9.  I love his ermine marks.

11.  I love that he raced.

12.  I love that he barely placed.

13.  I love his pedigree.

14.  I love how easily he got to me.

17.  I love his stupid, arthritic limbs.

18.  I love everything about him.

I fell off my pony. 

There. It's out in the open. Because it's the blog world and we all have perfect ponies and perfect equitation and never make mistakes, I felt extra shameful about my butt losing contact with my saddle. I almost thought about not mentioning it at all. 

So here's how it is: I've introduced trot work back into our lives. Archie barely breaks a sweat. I've been using a tabata program on my phone to time out ten minutes of warm up and then three two-minute sets of trot with two minutes of walking between them. And another ten minutes of walking to cool down. 

We were on our third trot set and I had taken him over some trot poles. I was going down to the far end of the ring to change direction. Wind was blowing the trees between our land and the gunshot house, excuses excuses. I was tapping his right ribcage to get it over and I realize now that I was leaning pretty heavily to the left.

Evidence of our kerfuffle in the sand.

One moment I'm on my pony, the next I'm standing beside him, still holding the reins. He looked at me and I looked at him, both with similar expressions of "Dafuq?"

About this time, my right calf started screaming. My at-home physician assistant thinks I tore it a little bit. Just a little. Nothing a beer, some ibuprofen and horse-grade liniment couldn't fix.  I walked him back to the mounting block and took him back in to the ring. We worked on trot circles in the scary side, with me growling at him when he started to get stupid about the trees blowing. The work he gave me was like we'd never missed a day.

If you look closely, you can see my gymnast-perfect landing.

I think it was good for us, though.  I needed the wake-up call that my old man should be respected just as much as any other horse.  Constant vigilance! (That's HP, non-nerds.) (Mad-Eye is my soulmate.)  And, dudes, I haven't fallen in years, and was due one.  Glad to get that shit out of the way!  Afterwards, I rode up to the BM giggling.  Texted D, who was simply thankful.  Discussed technicalities with L.  Told C and Hill, as C's mare almost refuses to work on that side of the ring.

Tl;dr: I fell off my horse, but landed on my feet like a fucking ninja.