Rough Weekend

Luckily all is well with Fawkes, unluckily I have had a hard time getting out to see him!

The weekend started out auspiciously enough.  J went hiking with crazy Maya, and I went with a friend to the Wild Animal Sanctuary, an awesome predator rescue.

The animals all have huge enclosures and fun enrichment things like this grizzly paddling pool.  Unfortunately, as we were leaving, J called with some bad news - he had fallen during his hike, landed on a rock, and his leg was swelling up pretty badly.  Thankfully he was able to hike out and didn't have to use his emergency beacon, but he was in quite a bit of pain.

So he went off to the ER for x-rays and I scrapped my plan of an afternoon ride and dirty horse bath.  X-rays showed no fractures but the doctors were impressed with the amount of soft tissue damage.  Here is the bruise, just getting started

It is much more purple today, I think is going to be an impressive rainbow.  Then on Sunday the weather went from almost 80 to 20 and snowing.  My trainer canceled my lesson and I opted out of slogging around in the cold.  The pressure drop had made me feel ill, Jon was still limping, and what is the motivation to ride after a 60 degree temperature loss??

To top it all off, we found out Jasper needs $4k surgery to fix his torn ACL (well, cranial cruciate ligament in a dog but same thing).  That is why only Maya got to go hiking Saturday and sad Jasper had to stay home

Why am I so alone and abandoned?

Luckily we have him insured, so hopefully a lot of the cost is covered.  Either way, it needs to happen because he has been limping around and I hate to see him in pain.  He is only 5 (ish...Shelter dog, so only a guess) and loves to hike so fingers crossed the surgery works.

Anyways, long story long, I finally got to the barn tonight.  Fawkes appears to have survived his 2 days without me although the goober did somehow skin his hock.  I am assigning blame for that to the mare in the next pen who is in all sorts of crazy, pee-everywhere heat.

We did a dressage ride and worked on our trainer homework.  He was much more responsive to my leg right off the bat, but we still worked on ask nicely, then ask with correction, then ask nicely again.  We did a "U" pattern where we trotted the "U", and at each tip did a turn on the forehand.  The idea being to get the right leg response the same as the left leg.  We trotted off from the turn to reinforce the idea of being in front of the leg.

2013 snow storm cuteness

There were a few temper tantrums around the right leg, but he did pretty well.  His canter departs were super active and uphill so no problem there.  Then we did a 3-loop serpentine where we cantered loop one trotted loop two, and cantered loop three.  That is not easy! Because we did the transitions at X, Fawkes really had to rely on me for which lead to pick up.

Good news: he was listening closely.  Bad news: When your horse listens closely and you shift your weight around you get LOTS of flying changes.  And a pissy TB.  After two times I either managed to hold still more or he memorized the pattern and saved my butt.  Likely the latter.  Since it is still frickin frigid out I didn't want to overheat him, so I ended relatively quickly and cooled him out bareback.  Practiced just asking him to move away from my leg and he was a good boy.

Between my schedule and spring shots, this week will probably be pretty quiet on the horse front.  Which is cool, I have had enough excitement for the moment!