Keepin' On Keepin' On

Thanks, everybody, for the recommendations for barefooting sites and books!  I am making like a sponge and soaking up info.

A friend of mine has created a New England Distance Green Beans Facebook group that might be of interest to some of you.  It's a small but growing and really friendly crew, on the same model as the PNER group that AareneX posted about the other day.  Exciting stuff!

As for me, I've been too busy riding to blog.  I'm still liking and still playing with the Eurolight.  Went back to a previous set-up and Tucker is again going really well under it.  My philosophical problem now is that this set-up is not a textbook-perfect fit -- but historically Tuck has protested textbook-perfect fits and it was the pursuit of textbook perfection that put swelling on his withers in the fall.  So the part of me that wants to Be A Good Owner/Rider and to See If We Can Do Better feels like I should keep fussing with it, and the part of me that feels strongly about Doing What Works would rather just accept Tuck's stamp of approval and go with this until/unless it causes an issue.

The plan for tomorrow is to make another attempt at a12-to-15-miler -- it at least should not be icy, although I've reached acceptance re: the fact that the footing is just not going to be suitable for moving at speed any time soon -- so I figure I'll know more after that.

In the meantime, we had a lovely twilight-into-darkness hack last night, inspired by L. Williams's "Cold Moon Ride."  I meant to just go out for a little and then head to the indoor and school, but it was such a lovely still night and Tuck was clearly so pleased to be out that I kept turning down just one more trail...

And today we stayed in the indoor and did some dressage.  I'm pleased, in the bits of trail riding that we've been able to do, with the results of pulling his shoes and then the stifle injections.  He's straighter downhill, and vastly more powerful up, and I suspect I'll be even happier once the footing improves enough for us to move out.  But the dressage is where it's like night and day.  It's not a miracle fix and now we're perfect, of course, but I realized the other day that I was looking forward to our next schooling session.

Which should not have surprised me, except that it did.  Confession: for probably two years now, I have dreaded riding dressage.  Not because of the dressage itself, which I do love, but because what with one thing and another it had become this really frustrating process, this beating my head against a wall and wondering if I was nuts, because so often what I was hearing didn't fit with what I was feeling, and I just kind of, like I said over the summer, burned right out.  And felt bad about it!  Because I do love dressage -- its precision and its potential, and the effect that it has on the rider and the horse -- which seemed to be part of the problem; it was too important to me to be so unpleasant.  So I dutifully kept trying, and then I opted out for a couple of months and just hacked.

And now all of a sudden dressage is fun again.  And that's pretty cool.

In other news, the round barn's latest improvement is the addition of cabinets to control our ridiculous sprawl replace everyone's tack trunks.  Behold!

Neat and tidy when the doors are closed...

A place for all my things!

Not actually all my things, since I took some home when construction was underway, but I think most of what needs to go back is medications and little fiddly things that will go in the drawers.  There will also be a row of hooks installed along the wall above my saddle rack and a hook or two on the inside of each door.  I have always hated tack trunks as a means of organization; everything disappears into the bottom and then something goopy inevitably spills and it's all downhill from there.  I think this is going to be much better.

Also, I discovered while emptying my trunk that I apparently own four hook picks, not counting two that I haven't seen recently but shouldn't have gone far.  That seems...excessive.  Also four different jumping bats, two of which I dislike (not the jockey whips you can see in the picture; those are the best!) and should probably discard except that throwing out a perfectly good bat seems wasteful.  Anybody need a bat?  Or a hoofpick?