Lodestar Eventing

Well, having found a professional looking dressage yard down South at short notice due to job moves it all went tits up very soon. Mabel got an abcess. The weather was shit and we had all the snow to cope with. Then the snow melted and the yard owner insisted they were turned out twelve hours a day.

Then the “ad-lib forage” promised in the adverts and pre-contract talk turned out to be one 4kg net of hay per day for Monster. 2% of a 650 kilo horse bodyweight is more like 13 kilos so that was patently not enough. Monster was very subdued. She had gone from accepting all day turn out to being resigned to it. She wasn’t settled – she was depressed. Now one thing about piebalds – and this is why you should never use a coloured for dressage – is that the pattern breaks up the outline. It’s the same principle as the dazzle ships. So it took a while, changing rugs and seeing her coat just once a day, to see that Puks condition had moved from good to moderate to poor. And the daily litany of complaints and nagging about the littlest issue became rather a drag.

We found a new yard and handed our notice in.

Then just four days later we received an abusive phone call refusing to handle “that f*cking horse” which had broken free in an effort to get to it’s stable and 5 kilos of food for the day. To put it in context, it had been turned out at 8.30am and was being bought in late, 5.30pm, in the dark, by a woman that would rather have been at a childs party than running a livery yard. Not very professional, and swearing at your clients even less so. Well, you can’t have a horse on part livery if it can’t be handled by someone else. So we moved them before the end of our notice and are well out of it. I rather begrudge having to pay up to the end of my notice period for livery I wasn’t receiving, especially as we were accused of theft when we rang to say they were going that night.

Still, as it happens the abusive phone call made by the yard owner was witnessed by a third party and word started doing the rounds that she’d been abusive to another client. Seems we were not the first. Since we left she’s lost her other liveries and gone out of business. Can’t say I’m surprised really.

While that sounds rather doomy and gloomy things have worked out rather better in the last few weeks. We have rented three stables, one each per horse and one to use as a tack room. Over the years we’ve moved from DIY to rather better part livery packages, but the move back to DIY makes me wonder what we were getting for our money. We get up half an hour earlier to account for the 30 minutes work in a morning, and take 45 minutes to do them in an evening. Which is less time than it took to even get to the other yard on a bad traffic day. At weekends we can set the schedule, instead of having to be at the yard to match everyone elses bringing in times. For the last two weekends I’ve actually enjoyed owning horses again.

We got one ride in at the new yard before it snowed.

Pastures New

I didn’t expect Moster to settle in quite so quickly, especially with daily turnout, but she has made herself at home. Since the snow melted we’ve done some exploring of the local bridleways. Hmm, we need to learn to like heavy clay.

Mabel OTOH is still not quite settled. Hopefully a bit of work – fortunately there’s a lunging paddock and a spiffingly surfaced arena – will give her something to think about and calm her down. In the meantime it seems like every day we get a text of “What Mabel did next” including eating fences, trying to escape fields, pulling her rug off…

Due to two redundancies in a year things are all change. And that has meant a two-hundred mile move for Mabel and Monster. We got them moved just before Snowpocalypse™. Following the Discovery and a horse-trailer down the M6 realising each time it lurched int/out of the ruts left by the artics that the three most important women in my life were in front of me. Sobering.

We have all day turn out here, and rather surprisingly Monster has decided that she actually likes being out all the time thank you very much, even if it is snowing. We’ve been exploring the local lanes already and bringing her back into work. Now we just need to find a friendly local hunt so she has something to leap over.

Mabel is also just about to come back into work after the respite rather enforced due to life circumstances. Let’s hope she’s lost the attitude, but kept her trot.

The result of hours watching Mabel whilst using the iPhone EquiTempo app to measure her paces, a trip down the motorway whilst Kirsty searches BPM databases, iTunes for then buying the music, iMovie for capturing the DV output from the HandyCam, and matching the music to the trot/canter/walk sequences, and finally QuickTime Pro for extracting the resulting audio track for her performance CD.

Then she goes and spoils it by deciding not to do right lead canter on the day.

"Never work with children and animals", someone in movies once said. You know, they were right.

AFAIK the use of the music is covered by our British Dressage music licence with the PPL.

Me-Moing