Mixed feelings

Well, I had an...erm...interesting session tonight. I would say overall, my horse and I came out of it both feeling pretty good, but we had a bit of a spot in the middle that was questionable.

I played with Crest tonight. I've been in Chicago for 3 days, so he's been bored to tears, and the way I understand it, he's been instigating all kinds of trouble, so with that in mind, I kind of prepared myself for Left-Brain Extroversion and started out with him. I had the halter and 22' line, and we just started out doing (or TRYING to do) some basic circling game stuff, but there was a lot of exuberance on the end of that line, and so I had to find something for him to DO, or things were going to be out of hand. I set up some barrels in a line as a slalom, the idea behind it being to give him a pattern to think about while exercising the idea of changing directions online, thus making it productive in a few ways. He did that several times, he's so bloody smart, it took him about 30 seconds and he knew the pattern. There we go, onto something else.

I decided to work on some circling with him jumping barrels, and that's when the iffy streak came in. Crest has always had a dislike for ropes and things around his legs. As of right now, it's a million times better than it was when I got him, but his dislike is still there, and he has a tendency to get a little frantic when he gets tangled. Well, Crest, Mr. Exuberant extrordinaire did a fantastic leap and roll back (LBE-AHHH!!!), the rope went under his leg and got yanked out of my hands, and the entire lovely session fell apart for 10 minutes while Crest galloped around the pasture. I gave up on even TRYING to chase him very early on, it's useless and I know that. Instead, I went over to Prin, hopped on her bridless and decided I would use her calm and "hey what's up" attitude to head Crest off and get a hold of him. That definitely worked brilliantly, and when I finally got him back, he was RBE and thoroughly bouncy.

I had to interrupt several bolt-y types of patterns, but then he finally calmed down, and I asked for some canter circles. When he did those well, I unhaltered him and called it a day. I'll probably play with him tomorrow. Now that the days are longer and the weather is nicer, I'll have less excuses to NOT play with him, and I'll get him going more thoroughly, cannot wait for big progress!