Oh man.

I once told a friend that I had difficulty counting money because it started me thinking on existential thoughts and then my motivation for the day would be shot.  (Here's how it goes:  we pay to go to places to learn things;  we take those things we paid to learn and we may or may not use them to someone else's advantage and that person then pays us; we spend eight hours a day, five days a week, doing some thing that we may or may not be passionate about, all in exchange for a little slip of paper; we give those slips of paper to people who are then doing things that they may or may not be passionate about, in order to get things that we are passionate about.  Summation: we do things we don't like in order to do things we do like, but the time spent is forever inbalanced.  And no one is going to remember, anyways.)

Okay.  That's off my chest.  Woo.  Back at work.

I remember my rides being hot.  I don't remember much of the details.  He had Thursday off and then I went out to the barn on Friday.  The BO was feeding and was super pleasant.  He doesn't spend a lot of time with the horses, but he was able to discern who my guy was and tell me about him in the pasture and all that.  And he thanked me for letting them take care of my horse. (!)

On Friday, we spent a lot of the time repeating some of the stuff we'd learned in the lesson on Wednesday.  Trying, again, to put all the pieces together.  I feel better holding the reins how I've always held them, but I'm having a harder time remembering that my elbows can actually move.  And should move.  I also practiced some two-point at the trot, in order to lengthen my leg, and that was ridiculously difficult.  One lap, a diagonal, another lap.

We've spent so much time cantering, too.

Saturday, the young woman with the other OTTB (who doesn't seem to exist) was riding as well.  She was riding barefoot and bareback but with a helmet, so I think she's a kindred spirit.  She also sits the trot like no one's freaking business.  I don't know if she's developed it over time or what, but I was seriously impressed.

As far as my own ride went, I tried to spend more time achieving and maintaining contact.  I'm finding it so hard to do all of those things at once, especially without someone telling me what to do.  I did work on more two-point at the trot and then took the Kid out to the woods.  We had a little canter down from the ring to the woods, with the mares in the pasture watching.

Sunday, a local student met me at the barn.  Sort of a weird story.  When I first starting on Instagram, I was looking through the #OTTB tag.  I saw a photo I liked, so I went to that person's account and started looking through all the photos.  From there, I noticed local iconography and realized that we were in the same city.  I struck up brief conversation - simply that I had an OTTB and lived in the same city.  She was working on a film project about OTTBs and owned one.

Late last week, she contacted me via Instagram saying that she needed to find a barn locally to move her OTTB to.  So I sent her a lengthy email about all the places and people I knew about here.  I tried to keep my personal opinion out of it but also told her the ones to definitely avoid.

She was looking for certain things and I felt that my new barn met those things, so I invited her to visit it while I was there.   She came on Sunday and I pointed out things, answered what questions I could, and just tried to give a baseline of what the barn was like.  It's a nice barn and I'm very happy here, so no reason not to share it.

For my actual ride, I tried to work more on cantering, contact, and not coming out of the saddle at the post so much.  I did more two-point, but I wussed out and did it at the canter.  I also did some no-stirrup work, in hopes that it would give me a better feel for how far of the saddle to come.  And when I returned to my irons, I felt they were too short.  So, something to think about.

We finished the ride back in the woods.

Other life stuff:

• We washed the house.  With a scrub brush.  And some soapy bleach shit that stank.  White houses are like white cars.

Nap time.

• We went to the gym twice because I've decided that I'm going to drop my Tuesday kickboxing class and instead lift twice on the weekends, like I used to. 

Overwhelmingly pleased.