Barn Pixie

I mean, really - uuurgh.

all the finances into the spreadsheet, the inter-monthly subtotalling fixed for the ENTIRE YEAR, and the secondary sheet with craft stuff on it as well.

I hate that part.

Thank you so much, all you cheerful enabling horse owners. I did have horses as a child while growing up, so I do understand the whole vet/farrier/board trifecta. You are completely correct that a lease would be a good idea, or even a half lease.

However - the job was not there, so no horse. I do kind of need finances to offset the equine, it wouldn't be something I could exactly sneak into the household budget. I think, having not had this particular horse drop into my lap, that I will continue with Plan A which is Find A Teacher, and assume everything else will flow from that.

In other news, the lessons continue, and the remembered skills are returning, as, unfortunately, are the bad habits (holding too hard with the hands, looking down, hunching forward) although the number of moments of forward lean has been aggressively reduced, mostly courtesy of yoga (my yoga teachers say "lead with your heart" and "side body long, inner body bright" and "BREATHE" and it kind of follows me around in the rest of life).

I rode another aged mare this time. She was Arab, with vertical neck evasion and tendency to quickness. It took the whole lesson to get her to come down into my hands and bend around my inside leg. Actually what it took was a long hard shoulder-in to the left, with tiny circles when she was falling apart. What I forget about short horses is how tiny a circle they can turn, so 10 m is not yet small enough. Also once I carried (without using) a whip she moved off my leg much more handily and forward into my hands better.

We spent a lot of time doing bending things at the trot - big circles, smaller circles, 3 and 4 loop serpentines, leg yield off the rail to the quarter line and back, and these shoulder(s)-in(s) (how DO you pluralize those?) We had nicer bends to the right, but she drifted out more. And two odd things: The first was near instantaneous down transitions, it didn't feel like a hollowing, but more like a cow pony stop - head and haunches down, back up, almost skid into it. I couldn't get forward motion into the down transitions for most of the lesson - we might have had one nice one. The other was that she had no speed regulator. Most horses get a nice trot going, and if I stay steady, so do they. She had none of that. I felt I was either trying to slow or encourage her for the entire lesson. It was tricky to balance between keeping her steady and letting her roll along - telling a horse All The Time faster,slower,here,there,now,no,maybe,go,stop gets wearing on both the horse and rider. They need a break to just carry themselves, and the rider needs a break to see if any of the corrections have been heard. But in and around that, we had no two consecutive minutes going the same speed. Probably my fault.

I didn't think to ask how much of her unevenness between tracking left and right was due to my unevenness tracking left and right. I'll have to think about that over the next ride.

GAH!!

the biggest trouble with writing down everything you spend is that at some point you have to tabulate it and attempt to make some sense of it.

the biggest pain in the butt about writing down everything you eat is that you have to write down everything you eat, and for all that it takes only minutes of the day, it is still a pain. plus, it is kind of embarrassing, or it entails lying to myself which is just too stupid to contemplate.

The theory is that writing down what I spend makes me more aware of it and I spend less. The theory is that writing down what I eat is that I pay attention to it and I eat less, and healthier, (and lose weight, and it should cost less)

The question at the end of my day is... does this work? and what do I do with the little cute notebooks full of scribbled dates and numbers that tell me what I bought?