling up to riding, but I forced myself to get out there anyway. I kept it somewhat short, but I was actually feeling pretty strong. Although, I did get dizzy every time I stopped at stop lights, heh.

After cleaning stalls on Saturday, I had a lesson on Diamante ("Di" for short), their 23-year-old Grand Prix gelding. The horse is pretty big--about 17 hands--and he's somewhat hard to figure out. I know he's entirely capable of being ridden lightly, but he just feels so heavy and clumsy. The lesson was very good, though, and makes me want to keep coming back for lessons. I just can't afford it, though. So, anyway, we did some shoulder-ins, leg-yields, and even a few half passes! At the end of the lesson, we did a piaffe! :)

We were having issues with the shoulder-ins to the left. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to turn your shoulders to the left, and keep your hips straight (or even worse, to have to turn your hips to the right)? Sit in your chair with your feet flat on the ground. Now turn your shoulders (basically, your entire upper body) to the left, but keep your lower body/hips "looking" straight forward, with your weight equal on both seat bones. If you're like me, your hips wants to follow what your shoulders are doing, or you want to shift your weight--but you can't let that happen, or the movement will go down the drain. Now, with your shoulders to the left, try turning your hips to the right. Makes you feel like a contortionist, right? Now look and see how many people are watching you. Haha. Anyway, imagine having to do that on a trotting horse--it's difficult. I had to do that several times in shoulder-in to the left, because in that direction, we kept drifting off the track, and in order to correct it, I had to turn my hips to the right. It was really hard to do.

Apparently Aragon (the energetic little three-year-old I rode a couple weeks ago) ran off with a few riders last week. I can see him doing that. He tends to get a little uptight/scared, so if a rider gets on him, and he starts acting squirrelly, and the rider gets scared, it can spiral downward pretty quickly with a horse like Aragon. Richard made a mistake, in my opinion, by putting a "kid" on Aragon. While he's a smart horse, he's still very young and too spooky to put an inexperienced rider on. Even their big oaf of a colt, Antares, who wouldn't hurt a fly, is still too young to have a rider on him that doesn't know much about riding young horses. Oh well.

So, I have a big tack trunk that I keep on the deck of my apartment. It's not water proof, but it is pretty water resistant, so I've never really thought twice about it. I went to clean my bridle yesterday, opened the trunk, and saw that the saddle pads on the top were pretty damp. Not good, but whatever--they're just saddle pads. I dig a little deeper, and things are getting wetter as I go further down. I spot what I *think* to be my bridle, but that can't be it, because it's all sticky and there's like... stuff growing on it. I move some more equipment over so I can see just exactly what that thing is, and yeah, it's my bridle. I've never seen any bridle so covered in mold in my life--and I've seen some pretty nasty bridles. I mean, there was mold just CAKED on it. And the little leather keepers that keep the ends of the leather straps from flapping around were practically glued into the straps. :( It took me a good 45 minutes just to take the bridle apart. The metal keepers on the reins were so rotted out that I broke them, and had to throw them away. :( I took another 45-60 minutes cleaning the bridle and oiling it. It's so dry that the oil has soaked entirely throught the leather, and it's dry once again. Sigh. Hopefully I can salvage it, as I really loved that bridle. The reins were difficult to part with, because I loved those reins, too.