Stuff I'm Learnin'.

It's cold here. Too cold for comfort. I know I grew up in Minnesota, but I didn't ride in the winter and in fact took to hibernation from about mid November until May. So I haven't been riding much. Things are fine here. Been working a little on slowing the lope, but I think I have to re-strategize. Junior has lost some weight and some muscling. This might be due to lack of exercise and or the cold. He's from Texas, ya know, and he's less fond of Winter than I am. So we're giving him extra feedstuff. It's hard to measure exactly how much hay he's getting since he gets some in the field when he's turned out and I'm not sure how equally those four boys share. Junior more likely to share with someone than someone is likely to share with him so who knows. We'll watch it. He's surely lost muscling in his rear end. I've also been paying attention to his stride. I lunged him Sunday instead of riding so I was able to really watch. At the walk he tracks anywhere from half a rear hoof into the print of the front hoof or about 100%. At the trot he doesn't track at all, and stays a few inches back from the hoof print. He wants to take tiny steps, surely a side-effect from training for the western pleasure jog. This is what I will be working on with the Dressage trainer at our lesson next month. I'm skipping this month, but he'll be ridden by one of Max's girls in this month's lesson.

He also has a vertebra out of place about midway down his neck. Monet diagnosed this back in late November and she adjusted him then, but he's still showing the lump and the tendency to turn his head to the right when we halt. I don't think he's hurting and his work ethic is fine, but we've been taking it easy until the equine chiropractor/massage therapist can come out.

I am auditing a class this quarter on Photoshop. I have some basic skills in the program but I'm entirely self taught so there's a TON I don't know. So far the class has been review but with little things about each tool that I hadn't figured out and that make things WAY easier. Today I made this just for fun:

I'll probably continue working on it. Unfortunately the picture of us is poor quality because it's a screenshot from the website of a photographer that was at our show last June so the color is bad, but it was just a practice experiment. You can see the original in my post on that show HERE.