Been having some fun rides on both horses

Two weekends ago I had made arrangements to meet someone and ride at Lory.   I felt badly, was running late.  Plus their new horse had scrambled in trailer on way over (at least didn't happen tied to trailer waiting on my tardy self) and scraped its fetlock so they couldn't ride.   But since I was there I went out on Tanza.  I have not had confidence that he is safe to haul out to ride w/o meeting someone but he was quite good for me.   We were on technical trails to start so walking and even me leading him down some tricky spots but I was very pleased with him and had a great ride just enjoying the day and the trail with my gelding.

Sadie was good at home this weekend after having too few rides after the camping trip.   She is not the endurance mount I dreamed of when I bought her in utero but she is good vitamin H at home and I can afford to feed her plus have Tanza so its all right.  

This weekend met some different endurance buddies southwest of here, actually at the trailhead where we camped 5 weeks ago.   It was a blast riding with people and horses that pushed the envelope of speed up and down some stretches where I would have backed off the pace.  Tanza got pretty winded one section but recovered ok.  I don't want to wear out my welcome with either of these groups but riding with them more often will be great to get to a point of riding faster next year.  I've been keeping the pace down to build up Tanza's legs this year, but next year I can bump up the pace at events if I do the faster training/conditioning.  I don't want to try to win rides on him for another year or so but I do want to be finishing in times that feel like we could do a 100 and have a bit of cushion for when we had to slow down after dark.  

I've been feeling overwhelmed a bit at home and work.  It is not really overwhelming.  I just feel like under appreciated for all the weed spraying and starting trees trying to maintain/increase value of the place.  And same deal at work.   Not even really under appreciated there, but feeling the strain that the software engineers have dealt with in dealing with the SE4, who really isn't terribly bright at that job and is pig headed and intractable about changing from what he came up with plus is snootily lazy about fixing things if he creates a bug.   Luckily as a non-software engineer I remain spared from him thinking he could delegate bug fixing to me.  I think I'd clock him if he seriously tried to make that my job.  And very luckily our new group manager understands coding,  created a flat system so that SE4 is not supervisor and in fact we got the bigger group manager to go along and move SE4 laterally so he isn't even fully in the group anymore (but he isn't fully out and some days that drives me crazy.) But new small group manager is good.   Mostly work angst now comes to "do we have time to make the needed course corrections now that we have mostly removed the anchor and have a good leader"

It got scarier because the great software engineer quit.  At least he did transition to part-time first and handed off how to do most of what he had been the sole person taking care of first, and in some ways it may be good not to have him as a crutch.  And the new scientist has gotten pretty comfortable with the software package we use so she is becoming a great asset.