The Status of Things

Wet. Seemingly always and forever wet.

I snuck in rides last Wednesday and Thursday knowing the forecast looked pretty bleak through the weekend. Saturday was actually nearly perfect weather-wise, but the husband worked in the morning and we had family plans all afternoon and into the evening. It was a great time.

Sunday was weird. This being SC, everyone freaks out at even the mention of a possible storm. I swear every locally grown S. Carolinian is Chicken Little personified. Which is why I ignored everything and then found myself outside in a lightning storm at 930pm without any pants on bringing the horses in. And then all we got was some rain and high winds. There was an EF1 tornado in the town next door though right by my work. Too bad it didn’t take my building out.

Anyway, the day was just odd with randomly darkening skies, a bit of a dump of rain and then back to sunny and clear. Every time I thought about riding it would get eerie looking outside and by the time I settled on not riding, it would clear again. Frustrating. It did manage to dump enough rain to put my arena under water by Monday morning so even with a gorgeous sunny, blue skied 74 degree Monday, I couldn’t do a whole lot but stare forlornly and take pictures.

It should be dry enough by this afternoon to get a flat work ride in. I’ve left my new favorite exercise up with the goal to eventually raise all 5 poles to verticals and work on the true jumping form of the exercise. Currently, I am at two jumps and three poles, but if the footing isn’t nice enough to jump in I will return the jumps back to poles and work on figures over them again. I really want to incorporate more canter work with figures. Right now my cantering is mostly in very large circles with a lot of drift and “good enoughs” thrown in the mix. As I’m getting more and more comfortable with my seat in the canter, I’d like to start dialing it in as a gait that I am actively a participant in and not just a passenger hoping to not run through the arena fence.

I have a half day at work today due to it being spring break and was planning on working on office stuff all afternoon but then taking a half day Friday. Looks like 100% chance of over 1″ of rain all day Friday which makes for perfect working weather. With that in mind, I’m heading home at lunch today to do spring bath day. It is one of my most favorite horse days of the year – removing all the grime from the winter. The weather so far hasn’t been quite warm enough for long enough to allow proper dry time before the night comes and it dips back into the 40s. I think today may finally be the day!