2022 Riding Journey

#2 First Lesson of the Year

Well, there was no entry last week because we couldn't go to Trainer's place, for personal reasons that I won't say here, but FINALLY I was able to go this week.  

Since it'd been 3 weeks since I was last at Trainer's, I was curious to see what might have changed.  Such as, perhaps, new hitching posts set in cement.  

Unfortunately, there were no hitching posts stuck in cement.  *rolls eyes*  There was, however, a mare in the indoor arena that was blanketed.  She was real friendly, as I walked along the fence she followed me with her head stuck over it. 

Little Tequila, my trainer's little white cute friendly dog, ran towards me in happy greeting, and of course I had to bend down to give him a pet.  While I was petting him, Trainer gave me a choice.  

Apparently, Helen went back to public school, so she won't be coming to the morning lessons anymore.  I'll miss her.  And Sally was sick, so she couldn't come to the morning lesson that week.  I was the only person who'd be riding the 9:30 lesson, so my trainer said I could ride in the 9:30 like usual, by myself, or ride with Carol when she came later with Medina.

To be honest, either sounded fine to me, but I chose to ride with Carol later.  I ended up liking my choice because I was able to get all the work done before the lesson. 

My first job was to go unhook the fence charger from the electric cord so my trainer could fix the fence.  The red roan mare, Riggs, had escaped, so my trainer needed to fix it.  

So I went and did that, then waited for a little while until my trainer gave me my next job.  It was stuffing feed sacks and looking for / picking up hay nets.

There weren't that many feed sacks.  One hay net had blown out from the pens.  In the pens, the hay bales were eaten down to a mound of hay, and so I went in there to see if I could pull out the hay net out from under it before it blew away.  

It was heavier than I thought it would be, and I got hay all over me and down in my boots, but I did pull it out.  So, I decided to try the second bale in the donkey pen.  I was partly succesful with this one, it tore and so I didn't get all of it out, but I got most of it.  

Then my trainer had me put two tires that had rolled away from the tire stack because of the wind back in their place.  Then she told me to turn the water on and see if the hose wasn't frozen.

See, part of the hose just stays in one place no matter where it's moved.  And thus, it's become covered by dirt and buried underground.  So, you can't drain a house when it's like that, and my trainer didn't know if it'd unfroze itself yet. 

If it was unfrozen, then I was to water the small tanks and then the big one in the donkey pen.

I did want it to be unfrozen, because watering is a job that I like.  However, when I turned on the water, only a tiny trickle came out the other end.  I debated between just going and telling my trainer that the hose was froze, or wait and see if it'd change.

It took awhile, and I just about gave up, but before I did, the water changed from a trickle to a stream, and eventually the water started coming through fully.  

So, I filled up the waters in the lesson horse pen first.  And while I was doing that, I noticed that Otis wasn't in there.  In fact, he wasn't anywhere on the place, and I wondered where he was.  I found out later where he was.  

I filled up the tank in the lesson horse pen, one of them, and then my trainer told me to fill up the two little tanks in the pen with Mistletoe and Riggs, then to put it in the big tank and come ride Lily. 

My trainer had mentioned before that when and if I put the hose in the big tank, I was to put in a ton of hose so that the horses couldn't drag it out as easy.  Because apparently they do that when the hose is left alone for periods of time.  So we were to make them work to drag it out ;)