struggling to get conditioning ride dates

A lot of the riders are retired or SAHMs and don't want to ride on a weekend when there are more trail users and I am just not good at the networking thing.   Probably its the nature of it that you have to reach out to a lot of people and then personally ask for favors and leads until you get what you need and I fall into feeling rejected after one or two failed attempts.  I really need to get Tanza out though.

He is doing better at home but still I have a limited area where he is comfortable and have to go back and forth to get much distance at all and have been just feeling tired and quitting after only 5-6 miles.

I need to be getting a lot more miles than that on him and I need to keep riding Sadie and should ride her a lot more miles because she is overweight and a bit footsore.

And the goats heads are going strong and I really want to spray them all this year and not have the horse pens be overrun anymore.

Plus Tanza has been getting welts every day.  They go down, but with his allergies I've been freaking out.  I started feeding him the Platinum allergy powder again and am trying to be diligent with spraying fly repellent on him.  I should get him an appointment with the acupuncture vet; Sadie is not having much allergy issues this year.  I have been feeding her the Platinum but in years past she still had raised hairs for several weeks in the summer.   I also stopped letting the horses out to graze the last few days in case thicker bugs out there or Tanza is eating something he is more allergic to.

Tanza completed his first ride of the season

I was going to ride a second day if I felt like he was ready but he was tired by the end of the ride and the stumbling he has been doing made me decide to call it a weekend.  I didn't want to set back our ride season with an injury on the first ride we attended.    He was restless Sunday morning so metabolically I think he would have handled a second day no problems.     It turned out to be a good think I had not taken Sadie along.   I hauled 3 horses home for someone who had lost a trailer wheel driving to the ride.   They hauled their empty trailer home and it made it fine.  Probably at least 95% chance it would have also been fine with their horses in it, but no sense risking injury to the horses if the other tire on that side would have blown out or broke off.  

Shoulder relief girth review

I do like them.   Both Tanza and Sadie tend to get a bit of saddle sliding forward.  Sadie especially will have saddle on her neck.   I had to do some extra shimming on the front of my saddle pads when the saddle stopped creeping up on the withers as much as they both are short backed and a bit rump high I guess.    In neither case is the cinch keeping the saddle completely off the shoulder, but both horses seem pretty comfy and both have laid back shoulders where a saddle would hardly be on the wither at all if it was completely back from the point of the shoulder.

Rode Tanza at a charity ride last weekend and got dunked

It was not the most productive conditioning weekend.  Better than my normal at home riding has been but not as much good work as I had hoped for.

Saturday I showed up and they were all brrrr, not wanting to ride but the mom and daughter that had picked out the trails did saddle up and ride with me.   Daughter got cold and was taking a break and mom rode out to catch up to the others who were doing a slow ride so we could ride together to check out other trail and ask the ditch rider to open a locked gate.  I should have gone with her to catch them but passed because of not wanting to hold her up while I got mounted.  Ugh for being old and fat.

After talking to the ditch rider when we went out together we barely rode any farther so it was probably less than 10 miles total that I did on Tanza.  Better than 4 or 5 at home but not the 12-15 I had hoped to get in.

I woke up real early on Sunday and went back for the organized event to ride the 25.  That was going fairly well until about 8 or 9 miles in they went in the lake where it was a nice shoreline.  Tanza did want to join in getting a drink and got brave and stepped in the water.   But there were tree branches right at the water line and after he had stepped over he had a "SOMETHING touched my leg" moment and went leaping into the lake.  I came off on the second leaping stride and had a moment of panic when water was not just the 18 inches or less I expected and my face went under as I was yelling whoa for Tanza.   It was only 30 inches so I was able to just scramble to my feet and wade out but in less than 60F weather with a good breeze the ride leader said I would get hypothermia if I rode on so I ended up getting a ride back to the base camp area in a Blazer to get my trailer and hauling  Tanza home.   I had a dry Tshirt and polar fleece vest and blankets and someone lent me a wool serape cape so I was not too cold back at camp.

The best thing out of that day was buying an endurance saddle that I think will fit Lady very well at the silent auction they had to raise extra money for the Hope Held by a Horse charity.

I've been using the Wintec on Sadie this spring and liking it.  I think the narrow tree saddle I bought actually will fit Lady even better than the Wintec did so now I can send her to Golden with a good saddle and keep both the Wintec and my treeless in case I want to swap back to it at home.   I could have sent Lady with no saddle or the barrel saddle K has using on Lady but the barrel saddle doesn't fit Lady real well, requires an extra thick pad to not hit her withers + she might use it on Razz this summer when Lady is gone.  And I'm more comfortable with them not just using the bareback pad or a makeshift saddle on Lady,  a well fitting saddle will be safer for her and anyone riding her.

The work week was a bear with lots of morning meetings + raining on Monday so my only weekday morning ride was a quick 3 miles on Sadie on Friday.    I am getting over being wowed by the new guys' smarts.   That is a good thing overall but there is always the letdown as I realize the person I had put on a pedestal has great plenty of faults and is not going to have any brilliant solutions to difficult problems that I just couldn't see because of not being as smart. 

I am pecking away on doing some 'estate planning'   They rolled out a new app at work to show off our great benefits and it did give me a shortcut to seeing what my work insurance was.  It is enough that I can skip buying another policy so that is nice.    I think I can set up the accidental death policy benefit to go to DL who agreed to be the 'god parent' for Lady and Sadie and that will cover most of the costs of caring for them if I die in a car crash or break my neck coming off a horse.   I need to think about how much of retirement benefit to give to the siblings vs charity.   

Sigh, Apparently I'm an outlier

Well what else is new.   But I was pissed that SI is planning to feature Bruce/Catilyn Jenner "nude except for his medal and the flag"  on an upcoming issue.    My first thought was merely  "oh great the attention whore and more push for calling body dysmorphia a new civil right that has to be pushed"  but then I went "wait, what,  they are going to use  Old Glory to cover xis genitalia ?!?"  That is so disrespectful to the the flag, using it to drape anyone's bare genitalia.    I'm guessing here, but they aren't an x-rated publication and the olympic medal is probably too small to cover anything.  

I want to start a campaign to insist that this flag had better be the rainbow flag, transgender flag (yes apparently there is a special flag for that)  Olympic rings flag,  state of California flag but no how no way should Old Glory be used.   But I don't know where to start and I posted it on a horse BB board that a veteran and veterans wife read and no reaction.   Posted it on a conservative politics blog and some "ewww" reaction about the 67 year old almost nude regardless and or because of whatever hormone and surgical attacks on natural biology and only one response that understood the disrespect to the flag was the focus of my outrage. 

I've never even been much of a flag waver type, but the SI plan pisses me off royally.  But I'm terribly sad and discouraged that apparently everyone else thinks its just noise in our slide into Nero style Roman decadence. 

Hurray for good neighbors

And for trying to be one myself.   The neighbor girl that has been riding Lady some came over yesterday.  It was warm but gray skies and wind had been making me feel like I didn't want to be outside.   But with the bump of K's youthful energy I went out.  Had her pull some weeds in the tree bed south of the house while I pulled out old stalks from mom's flower beds that I'm trying to keep enough grass and weeds out that they survive w/o shorting my horse love to become an unpaid groundskeeper in my off work hours.

Then we rode Tanza and Lady in the bigger horse paddock.  I asked K not to let Lady go in her favorite corner because of the tree branches that could poke an eye.  With that, plus I think she processes from last ride and improves even when it has been a couple weeks between rides she was doing quite well with keeping Lady where K wanted to be.   I think they could go down the road with me within 2-3 rides if the progress continues.   Lady does not have an energy leap when she is out of the paddock like many horses do so if there is good control and management of Lady's energy level in the paddock I think they will be fine riding out.

Later I kept on a bit with that energy boost and did some hoeing grass out of the flower bed.  I used the microwave to heat the pulled pork and some frozen veggies for supper.  Dad had the last of leftover mashed taters with his and I had a slice of bread.   I hate the Roman orgy feeling of the 21st century but I do love having convenience foods and the microwave.  If only we could get rid of the outrageous behaviors and cheering of such for status or tribal signaling/flaunting purposes and keep the technological shortcuts life would be really great IMO. 

The candidate for work turned them down.  I suppose they could not offer enough money since he was interested and came for interview and gave a seminar but then declined to accept job and he was higher level than our position before going to east coast and is high level management there.  He wanted to have less management but I imagine their is a pretty high mental barrier to taking much of a pay cut.    So we will have to muddle along w/o getting extra management help.   And we didn't get the contract bid we put in for.   I had a bit of a bad feeling that we were gilding the lily too much, adding extra quarter or more percent of time for 2 or 3 high level people who were not going to have any of that time free from their core projects anyway but I deferred to the management folks who were scared to low bid and end up not covering all expenses for the project.   And we might still have not got low enough to be competitive, as there is no way we would have gone nearly as low as the company that won the bid did. 

Making hay while the sun shines

Not actually putting up hay,  we don't even have any hay fields.  But I've been making it a point to ride each morning this week before heading to work because the forecast is for it to rain or possibly snow all weekend.  

I am blessed with a couple of good horses.   Sadie is weak on the staying sound side but if endurance was out of the picture she is the perfect horse for me, she is so good about going out on short solo dirt road rides and even when she is being rowdy nothing she does feels like its going to fling me to the dirt.

Tanza is coming along.  I think his legs will hold up to as much riding as I get back up to doing and he is getting quite a bit better about relaxing if I take him out by himself and I know he is good in groups, having none of Sadie's angst about being surrounded by other horses.   Yesterday I slapped him out of Lady's feed pan so he had to run around a few minutes before letting me catch him,  oh my is he a pretty mover.