A little over an hour before sunset, I wandered outside and caught Romeo. Harley watched from his pasture, curious. Tacked Mo up, and headed to the arena.
No warmup on the longe, I just hopped on. Lots of good loose rein walking and jogging to warm up his muscles and his mind. Adjusted the jog stride to a working trot a while, then back to jog. He was relaxed, neck level with his withers, ears alert to the deer grazing through. Lope work was pretty. Cute, soft, relaxed. For a while there, I had to squeeze and drive to keep him going. All the down transitions on 'air brakes'. Turns on forehand and haunches, all sticky to start, but improved.
For a bit at the end, I worked on turns on haunches. After a recent HorseMaster TV episode, I decided maybe we'd take a stab at rollbacks. First step was a good halt, which we've got. Second is the turn, which improved last night. Finally, is the lope off from a halt. That'll take some work. I caught myself doing the same thing the TV rider was doing - not looking deliberately and clearly where we were going in the rollback. Once I repositioned my body, my entire body, and looked back over my shoulder in the new direction, his turns got much sharper and focused. Neat stuff...
About 40 minutes out there total. We ended our work pushing some deer that were outside the arena (from inside). Mo walked towards them, and one doe darted away, just to migrate right back to the fenceline. I told Mo under my breath, "Git'er", and he very deliberately walked over towards her. The doe, realizing we were pretty serious, took off again, but as I was dismounting and opening the gate, there she was again, same spot. "Hey Mo, don't freak out when they all take off every direction crazy." As we left the arena, all SIX of them went every which way. I laughed, Mo let out a heavy sigh. Fun...
In other news, I thought I was going to be broadcasting a concert event in my local hometown. Benefit concert for a local charity. Somehow, through some horribly bad communication, what was originally supposed to cost $800 turned into over $2000. That information didn't surface until after I had secured $800 in donations, gotten permission to host and organize the event, and had a lot of eager folks ready to help out. A very unfortunate turn of events. I can hope the event planner has learned from her error in making one deal with me, then changing it. A very disappointing situation, indeed.
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