I’ve been meaning to pay tribute to Phylliss for some time. Phyllis is the first horse I rode when I began taking lessons two years ago. She was in her 20s, didn’t like anyone, threatened to kick and bite all the time, and was generally a pain. For my first lesson, I was so keyed [...]
This morning I took in an hour’s ride at the barn. There’s no instruction or supervision, just the use of the horse for an hour. It was sublime. At 10:00 a.m. on a rainy fall morning, there’s few humans and most of the horses are munching hay. No one was kicking his or her stall [...]
“One of the fortunate occurrences that helps the correct learning of the art of riding is to have from the start good and appropriate beasts, in accordance with each one’s stage of learning; because the beasts should be of one type at the beginning and of other types later on.”
From The Royal Books of Horsemanship, [...]
A former co-worker and I were talking horses one day. She returned to riding as an adult too, though now she has drifted away again due to family responsibilities. She said that once she started taking two lessons a week, she got very sore and lived on Ibuprofen.
I wondered if the same would hold true [...]
After my “projects” post the other day and after the great comments, I wonder if perhaps we are on to something here, re: the knitting angle. I’ve almost given up on knitting sweaters for humans because I’ve made three for myself so far and gad, they were foul. And how many scarves does one person [...]
Oh my goodness, in my search for Mountain Horse boots I chanced upon the Mountain Horse Web site! Talk about your fantasies! It’s not just the great sweaters, cool boots, naty and oh-so-chic breeches; it’s the photo shoot.
Yes, as the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated is to devotees of the bikini and sports, this catalogue [...]
My internet connection was so insufferably slow this morning that it rendered even the most casual use an exercise in extreme frustration. I was vexed, vexed beyond hope because I could not take the time this fine rainy morning to find good prices on winter riding boots, such as the Mountain Horse line offered by [...]
Katherine Blocksdorf, the About.com expert for horses, covered the topic of sew-it-yourself riding clothes. She linked to a company called Suitablity that sells patterns for all kinds of rider clothes, horse clothes, and general stuff like hay and feed bags. It’s got my attention since I used to sew some (made myself a Renaissance [...]
Had a great talk with a woman yesterday about an Arabian horse she has for sale. It was really kind of her to take so much time to talk.
Turns out her horse is spoken for, which is probably good because I think it has great blood lines and needs to be part of someone’s breeding [...]
Today I was reading www.halt-near-x.com, a well-written blog devoted to horses. Ms. X, the author, suggested a hypthetical registery for “Shank’s pony.”
“Shank’s pony, Shank’s pony,” I thought, “I have heard that phrase in some other context. Oh! Yes! A Richard Thompson song called “Walking the Long Miles Home.” The line is “When you ride Shanks’s pony, you [...]
