I loff my bay mare

Saturday night I snapped a few pics after the rain quit. Today I wanted to grab a quick ride to stretch our legs. Its quite probable it will be the last ride before Kenlyn. I always cut any conditioning off after the weekend before a ride anyway but I like to have an easy ride or 2 during the week do make sure all the systems are working. I AM an engineering nerd and get to write that. So I catch Shade and got her brushed and tacked up in the LJ pad, Mia is sleeping by Sadie's water tank and I'm thinking I might get to ride w/o having to wrangle her. Nope she heads for the gate when I bridle Shade.

So I put Mia's collar on her and transfer the leadrope from Ole -he wears it to help motivate him to not run off if he decides I'm taking too long or might even skip if I'm doing other things first. Get everybody through the gate and past the neighbors' yard. Their Dachshund is out with them and Ole spooked up something from their driveway corner. It looked like a rabbit but the motion seemed more like a cat running. Ole did quit when it ran into the other neighbors pasture across the road, whew.

I had been pondering whether I should lead Mia all the way past the road into the subdivision after she ducked there last week when I was riding with mom. But I decided to let her go and just get on Shade. Shade let me put her right by the road so I had several inches, the LJ will slide on her pretty easy. I let Shade have quite a bit of grass but did ask her to come on the road and trot to get between Mia and the subdivision road, told her she could eat in the ditch past the road. Shade has always been looky loo there but the place has been empty all winter so I figured she can relax and eat, no cows or goats to charge up to the fence to check her out. She was cool with that today.

We head down the utility road, thankfully Mia did not try to keep going down road 6. I kept twisting back to look for Ole in the CRP, Shade just took advantage to grab more green grass. It was sooooo nice to have her just be relaxed and filling her tank while she had good opportunity. LOL, I can just imagine the disapproval from the 'the horse cannot be encouraged to make such decisions' crowd. Mia went about 1/4 mile down the utility road and was turning for home. Ole had showed up from the CRP. We walked home, trotting just a bit to catch up to Mia, and then to get in front so I could grab her lead as neighbor was burning weeds so I didn't want to risk Shade being too uptight about that to respond as needed to cut Mia off from their driveway.

Then I did just a few rounds in the paddock since the road portion was so brief. OMG Shade gave me a smoooooothhhh canter. A nicely rounded jog too. Then I pulled the bridle and LJ in the pen and gave her and the geldings some hay right away as her reward. Wrangling the dogs, ponying bratty Sadie, ignoring RazzMo to ride in the paddock, Shade really has become my goto horse that I trust to help me keep things working when we ride.