This lesson definitely wasn't one of my best, but maybe one where I learned the most.  Hopefully, anyway.  

It was cold and brisk when I first arrived.  Sea Monster, the blanketed horse, was in the arena again, and just as eager as before, following me along the fence.  Tequila and Daisy came to greet us.  

Sea Monster has looks that I like.  Not only is he a flashy bay, with socks, but he's leggy.  However, his legs aren't thin, but bony, and his head is pleasantly shaped. 

My first job was to stuff feed sacks, and then to grab an orange bucket and put some metal that had been picked up with a rolling magnet by Carol.  See, where we are, the wind always unearths more metal / trash, so Carol came out on the weekend and helped pick it up.

So I picked up the feed sacks, there wasn't that many.  And then found the orange bucket.  The metal was on two feed sacks, along with a bunch of dirt.  I did the best I could to get all the metal out without the dirt.  

Just as I was about finished, my trainer came by and said that when I was done, I could grab the hay fork and wheel barrow to scoop up the rest of the hay in the tack shed.  Only, I wasn't to give it to any specific horse but to just leave it in the shed.

So, I finished putting the metal in the bucket, put the two feed sacks in the trash, and went on to the next job.  

I had to do some searching for the wheelbarrow, because it wasn't where I'd last left it and I couldn't remember if I'd seen it any other place.  But in the end I located it (it was the one-wheel one).  

Scraping up hay is a good job for the most part, although you do get it on your jacket and sometimes in your boots.  I tried my best to make sure the hay didn't have anything in it, like wood pieces, and other things. 

As I neared the end of this job, my trainer came and gave me a bath towel.  She said she wanted me to dust off the tack.  All she wanted me to do was remove the layer of dust that settles on everything where we live.  This seemed easy to me at the time.  

So, I finished up the job with the hay, and then went to dusting.  It was satisfying to remove the dust and see the shininess of the saddles come through.  Some of the saddles had been dusting for awhile.  

I also dusted off the bridles along the back wall, but some of them had more than just a layer of dust.  The dust had combined with moisture to form a dirty coating that couldn't come off without soap and water.  I did the best I could.  

About the time I was finishing these bridles, my trainer came to fetch something from the tack shed.  She said the weather showed that the wind was going to die down later, and then I could have my lesson.  I told her I'd dusted off all the tack.  And then she told me to start dusting off the tack on the pallets.

Now, some clarification.  My trainer has a LOT of tack.  More than she can use by herself, and even more than what she needs for lessons.  So, some of the not-as-good tack that she doesn't use has been put over on these pallets.  

I didn't think she'd want me to dust those, because they're not used and all, but sure enough, she wanted me too.  I'll be honest, it looked terrifying.  There wasn't just a layer of dust on these saddles, okay, there was SEVERAL layers. 

I put two little kid western saddles over on another saddle, and so then I had a space to put these saddles on to clean them.   

Thankfully, about this time my Friend arrived.  I had known she might be coming, but I didn't know for sure.  With her being there, it relieved the tedium.  

We talked about horse things and cleaned off insane amounts of dust.  It was so bad on many saddles that you couldn't tell what color the leather was, and you had to 'unearth' it to find out.

But between the two of us, we managed to clean off every single saddle.  I even cleaned off my trainer's old tall boots XD  I don't know if she knows that she still has them...  She had me put them over there a couple of months ago and hasn't touched them since XD  

Anyhow, having completed that, we left the tack shed.  My trainer was riding Sea Monster at the time.

To my surprise, my trainer told me that I was going to be riding Twister for my lesson.  I don't know when was the last time I rode him.  And Friend was going to be riding Mariah.  

Before grooming and tacking up Twister, whom my trainer had already caught and put on the fence, I fetched Otis for her while Friend caught Mariah.  

It was nice to tack up a horse without them pinning you with dagger looks and snapping.  Twister was half asleep.  

Mariah's new habit, Friend told me, is biting the panel whenever she's unhappy.  I had noticed this last week, but I didn't know it'd grown to be a new habit.  

I was first to mount, although Friend wasn't far behind me.  

Right away, Twister started tossing his head against the reins.  I thought it was because I was pulling with my hands and tried to not do that.  But my trainer told me I had my reins too short, so I had to lengthen them.  

We just walked one lap around the arena one way, and then another lap another way. 

My trainer than said both Friend and I were going to be trotting around the arena.  But then, my trainer had us both stop and gave us a long talk about Sea Monster, which I'll try to recall accurately here.  

Sea Monster comes from the same place that Firebug and the big gray mare from my last journal comes from.  Trainer has her own trainer, whom she takes lesson from.  I'll call her Teacher for clarity.  

Now Teacher has been riding for 15 years more than my trainer, and my trainer said that she could get on any horse of my trainer's and whip her.  Because she just has that ability, I mean, she's training up to 1 meter 50 with some client horses.  She deals with these higher upper level horses.  

But my trainer has some skills that she does not.  She's gone on to learn some things that Teacher doesn't know.  And she has more time, which Teacher doesn't have.

So Teacher can send these horses whom she doesn't have time to work with, and whose problems she may not want to deal with, to my trainer.  That's how Firebug got there, because she terrorized everybody at Teacher's barn, no one wanted to ride her.  

It's the same way with Sea Monster, except he's not as bad as Firebug.  "This horse, with his blanket rubs, is worth 30,000.  And the reason that he's not worth more is that he's young, and he's not very ridable," my trainer said.  

When my trainer picked up Sea Monster, they told her that he was 'funny about his mouth'.  But what's actually his problem is that he just wants to pull the rein through your hand.  My trainer won't let him do this, and it makes him mad, and we have a lot of backing up going on XD  

My trainer said that also, just because you're not going to go jump your horse Grand Prix doesn't mean you can't train like you're going to.  It doesn't mean your allowed to skimp on your horse's education.  

And so, while my trainer doesn't have what Teacher has, she does have some other things.  And so they can help each other out. 

Plus, my trainer demonstrated how she wanted us to do the circles in the corners.  She said when we went through the corner, did our circle, and was coming back through the corner, she wanted to see us taking the same route we had before.  No matter how ugly or lumpy the circle was, she wanted us to go through the same footprints in the corner.  As she put it, you can't make a circle unless you end where you started.  

So, for some reason, my brain didn't realize we were supposed to be doing circles in the corner at first, despite what my trainer said.  But... 

Okay, so, the reason that I titled this entry 'disgruntled' is because everyone was disgruntled.  Sea Monster, under my trainer, was disgruntled.  I was disgruntled, Twister was disgruntled, etc.  

The first time I went to trot Twister, I didn't even get him trotting.  He started being crooked, and I was trying to get him straight, and it wasn't working...  Ugh.

My trainer had me stop, told me to take an inside line so that he wouldn't try to avoid some creaky metal along the fence, and use my body to steer.  Which I KNOW I'm supposed to do and which works better.

She'd also told me that Twister had to have a fast trot, but that if I asked him for it and he cantered, to let him canter and then bring him back to trot.  She didn't want me to punish or keep him from trying.  

This, in addition to my frustration / tenseness, didn't help.  I got him trotting, and then he started doing weird cantering things...  Yeah, the memory's kinda a blur, but suffice it to say that things weren't going well and I wasn't doing well...  

So my trainer had me stop, dismount, and hold Sea Monster while she demonstrated on Twister.  

And what happened is kinda a blur, again, but one of the things I distinctly remembered she told me to do, when he did that nasty try-to-dive-through-the-corner thing, with his head facing towards the fence but his body curved to the inside, to just turn his face and run it into the wall.  Also, she was able to have her reins shorter because she had her hands higher.  Those were the two main things I took away from it. 

And for the rest of the ride, we worked on trotting with doing circles in the corners.  I'm partly mad at myself because it was such an easy exercise, literally just a basic warm up thing, and I couldn't do it easily like normal.

I think part of the reason was that I've been ride Mariah and Lily for so long that the adjustment to Twister is pretty huge.  His strides are long and big, he's not as quick to respond to the leg, and he tries to weasel his way out of things.  Mariah, if she doesn't like or want to do something, she lets you know.  Twister, on the other hand, tries to 'change the subject.' 

In the end, I did pretty good.  I did run his head into the fence a lot, because he needed that.  I also just did a bunch of circles in walk before going to trot.  

At one point, I was struggling around on a circle, and my trainer said, "Relax!"  And I did, not a whole lot, but enough to where suddenly Twister stopped fighting. So, another reason I think I was struggling so much was that I was emotionally tense, anxious, and frustrated, from something that'd happened the day before.  

Hopefully this next lesson won't be so bad.  I guess I'm taking a break from Mariah for now, to get back into riding other horses again.  Twister is joining the lesson program again, because Otis is leaving in a couple of weeks, but I think my trainer is still working with him. 

And yeah, there you go.  Not my best lesson.  But hey, you've got have those sometimes and it showed me a lot of things.  Some of which I already knew, and some of which I didn't.  

Actual lesson 1/25/2022