Carriage House Combined HT Recap

We made it to Carriage House! It's been a stressful week, trying to prep an out of shape horse for a show, and several times I nearly threw my hands in the air and gave up. My wonderful friend J kept pushing me, and despite some rocky rides, I packed and cleaned my tack and tried to not worry about leaving Foxie home alone for a few hours.

On the home front, things continue to be a struggle; here's a list of shit that has gone down:

• Hubby was in a car accident on Friday (no injuries, just one dented bumper)
• Our phones continue to not work reliably at home (we went to get new ones... and hubby's is already not working)
• Bailey came in from the pasture with a huge hole/sore in her butt (yay making me look like a responsible mom)
• We have to have the vet out to our property to be approved to adopt a TB mare I'm nuts about... so there goes more money.
• Foxie's been getting eaten alive by bugs
• The dog keeps banging up the corner of his eye while running around outside but can't be contained because he goes crazy
• We broke the PTO shaft on our mower.
• We bent another blade on the OTHER mower
• Grass is basically taking over our general "yard" area

But either way, we made it to Carriage House on Sunday. I got Bailey braided and loaded in fantastic time, but forgot my coat and armband. Fail. Hubby brought the coats down, and I got on extra early to warm up because I was expecting my horse to be a psycho. She, always the one to surprise, was absolutely perfect. If anything, she was lazy. 

She laid down a good test for a 32.10 and some weird judge comments. I wasn't too fond of riding on wet grass for my test, and wasn't being too accurate in my corners and turns because I didn't want to slip, and the turn from outside the ring to C was about 4 feet wide. I overshot my center line to fix it, but the judge definitely noticed, and went out of her way to say that I wandered down the center line. I'm not going to pay too much attention to the comments - Bailey put down a great test, and left us in 4th - and she definitely wasn't at her best, so that was amazing.

(video to come)

I ended up with a stall (not sure how that happened) so Bailey got to demonstrate her chill new attitude sleeping, eating and drinking like a pro in her temp stall while J and I found me an armband, socialized and I tried to not get sunburned after forgetting my sunscreen. I got on early for jumping again; I was nervous as the day before in our last jump school at home, I was swearing at the top of my lungs trying to safety-seat myself into not falling off my horse when she randomly decided to start jumping 2'9 like it was about 4'6 and while I kind of enjoy her jumping the crap out of things, this was... different. It felt very unsafe. I popped her over some starter warm up fences and she was 120% her usual self again despite the previous day's weirdness... loping around like a hunter, clearing everything happily and even doing a little jamming despite the heat (it suddenly decided to be summer and was in the mid 80's and humid). 

The course was riding kind of rough, especially between 4 (the green with Pine Trees fence) and 5 and I was nervous. I put on my coat (because I don't care if coats were waived, I came to wear my green coat, and I am going to do it!). I popped a few more fences and went in:

1 garnered a look and a tap, two went well: 

Three she jumped me out of the tack over, but jammed until I got her pointed at spooky 4: 

She tried to run past 5 a bit, but popped awkwardly over it when asked, and left it up!  6 was also super ugly due to getting a horrible line, but she went. And trotted the down bank like it wasn't a thing. I thought 8 was a bit spooky, but Bailey said "Yes Ma'am" and jumped like a good bean:

We lost some focus into 9 a & b (kids on the rail, AH!) but BB took me home: 

And she flew around for a double clear. Some fences were rocky - and maybe I was a bit tap-happy with my whip, but she jumped the shit out of a BN course (with random down bank) and took us from 4th to 2nd! We got a ribbon and a very nice body brush out of the day - not a bad bit of luck, when the rest of the weekend was a disaster. Plus, my new coat looks badass. 

Good girl, BB! She and Foxie were thrilled to be reuinited and while some more misfortune hit me when I went to go park the trailer... at this point I can't stress or be upset about things. My trailer is a bit damaged (I might have clipped a fender on another trailer trying to avoid backing my damn trailer) but everyone is fine, the other trailer is fine, and despite tons of unfortunate things happening, we're all healthy and it can only get better from here, right? 

Right. (positive thoughts would be appreciated, however).