Or..If you forget your saddle pad and end up riding using a random blanket from the truck as a saddle pad….you might be a redneck…?

My husband had a great spontaneous idea for us to throw a horse in the trailer, his fishing rods in the Bomber, and head down to the lake together. I decided Blaze was overdue for some trail time and loaded him up. Bless his heart, I must mention that after 6 months without being in the trailer (time off after last season’s saddle fit issues, been riding him from home) he hopped right into the trailer without hesitation. He was sweaty and had nervous cow pie poops in the trailer, like he used to when I first got him, but I know he’ll chill out with a few more times out.

We parked near the diversion pool where J fishes, at a spot conveniently large enough to turn around, with direct access to my usual lake trails. I hopped out all excited, opened my trailer tack door and immediately saw  that my saddle pad was missing. That would be because I am so over the top on color coordinating that I pulled Desire’s blue saddle pad out so I could put his green pad in. Except I never put the pad in. So there I was on a perfect gorgeous afternoon at the lake with no saddle pad. Well I briefly considered trying the saddle without any sort of pad but couldn’t make myself do it. Then J spotted the very navajo-esque blanket I keep in the truck for my chihuahua, Georgia, to sleep under when she’s cold (and if it’s under 70 degrees, she is cold). I was dubious but I REALLY didn’t want miss an awesome chance to ride Blaze and with his winter coat and the sultry weather I knew riding bareback wouldn’t be fun for long. So I folded that random blanket in half, then took another fold in the front to sort of lock it in and make it the right length on his very short back, and strapped the saddle on that puppy.

My husband took a few cool pics of us. In the top one the big “hill” behind us is Oroville Dam. Below that I rode down the road a little ways with J to where he heads off to fish and Blaze was snorty snort snort at everything and standing on his Arab tippy toes, not wanting to go forward. There is a mountain lion in that area (that’s the spot our lab, Tady, ran off up a hill and came back with claw marks down his chest and shoulder) and we wondered if he smelled something because he was NOT pleased and it’s not like Blaze to make a big fuss over nothing. Still, cool photos:

We hit the trail around 3:30 pm, and ended up riding down to the Lakeland tunnel and back, some along the water and some winding on the trails above the water-side trail. It was about 7 miles in a leisurely hour and a half, I didn’t ask a lot of Blaze, just some nice trots along the flats, and I was paranoid as all get out the whole ride that my ghetto saddle pad was going to ruin him, or even just rub, either way, oohhhh nooo what was I doing to my horse?!

We wandered back to the trailer around 5 and I held my breath as I untacked the Blazer–and discovered almost perfectly even sweat marks! There was a bit of ruffed hair at the shoulder areas but that seemed to be more saddle fit than anything else, and I had changed my shimming for today as I didn’t think I had adequately thick shims at the hollows behind his shark withers. Yeah, he is a special shaped horse. But anyhoo my cheesy saddle pad improvisation worked a charm!

Blaze was dogging it on the last mile or so to the trailer but I’m pretty sure that was more the warm weather and semi-confusion at being on the trail again than being truly tired. Who knows. I had almost forgotten how incredibly painfully slowly he walks, I can literally walk twice as fast on foot and it makes it hard to appreciate the ride sometimes. I’m sooo impatient! Sometimes it feels like we’re going to go backwards he walks so slowly!! Desire’s brisk walk and smooth gaits have really spoiled me, but Blaze is the dearest soul in the world and I’m glad I got to spend a gorgeous evening on the trails with him.

My husband made an amazing dinner and when I went snooping in the freezer I discovered he had bought Ben & Jerry’s Coffee Heath Bar Crunch too! Ohhh heaven, after spin class this morning and an evening ride, I’m digging in!

Tomorrow morning I’m going to pick up a new animal friend. I’m bringing the horse trailer 🙂

Today I pulled a little surprise on my husband. It didn’t quite work out exactly as planned but still ended up pretty fun and successful. Before my husband met me, when he lived in Santa Barbara (where he grew up), he kept goats and dairy goats, and he has been wanting to get goats since we moved up here 4 years ago. I’ve been pretty resistant to it, I’m generally not a fan of goats, nor the endless noise they make. Still, my husband supports all my horse lunacy and we have 21 acres with plenty of empty pastures, so it just seems Scrouge-like (and selfish!) to deny him his goat dream forever. He had been mentioning wanting baby goats, and a goat to milk. The boarder goats will be going home in the next month or two and he was starting to get sad about not having goats anymore. I’ve been going back and forth between surprising him with a goat or two and staying far far away from the subject, but with the imminent goat departure things were starting to come to a head. My good friend L, where mini doxie Wilbur and min horse Napoleon/El Bandito came from, just happens to also have goats–and Arabs *ahem*–and a couple of turkeys she wanted a home for. We put our little heads together and came up with a good trade for a couple of goats, and thus the surprise husband scheme finally came to fruition.

Today he left early to fish and my plan was to run down to L’s and pick up the turkeys, which he knew about, and the goats, which he had no clue about. And not just any goats, a pregnant female who will make a good milker (Nan) and a cute baby Boer (Maizie).

So my husband would be getting all his goat dreams fulfilled in just two little goat bodies! Of course when I was at L’s the cell rang and it was my husband, J–calling from home! Oh shit! He’s not supposed to be home! I am a terrible liar and start laughing and smiling when I’m trying to be sneaky, so J knew something was up even through the phone. I mumbled something and rang off as quickly as possible but knew I was at least a little busted. Still I have been particularly verbally anti-goat lately in anticipation of the surprise and I didn’t think he would guess I was bringing any of the little suckers home. I drove home and pulled in the yard and tried to remain calm and casually tell him I picked up the turkeys. Of course the little goats were baa’ing in the back of the truck and it took mere seconds for him to discover them. He was delighted and the goats are now settled in a paddock with a shed while the turkeys joined Sheza and the boarder goats in the big field (they had their wings clipped today).

I built a ghetto gate-keeper for the Sheza pasture, the gate was hung a good foot and a half off the ground and the boarder goats slide under it on their knees and ream the gate dozens of times a day. Plus when I have the horses over there they harass Desire when she gets mash. So I cut a piece of chicken wire mesh fence off the roll (without measure, coz that’s how I roll..hey it was only a little too short), grabbed some stakes and my hammer and some hay string–I did say ghetto, didn’t I?–and headed out there. The boarder goats are INCREDIBLY nosy and were all over me and the tools and the gate while I was working. It drove me bonkers and I was starting to question just WHY I felt the need to get more of the stupid things. Breathe, breathe. The female goat slid back and forth under the gate and jumped on, in, and all over the Polaris while I contemplated goaty murder and worked away attaching the piece of fence to the gate. I pounded the stakes in on either side to keep them from diving under it, and lashed the stakes to the fence support posts on either side. I hauled some random giant chunks of concrete out and piled them along the bottom of the fence in the middle so they couldn’t tunnel under. So far it is holding and they were *pissed* when Desire got her mash at dinner and they couldn’t get under the gate to get at it. I should have attached the piece of fence with wire as I know the goats are probably already chewing through the hay string but I couldn’t find any wire naturally and wanted to get it done. I’ll go back through and use wire here in the next day or so.

 Monday we’re going back to L’s to take a look at a cute young bay individual of another species of animals I mentioned she had..hehe 😉

This morning was bitterly cold and windy, there was ice on the pond and in the water buckets. Still the sky was showing signs of turning bright blue and there was sunshine to be had, so I loaded up Desire and headed to the lake to meet up with N. We got there a little before her and there were lot’s of trucks and trailers in the parking lot already. Lately Friday at the lake has been nearly as busy on the weekends! 

We galloped from the bottom of the hill pictured below, way down where the pipe disappears, to the top. Desire was seriously huffing and puffing, but she did it. It was fuunnnn!

I know I know, as the great Funder would say, “Pics or it didn’t happen!”   My husband had my camera with him today so there are no pics. But it did happen! All of my horses, evil little mini horse included, behaved excellently for the vet and spring shots this morning, despite a bitterly cold day with an unfriendly, gusty wind constantly stirring things up. I needed to get Desire’s Coggins and health certificate in order for crossing the Nevada border for Rides of March in a few weeks, and Desire, Blaze, and El Bandito the mini were all due for spring shots. Sheza had her vaccines in the fall so she was just a background observer today. She was showing just how independent she was by grazing at the far side of her paddock without the slightest observable interest in all the goings on. I honestly kind of prefer that to throwing a baby shit fit like she usually does!

I had some doubts about how successful rounding up El Bandito by myself would be. Usually I have at least my husband to help corral him, and with today’s gusty wild weather I didn’t see him being any sort of sweet. Here’s the thing: I was completely wrong! I did drive him up to the gate so he had nowhere to go, no fooling. But once there I walked right up to him, haltered him, and away we went. He has had about 2903747 stickers in his hair for the last few months, and you can say I’m a bad horse owner but I’ll say I’m just over itttt. Let me explain: our 21 acres boasts just about every conceivable form of sticker, pricker, and thistle. Blaze and El Bandito’s favorite past time is sticking their heads in bushes and coming out looking like frickin unicorns. I can pull Blaze, comb him out, put him back, and he will walk back up the gate five minutes later full of stickers again. We will eventually get a handle on the sticker problem, but it’s a work in progress with limited funds and no big tractor/sprayer combo to work with (in fact, we’re working with nothing more than me and my push mower and backpack sprayer). Sooo, Blaze gets tortured with incessant hair combing, but El Bandito tends to just rock his stickers without further correction. Until days like today come around, and then it’s spa time for mini man. His mane and forelock are SO THICK, it’s ridiculous. There are like three different layers to each. Cowboy Magic may be expensive but with the kind of stickers we have I swear it’s worth the money, I just spread that all over the stickery dreadlocky mess and start separating/working the Magic into the hair. It’s pretty impressive the relative time it takes to turn a hot mess into a normal mane and forelock situation. Bandito was a little hesitant for all the attention but mostly was too busy gobbling grass to protest. He took his de-wormer quite well and then stayed grazing til the vet showed. Since I didn’t have a great place to tie him safely I had the vet give his shots first and he took them like a champ! Quite a surprising display of behavior from him, especially considering the crazy weather, but I appreciated it.

Desire, meanwhile, tapped and danced and stretched and looked and just generally was an impatient Arab in the cross ties. The entire hour and a half she was in them. Lol. Sometimes she is just silly, but that’s her prerogative considering she is all business under saddle. Blaze was literally asleep in his cross ties. He woke up to see the vet but didn’t so much as flick an ear when she gave him the shot. He is generally pretty good but even I was surprised how calmly he took it. The vet loves him, she was talking to him today saying if he ever needed a home he should come to her house! I told her I’d be more likely to send my husband to go live there than Blaze, LOL. My husband did laugh about that later, by the way… Blaze was pronounced in great weight and overall looking healthy as, well, a horse. Desire was still tap dancing and did a little snorting when the vet went to her BUT she did the blood draw and vaccinations without any drama, which was awesome! The vet couldn’t believe it because when she came to do vaccines when Desire was pregnant last year Desire was so bad we almost couldn’t do the shots. She had been planning to do an exam but Desire was so bitchy we decided to skip it. It was nice to receive glowing compliments from the vet on all the animals–oh yeah and Sheza got a “Um, you know, she’s BIG!! How old is she again???”  Hahaha, oh dear.

It’s still windy and bitterly cold here now, I blanketed Desire and Blaze and feel totally guilty Sheza doesn’t have a blanket but at least she has a good coat and a shed (she’s outgrown 2 blankets now). Blaze doesn’t have a shed and Desire doesn’t have a winter coat, so I’m telling myself it all balances out. After the good vet session (and lovely accompanying bill) I spent the afternoon at a friend’s house helping her blanket her big herd of Arabs and just hanging out. There are also going to be some new additions of various species to the Redheaded Endurance family soon, it will be fun to post photos and info soon, but not yet!

My husband just made the most delicious steak dinner, YUM!

Oh, technology. I just grabbed this off Facebook, where I had posted it from my cell phone..so there is a pic! See his nice hair! It happened 🙂

I rode with some new friends today, it was a blast! They are the pair I mentioned in my Endurance Riders Rock post, a mother and daughter who have been involved in endurance for years (since the 80s, in the mom’s case). I had heard their last name in the past and knew they were endurance riders but just happened to meet the mom, L, at the feed store a few weeks ago and the daughter, M, and I had been chatting on Facebook thanks to mutual friends in the last few months. C was supposed to join us but couldn’t due to a problem with her horse trailer–the freakin’ wind gusted and bent the hinges of her trailer door when she got back from our last ride!–so it was just the three of us.

We started at the usual parking place at the Lake but after a stop at the water trough we branched off from the horse camp loop to another spot which is actually on private property (they have permission to ride there).

M was nice enough to take my camera for a while and take some photos of me and miss D, which was awesome!

Turned out the steep dirt driveway we ended up charging up–it’s a long, gnarly-steep hill–was the driveway to a house my husband and I had worked on a few years back. So I kinda sorta knew where we were most of the time. The hill was really fun to trot/canter up, my right hind Easyboot did pop off but the gaiter held it on and I popped it right back on with no trouble.

The hill is really rocky in spots and you kind of have to steer your way from good footing to good footing, that plus the uphill charge somehow got the boot off. Luckily M noticed right away and told me. I’ve noticed the V spread on my hind Gloves aren’t the best, but when I put power straps on them before I couldn’t even get the darn things on at all..so maybe I just need to put them back on and try it at home to see if they’ll go on now with the straps for a snugger fit after a few months of healthy hoof growth. That’s the third time the right hind glove has popped off but been held on by the gaiter, so I’m thinking it could fit better. We’ll see.

After the big hill we tried another trail but found it blocked by trees before long. Where is your saddle chainsaw when you need it?!

It was a lot of fun getting to ride and chat with L and M today, I look forward to more time spent on the trails with them! We ended up riding a leisurely 9 miles in 2 hrs 40, plus that big hill. It’s really chilly today so I busted out Desire’s new cooler for the first time when we got back to the trailers: