We call Indy the miracle horse of the barn. In horses, Indy’s color is called grulla, a form of the dun color. He has the dorsal stripe, and you can occasionally see faint stripes that run at right angles to the dorsal stripe.
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I saw Seabiscuit with friends yesterday, and loved it. “Equidaily Racing Journal”:http://www.equidaily.com/sbiscuit.html has pointers to articles all over the web. A “Washington Post article”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A54773-2003Jul28¬Found=true talks about Laura Hillenbrand, the author of the book. An “SFGate article”:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2003/07/26/SP253593.DTL discusses how Seabiscuit ranks among racing greats such as Man of War and Secretariat. The New York Times has an “archive”:http://www.nytimes.com/ref/movies/25SEABISCUIT-REF.html of Seabiscuit stories, including the article proclaiming his victory over War Admiral.
CJ, a small gray Arab, approaches a cross rail.
BBC News reports on the first cloned horse born in Italy ten weeks ago. A mule clone was born earlier this year in the United States. Prometea, who is the clone of the mare who acted as surrogate, looks like a sweetie. It will be interesting to see how she develops. The success that resulted in Prometea took 328 attempts.
I rode Her Royal Highness yesteday in a class lesson with my trainer. I tempted fate when I was looking for the horse that turned out to be Lily: I said something at one point along the lines of “at least, if I find another horse, he can’t be as difficult to deal with as Hap.”
Continue reading The Princess and the Peas
I had not taken Lily out on trail ride in several months. It has been one of those “ought to’s” in the back of my mind, but there has just been too much going on. I usually trail ride with my trainer and she has been too busy with her summer camp.
However, she takes Wednesday as her day off, and asked me if I wanted to go out. Lily had been a little too enthusiastic on Tuesday, since I hadn’t been riding her enough last week due to the heat, but had chilled out again today, so I agreed to a 20 minute trail ride and worked for a while in the arena while my trainer got Havoc ready. Havoc is her 22 year old Thoroughbred and former show hunter. He looks like an old dude horse on the trail most of the time these days, except when he doesn’t. My trainer would probably let me trail ride Havoc if I asked her, but I haven’t ever quite gotten up the nerve to do so. I’ve seen Havoc forget his age and do airs above the ground too many times over the past decade. If I want to trail ride a Thoroughbred, I’ve got Hap.
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In a post last week, I wrote about riding Hap bareback. Here is a photo my trainer took of us today while we trotted around her in a circle:
I would like to be a little more erect and have my leg dropped down straighter out of the hip, but I love how relaxed and round Hap looks in this photo.
Time has a review of the movie about the legendary Sea Biscuit. I want to read the book before I see the movie so I better get busy.
I took this photo of Smoke and dogs fence fighting last November.
I rode Lily yesterday morning, but it seemed too hot to ride by the afternoon, so I decided to ride Hap with his bareback pad. As always, he was wonderful.
When I bought the bareback pad several years ago, before I bought Lily, I didn’t plan on using it for Hap. I thought it would be a nice thing to have here at home, so when nieces and nephews came out I could put the pad on Smoke and let them ride him in the round pen.
Continue reading Bareback riding