Dirty horse, good horse

Fawkes has been a professional mud roller, it is fast becoming legend at the barn.  Barn crew now takes pictures and videos of him drenched in mud, rolling happily.

This was a good day.  He is usually much more rhino-hided

This means I get to spend my time being a professional horse cleaner.  Yay.  I presume this is because he is hot and laying in the mud is cool.  But picking mud out of his ears and sheath and spending hours hosing mud off of his (brand new) fly sheet and mask are not my idea of fun.  On the plus side, he is finally shedding. Which means he was just slow and we can stop worrying about diseases for the moment.  Real yay!

This is a super old picture, but very indicative of his mud accumulation talents.

He also continues to be excellent under saddle.  We had a great jumping lesson tonight.  We weren't jumping any height - mostly around 2' - but we were asking him to canter things the first time he saw them which he always gets nervous about.  I actually got to ride with trainer R's daughter which was fun.  Basically worked on hunter courses (line, diagonal, line, diagonal) and shockingly, he was good and I rode well.  AT THE SAME TIME.  This is almost inconceivable.

But really, it was all good.  Were able to maintain rhythm, get mostly decent spots, his changes were clean, tight, and right there. We finished up with a walk up the street past the house with the scary kids and the other house with the scary goats.

We will do another lesson with R's daughter tomorrow morning before I head out of town for the rest of the weekend for a party.