2022 Riding Journey

#4 Cold & Groundwork

Tuesday dawned about as cold as the weather app said it would.  But it might have warmed up to be a nice day, except there was a brutal north wind blowing quite strongly.  

Despite that, we have an indoor riding arena that blocked that wind, so my trainer didn't cancel lessons.  My first job was to put feed sacks in the trash, and then my second was to transport square hay bales.

See, Yucca, the stud colt, has officially been gelded and is now integrated into the lesson horse program.  (Blueberry picks on him a lot XD).  The hay bales that were over by his old little pen my trainer wanted me to move.  Two of them to the gate by the lesson horse pen, and two of them by the gate to the donkey pen.  

So, after doing feed sacks, of which there weren't many, I grabbed the two-wheeled wheelbarrow and went over to Yucca's old pen.

One bale at a time, I wheeled them to their designated locations.  It wasn't all that hard, except the bales were tricky to get in and out of the barrow.  

I found my trainer in the tack shed for my next job.  She's been at this 'new' place (I originally took lessons with her at another place, but awhile back, before I ever even started Wattpad, she moved to this place), and she has yet to organize / sort through the stuff in the tack shed.  

So guess who's job that fell too?  

Which is fine, because I like organizing things, it's distinctly fun and soothing to me to bring order out of chaos.  

Actually, my first job was to put the western saddle blankets back in order.  They'd kinda fallen in a messy pile.  

They're stacked on this... wooden thing?  Cabinet?  Not sure what it is but it works pretty well.  After unearthing it, I reorganized so that the least used / dirtiest saddle pads were at the back, and the most used ones at the front.  

Then it was time to dive into a pile of stuff that was right next to the western blankets.  My trainer gave me one box and told me to put any little bits and bobs that weren't trash in there.  She also said that she was going to bring out some more boxes for me to put things in, and that I'd have to show her what was in each on before I left.  

However, as I was working on the saddle blankets, Sally showed up for her lesson.  This distracted my trainer, and so she never ended up bringing the boxes XD  Despite that, I went ahead and went through it so that when the boxes came, I could just put the piles in them.  

Sally said that my helmet cover looked really nice on a cold day, and so I told her where she could find it.  Seriously, guys, that helmet cover has made winter riding so much more tolerable for me, it is amazing.  

Rummaging through all that stuff and organizing proved to be interesting.  You just never know what you might find.  I won't list it all here, but there was a lot of variety, let me tell you.  A lot of it was dusty from having been left there for awhile.  

It felt like it took a lot longer than it actually did, and when I'd finished that, (my trainer still hadn't brought me any boxes), I went back out to the indoor arena.  Sally was just mounting Cordell.  

My trainer told me that a blue tub had blown over to the end of the horse pens (I knew where it was, I'd seen it,), and she wanted me to put it back in Riggs and Mistletoe's pen along with a purple tub.  Then she wanted me to fill up the water tanks.  Oh, and pick up any hay nets I saw.  

I fetched the blue tub, and picked up some hay nets.  The hay net in the lesson horse pen was nearly gone, and I knew that I could pull the hay net out from under it before the wind blew it away.  I also knew it'd probably be pretty hard to do.