My hamster-brained mare I often joke that Casey has a hamster brain. Specifically, I think of her brain as being a big hamster cage with one of those really cute (but sometimes vicious - anybody else bit often by their pet hamster as a kid?) brown and white spotted hamsters in it. This hamster is mostly a good hamster that loves to funnel its energy by running on the wheel. When the hamster is running on the wheel, Casey is focused, driven, and on-task. However, hamster is not the smartest animal, and so can be very distractable. This shows up in Casey's behavior as well, "oh look at ..read more

My ultimate dream is to be one of those riders who seem to communicate with their horse by magic. No bridle, no saddle, no whips, just a true union of souls. And so with visions of galloping Casey bridleless through a field, I ordered myself a neck rope! Yep, living the dream Now, there are lots of neck ropes available. And to be honest, for a while I got by with just a lead rope haphazardly tied into a neck rope-like shape. BUT, I have a true love for pretty things, most especially pretty horse things, and so I knew I wanted a pretty neck rope. After some scouting around on Instagr ..read more

After a month of no lessons due to figuring out Casey's back soreness issue, we have finally gotten to resume them! Yesterday was the first lesson back and we went into it not really knowing what we would be working on. I figured that it would be a flat-only lesson seeing as we just started her on the vitamin E supplements at the start of the week. We want her to be on those for at least a couple of weeks before jumping, although it's highly dependent on how she is feeling and moving. Finally in a lesson! We opted to have our lesson in the outdoor arena because the weather was ..read more

Casey and I are moving up in the jumping world! As in we have now progressed to tiny vertical jumps, rather than only being able to do cross-rails. Who knew I would ever be so excited about a two-foot jump? Let's start from the beginning though... We started off today by waking up early so that our farrier could come and nail Casey's front shoe back on. She managed to step it off on Friday, but Farrier is amazing and lives right down the road from my barn so he came out first thing in the morning. We love him :) Casey was not impressed with having to stand for the farrier first thing in ..read more

Guess what the family did today! We all traipsed to the barn for my jump lesson on Casey. That's right, all of us. I managed to get my very reluctant horse-hubby to come out as well so that I could finally get some decent jump photos. It may, or may not, have required a lot of pleading, begging, and whining, but it was worth it :) Yep, worth the begging for these photos This was our first lesson since getting hocks injected (although I have ridden her on my own in the past week) and I was super excited. Additionally, the weather was nice and the outdoor arena had been freshly dragged ..read more

Do you know those days when you hop on your horse and things just aren't quite right? Like, they don't seem lame, they might even seem sound, but it just feels like there's something going on? Well for the past two weeks, I've just had that feeling with Casey. The best way I can describe the feeling is that she just seemed slightly more stiff than normal and at the canter it felt like there was a moment of hesitation, or almost a stutter, between strides. What was especially weird though was that I felt it a lot more to the right than to the left (the left is the leg that sustained the suspens ..read more

Sometimes I find myself wondering how much money I actually spend on my horse. It does really "matter," because no matter the cost I'm going to keep paying it regardless, but just for curiosity's sake. What does she cost besides all of my love I mean When Casey got injured, I obviously got slammed by vet bills. I told myself that this is why I had a credit card and just decided to live in denial. I would make payments every month to my credit card, but I didn't want to know how much money I was bleeding. I think that this form of denial really helped me, because it kept me from panick ..read more

I anticipated having an easy time coming up with goals for this new year, but ended up having a surprisingly hard time! 2017 was so unpredictable. I would never have guessed that a major injury would be sustained and would require nine months to come back from. So with that in mind, my goals are not as ambitious as they might have been otherwise. Whereas last year's goals were very focused on our specific discipline (jumping), this year's goals are much more focused on flatwork and communication between Casey & I. I don't really know what this year will look like for Casey and I, but I kno ..read more

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