Yes, Ace, I really am da boss of you.
He apparently feels the need to challenge me occassionally in an attempt to reassert his role in the relationship. What he doesn’t know is that while he may outweigh me, I will always out-think him in the end.
Wednesday we got stuck out of the blue. No matter what I did, we were standing in the middle of the arena, never taking more than a step or two and never getting back out to the rail.
I went to the barn Thursday with a …

Somehow we managed to go from having our best ride ever to our worst ride ever within a span of two days.
Oh, it started all right. Walk warm up, stepping over poles with nary a bump. Trot warm up, some figure eights, some trot poles without any touches. We weren’t overly energetic, but the bending lesson had stuck and we were navigating corners beautifully and going nice and straight down the long sides.
Then we trotted over some poles, and Ace caught his back foot. He didn’t even hit it hard …

It was finally warm enough today to give Ace the first post-winter bath. And boy did it feel good! I thought about titling this post something catchy about “spring cleaning”, but then realized Ace’s bath wasn’t so much about cleaning him off as it was transferring his loose hair and dirt to me. Either way, it was a beautiful thing.
Ace gets a cookie for behaving so well for his bath. I gave him one the day after I bought him last fall, and he wasn’t thrilled. He stood well for …

I’m always a little bit skeptical when every ad I read for a horse for sale says he “clips, loads, and ties.” I know horses, and I know they don’t all do it that easily.
With Ace, I’ve got two out of the three.
He Loads
Ace had been standing out in a pasture for two years before he came into my life. Dave went to pick him up and bring him to the barn, and he walked right on to the trailer like he did it every day of his life.
He Clips
Last …

It’s hard to believe I had time to train two horses this week. It’s a big enough project working with one greenie … on top of a full-time job, family, and other obligations. But somehow I managed to pull it off.
I taught two completely different horses the canter depart this week ….
… Ace’s left side …
…and Ace’s right side.
Anybody who has ridden horses for a while knows that it’s completely different riding a horse in different directions. Just because he learns to do a nice canter depart to the left …

My boy Ascension (I need to practice calling him that) has some of the most expressive eyes I’ve seen on a horse. They’re big, liquid-brown windows to his soul.
Last Friday, I showed up in the barn dark-and-early at 6 am to do chores. Typically my horse is happy to see me and trots up to me with ears pricked and looking for treats (he has learn to do that with manners, by the way). But this time he blinked his bleary eyes a few times, and stood on the other …

One of the lessons Ace taught me back in the fall when we were starting under saddle is that he doesn’t like to feel pressured. I was asking too much at first, go forward, be energetic, stay straight, bend on the turns. And it was just too much for my horse who had been standing in a pasture for two years. He taught me that I needed to just focus on one thing at a time. And when I did, everything else started falling into place, too.
When we finally started …