What A Sassy Day

Some days are just sassy days.  Things are proving to be a little more difficult than originally expected.

I did barn chores today, which was fine.  The horses were all well behaved, which is always a plus.  Sometimes, as we head into winter, some horses forget manners and start to be dolts in hand: rearing, striking, occasionally pushing, and pulling.  As just a stablehand, I don't really want to be responsible for training said beast and let alone be accused of hurting furface when he is striking and accordingly gets shanked, backed up, or what have you as a consequence, but sometimes it happens.  But at least that didn't happen today!

But what did happen was the water was out of commission.  The spigot that turns the water on and off was shut off/cranked too tightly by someone, crushing the washer and some other apparatus inside that keeps it from leaking.  So this morning, the barn owner tried to fix it.  Unfortunately the repair kit for said spigot didn't include the properly sized replacements.

Cool.

Usually, I like to have all the chores done in the morning if possible.  Turning out horses, cleaning stalls, filling water troughs, dumping and refilling inside buckets, putting hay/grain in stalls, and so forth.  The whole water detail was sidelined.  Also a major bummer was a different spigot on the property was busted, so when the original spigot was fixed, water was going to have to be bucketed out to fill an outside trough.

Fortunately, spigot was fixed.  Buckets were filled.  It was late in the afternoon and started getting cold again, but all was well. Just an unexpected deviation from what my original plan was, so instead of spending approximately five hours at the barn, I was there about eight.  But that's how it goes.

When I finally finished doing all of the PM type turn-in and so forth, I waffled on whether or not I wanted to ride.  I haven't ridden since the temperatures plummeted, so I think it's been about a week and a half.  Or maybe even two weeks.  I did, however, have another person at the barn, so I figured if I decided to be not so graceful, at least someone else would be there to scrape my human putty off the wall.  A bit of an exaggeration of course, since I don't really plan on unexpected translocating anytime soon.

I went and fetched the Semi Feral and turned her loose in the indoor.

Oh dear.

A little sassy indeed.  No shaking, whip, or prodding involved to get a whole lot of snort and blow.
(If you have no volume or can't hear, she ended up being a doofus and snorting and blowing for probably ten minutes while I had her in the arena.  She will, occasionally, but this was consuming her whole years supply in those ten minutes, I think!)

I went ahead and rode anyway.  She did pretty well for having been out of work for a short while.  A little tense at first, but then settled in.  I had on her new back on track dressage pad and not sure if it was the pad or what, but her trot was really quite soft and nice.  I can't wait to try riding her again for a longer period of time when she's feeling a little more connected and I have time to work her harder.  our ride was a little short as I didn't want her to get sweaty since I was running out of time to go from the farm to the veterinary clinic where I needed to check in.

But even short rides have their merits.  I am glad I went ahead, despite all signs on a "sassy" day to just take the easy way out.