riding log including a JUMP!

I rode Minnie as per usual on Tuesdays, except in the afternoon instead of the morning. I arrived at J's just as the farrier finished putting her shoe back on. Minnie's (still) shedding. She was once again a *very* good girl about her bridle... What has gotten into her? J and I rode out in the woods and up to a field for flatwork, but by the time we got there Minnie was too tired to do much.

Why?

Well, among other things (to be enumerated below), we *jumped*. Only a fallen tree about 15 inches tall, and it wasn't necessarily planned, but! I only lost one stirrup, and it was after we landed. I did not fall off and never felt like I was in danger of doing so. We were going up a steep hill, and Trumpie moved out into a canter and jumped over the tree, and Minnie just followed him. She *loves* to jump. But taking a jump going up a steep hill was serious exertion for Minnie. When we got to the field, we trotted around half of it, with Minnie pulling only a little, and the small cantering circle around Trump and J was rather abbreviated because Minnie was just *tired*.

The first other thing was spooking at Pedro the ginormous black dog emerging from the forest at Minnie's heels. After Minnie spooked, she crowded up by Trumpie, who must have been whispering calming words to her. It was very cute. The second other thing was a bit of a fuss about wending through a very tight space in order to step over another fallen tree (which J intends to turn into a jump when she can clear the area around it.) The latter was solved by the simple fact that Trumpie and J had already gone through, and Minnie has separation anxiety, so after a few seconds of plunging around and being silly, she relented.

It was a very, very warm day, so when we got back, J hosed off the horses. When we turned them out, needless to say they both rolled in the dirt *immediately*. Silly horses! J is really busy with farm stuff right now, so I helped out by cleaning the stalls.

Next week I will take my husband and my in-laws' Very Large Dog with me, so maybe Pedro won't come along with us because he will have another dog to play with. Minnie would definitely prefer not to have Pedro, because he tends to crowd her heels, and of course if he wanders off and then comes running up to us, it scares her.

So Minnie isn't going to Windrush, sigh. I would like to have her closer but there are no obvious ways to do this. J is in the process of cleaning out her horse supplies and is donating things to Windrush.

On the way back, I stopped off at a nursery that gave 30% off for a purchase of 20 6 or 4 inch perennials. So that was $80.50 for 20 plants! This will force me to get serious about the garden. Speaking of which, it's time to rake...

leaf burrito

I did a little raking in the front yard, late this afternoon, and Ben did much more after I got distracted by stuff like fertilizing the blueberries and mulching my bush cherries, and *and and and she says with much excitement* discovered that my cherry tree *is* in fact blooming, and it is self-fertile, so I may get some cherries this summer! This is the tree that came to me as a 3 foot tall sapling with 3 branches and is now, 3 years later, taller than I am, with about 20 branches all of which have branches of their own.

And then I was tired and went inside, and Ben got a tarp to put all the raked leaves onto. We have found that dragging yard debris on a tarp is the easiest way to get it to the hill behind the barn, where we dump it.

Some time later, just as it was getting really dark, he came in and said he needed my help constructing a leaf burrito. If you can imagine a very large (8 by 12 foot) tarp rolled like a tortilla around so many leaves that it was seriously overstuffed, with those self-sticking ties from heads of lettuce holding it together, you get the picture. (And we did not, because it wsa too dark.)