I promise his ears were up.

Is also a semi-failure?

So, I got the vast majority of the things I wanted to do actually done.  Is it defeatist and self-fullfilling prophecy if I say that, while I didn't finish everything, I got more than I anticipated actually done?

My husband, my dear, sweet husband and dictator of all things miserable in my life, declared that if we were going to be cycling, we could skip the Shaun T torture.  T is for Torturer, of course.  So I had three blissful days of no screaming, no ladder, no jumping or any of that other stupidness.

New fallen tree.

Friday, I rode.  Oh!  And he was excellent.  We popped over the little crossrail a couple times and he cantered on both leads.  And another fallen tree.  I feel like the BO has poor karma - as soon as she got one tree cut up, another fell.  So we did a little bending line from my ghetto stack of limbs to a recently fallen tree, complete with branches.

Old ghetto branches.

There's a corner of the back pasture that he's been an idiot around, so I took him to it so we could work on it.  I wish that I had approached that at the beginning of the day, rather than at the very end.  It was great that he didn't have an attitude on his mind throughout the ride, but two spooks and a correction wasn't necessarily how I wanted to end the ride. But we worked through it.

Middle left is new, middle right is old.

Me.

Saturday, the hubs went to round at the hospital and I got up and did the normal chores.  Walking dogs, feeding the kids, etc.  By the time he got home, I had everything set up for us to leave to go cycle.  We drove over to a nearby base that boasts a ten-mile loop.  It was sort of stressful, to be honest.  Not the actual ride, but the crossing of an intersection, the stopping at a guard station while surrounded by vehicles, all that.  We ended up biking over fifteen miles, but our time and MPH were inaccurate, because the hubs had to stop three times to answer calls.  Oh, and crossing that same intersection, I went left and the hubs went straight.  And when he turned his head to search for me, he fell.  :(

Him, taking call.

After that, we went home and showered and relaxed for a minute.  Then it was off to lunch (Japanese) and cupcakes and home to watch Underworld Evolution.  Perfect movie to sleep through because I have no fucking clue what it's about.  He got called in for an emergency surgery (open fracture of a leg from playing rugby), so I went and rode Archie again.

Scenic as fuck.

I thought a change of pace would do him some good, so I headed out to the dirt road to just work on straight and pace and transitions.  Fucker was an idiot.  He spooked twice at the same clump of trees and again while munching on some grass.  We did get a beautiful right lead canter after the first spook, but after that it was all I could do to get him thinking about forward instead of high-as-a-kite.

Ginger's base farmer tan.

After the ride, I immediately changed and went to the track.  Pumped out 4.5 miles at a decent, albeit slow, pace.  Came home and cleaned up and we went to get pizza and beer.  I love pizza and beer.

Sunday, we immediately went on another ride.  Ten miles, close to home.  It was supposed to rain all afternoon, so we hustled to get it in.  Let me just say, I need some padded bike shorts because my Stubben is eight hundred times more comfortable than my Viper, and the Stubben sort of blows.  We held a pace of about 14 mph and then had to clean mud off the bikes. And no one fell.

Pony gets a spa day.

We were supposed to meet a friend for lunch, but I had enough time to play with the Kid before the storms were planned to arrive.  I started by pulling his mane and then had that wonderful pre-storm temperature drop, so I rode.  At noon.  In August.  It was amazing.  We didn't do much other than walk/trot.  No jumps. One perfect right lead canter that he got praised profusely for, even though I didn't ask for it, and that he had to transition into a trot from.  It was a quick and neat twenty minutes.

Short mane.

We met my friend for lunch, took Archie's dirty stuff to the laundromat (where a strange man possibly with Parkinson's gave us a card for $6 because he felt that place was too expensive), and saw the latest Batman movie.

So. Worth. Seeing.

And we ended the night with True Blood.  All in all?  One of my best weekends.

Bliss.