Busy.

I am currently on spring break, but between work and a new horse-sitting job, I don't have much time in the day to ride. As far as the horse sitting job goes, it is ridiculously easy. Nice barn, two horses, light stall cleaning, grain at night only, etc. Both horses are very fancy, and one looks like Cruizer's twin! The only difference is she's a lot shorter, darker, and has just a star and snip instead of the full star/stripe/snip that Cruizer has.

I rode Cruizer a couple times this past week. On one of the days I planned to ride out around the property before doing our arena ride. I took him into the arena just to trot him around for a minute before heading out (was waiting for my trail-partner to finish tacking her horse up too). As soon as I asked him to trot he started wagging his head from left to right, arching his neck, and snorting. He didn't settle down, so that was the end of our trail plan. Instead, he got lunged hard for a good 35 minutes, and then I got back on. I had a pretty decent ride on him.

Last time I rode him I put him on the lunge for about 3 minutes, and he barely wanted to jog, so I opted to try riding without lunging. In the summer I do this every day, but during the winter he is a lot spookier and hyper, so I always lunge him just to be safe. He can do some pretty impressive aerials.

That ride on him was amazing. His canter was super lazy though so we ended up doing about 15 simple lead changes to get him moving. It worked. His canter ended up being very nice and fluid.

After our ride we did a little showmanship, and he nailed all of his pull turns, including one that was a 180 degree turn. He finally is understanding!

I have the feeling that one of my goals for 2011 (finish Cruizer in showmanship i.e. pull turns) will be reached in the next couple of weeks.