Lesson 18

The dogs need to be leashed now. Poor Pia... at least she found a good place to dig.

Today I got to ride Gretsky again. But no canter. The morning was actually quite cool, I was even wearing a little jacket to start!

Today we were working on half halts. I started with trotting a serpentine through the arena, and when I passed through the chairs, I was supposed to slow to a walk, then trot on again. Once I got that, we went to halting between the chairs, and then trotting on. Unfortunately, Gretsky decided my telling him to stop actually meant he should just walk really, really, really slowly (I think he thought he might get carrots if he got to Anna, she was not of the same opinion). So it took quite a while to convince the horse that stop did in fact mean STOP! Once I could actually get the halt, we moved on to asking him to stop, and when he started to, asking him to go again (which is a half halt?). By the time we were done with that, Anna's next lesson was arriving.

I don't know if you can make out what's going on in these pictures, but this is what I saw when leaving. That's Domino and (I think) Ikarus. They're both holding onto a rubber ball, and they were walking around in circles. It was just a very odd sight.