A Picture and A Ride!

That handsome bay gentleman with the chompy mouth? Look familiar?

It's River! :D

SO excited!! I still can't find an actual racing picture, but this is good enough! :)

Just a heads up, if you want nice track photos of East Coast tracks, Nikki Sherman is the place to go to! I've found all my race photos on her site, for Rhapsody, Paradox, and now River! She also has some pictures of QH racing and harness racing in case you're into that kind of thing.

It was crazy warm today (got up to 60!) so of course I had to try to ride! He was great but started flipping his head part way through, so we just walked and trotted a tiny bit, and then lunged in the round pen at all three gaits. I suspect that his ear mites/ticks/whatever-creepy-crawlies are back. We treated him for them about a month ago, and in my crazy researching at the time I learned that mites can lay eggs that hatch in about a month, so we'll re-treat with the stuff the vet recommended tomorrow, and hopefully he'll be A-OK again.

Met another person at the barn, which was exciting! Lol, folks here are pretty mind-their-own-business kinds of people, which is fine with me, but it doesn't lead to a lot of friends made quickly. It doesn't help that when people ask "So what do you do?" my answer is pretty much, "Um, well, we walk...and trot...sometimes we canter--and regret it immediately, and don't do it again for a week..."

Haha. In touch with Coach about the canter--he has a lovely free-lunge canter, but under saddle he dives down and powers along on the forehand--and she suggested some round pen work to help him learn to carry himself properly without me on board first. So along with the hill work, integrating that.

Going to freeze ourselves solid again the first part of this week; I keep hoping that each single-digit low will be the last one! :-/