Yup, We're Still Here, Rapture, or Not.

Between my back and busy time at work I have only ridden a few times since the show. We had a good dressage lesson today. It was exhausting! We were working on my seat and using many of the same muscles in my back and hips that are still recovering so it was extra hard. Plus it was over 80 and sunny so I couldn't help nodding off during the following lessons! After our lesson I was able to put Junior in the grass field for the first time in days (it is still SOOO wet) and he galloped all the way across to the tall grass and stopped on a dime with his head down. Will this rain ever stop!?!

In usual fashion, I am still reorganizing after the show. In addition to my laziness, the injury really made it difficult for me to get my show stuff up off the floor and reorganized. You never realize how often you bend over until you can't!

This is just part of the pile that I need to sort through after a show:

I think that was taken after our first show of 2010. I'm actually more and more organized each time I do a show, but each of the bags has to be vacuumed inside and out (yes, I'm that girl), all the washables need to be washed and everything needs to be cleaned, polished, re-hung, and repacked, separating the things that need to go back to the barn from the things that stay at my house. This would be MUCH more streamlined if I had my own trailer and could just leave most of it in there.

It's getting back where it belongs now, including getting my new saddle neatly situated into my tack box! It's so nice not to have a western saddle sitting in my spare room and having to lug it up and down my apartment stairs and in and out of my Civic each time I want to use it.

I still want to wrap the new saddle it in bubble wrap, but I'm trying to get over it. I intended this to be a USING saddle and NOT one that I have to baby, but it's just so pretty! I think it's that new car thing where you park at the far end of all the parking lots. I've got it sitting in there with a stick through the stirrups to keep training them. I think I'll still make a cover for it like my English one, just to keep it a little protected without having to wrestle my huge quilted bag over it.

Tack box is still working great. It could use a vacuuming and a tidying, but I'm very happy with how it's been working these 9 months. Of course if I decided to build another one I'd change a few little details. I think I'd try to use the built-in saddle stand idea and mount one rack for the English saddle above it, with the lower saddle stand serving as the storage area. The sacrifice would be losing some of the down-below storage space I have with this one, but honestly I'm not using all of it. There are two EMPTY containers down there. The benefits would be: 1) I could turn the English saddle inwards instead of outwards (otherwise the English flaps and the Western fenders attempt to share the same space), 2) I could remove each saddle from the box without bumping the other (removing the Western with the English in place is a little tricky), and 3) I wouldn't have to lift the Western saddle so high.... not like it's taller than my 16 hand horse, but it's less awkward to swing it onto a horse than to set it just right on a rack without banging it against the rack/top/sides.

But I'm not really in any hurry to go through all that planning and staining and clear-coating and moving it again!