Fourth Day Of Internship

So, its been a couple of days since I last posted an update. We went for a night to go pick up a horse. More on that later-yesterday, I played with Lightning, and Chief. Chief was my horse in the saddling clinic. Diane and I were to learn how to shim our horses. I got the gist of it-I decided to make it as simple as putting the shims where you want muscle to form. So that was pretty cool.

Lightning taught me just how incompetent I am with Left Brained Introverts that want to eat grass. LOL! He's a mini, btw. :D At first I tried to force him into it. Then, realizing that was only going to lead to a fight, I tried to motivate him. I got some looks of interest, and I was on the right track for a while because he'd look to me for direction when the signal to graze on command stopped. But then I asked for too much, and he went back to grabbing grass every three seconds. LOL. In the end I just decided to scratch my head and do some undemanding time with him. :D Mmmk. So then we were to pick up a horse up from somewhere in minnesota, and Jane thought it would be a good idea for all of us interns to come along. At first, to be honest, I wanted to stay at the barn and play with the ponies. But I'm still glad I went along. First off, we stopped at this really fancy restaurant for dinner. The prices were HIGH. $10 for a CHEESEBURGER. a CHEESEBURGER. Anyways, so the restaraunt was really high class. In the bathroom, instead of paper towels, they had actual towels for your hands. I've never seen that before in a restaraunt. Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures of this awesome restaurant.

We arrived at Jane's second home fairly late. The place was really cute-it was built in the 1890's. I got a few pictures of it I'm going to post on facebook. we didn't get to swim-we only got to sleep, and then take off again.

We stopped at a cute little restaurant for breakfast afterwards. The food was pretty good, and Jane treated us all again. :)

Arriving back at the barn for the day was really nice. On the way, I stayed in the back of Farrah's trailer, and read and used the computer. She lent me move closer stay longer-a book about fear that I've been wanting to read. After that, we just had to help Farrah pack up for Madison (she's spending the weekend there), and then we were free. :)

I decided to go play with my buddy after-it had been a whole day since I had played with him last. Where as usually, I see him three times a day here. I discovered that my blue halter and 12 ft line was missing-I borrowed one from Adency, but am still on the lookout for it. I suspect it was accidentally thrown in with Farrah's stuff-I am using her tack locker, after all.

Starting out, Chase was nervous in the wash racks. I took him there to groom him, and he progressively became more nervous, but I figured once I started playing with him, he'd get settled down quickly. But I still had to grab his wraps. So I tied him in the arena, figuring he would be calmer in there with someone leading another horse around. Bad idea. I came back with the wraps to find he had pulled back so hard that the rope had come loose enough, and he had his foreleg over it. Strike two, eh?

So I retied him, and went to putting on his wraps. I got one on before he started rearing in the ties, and really started letting loose. Realizing I wasn't going to get him still enough to put on the second wrap, I switched the twelve foot line for the twenty foot line, and set him on the falling leaf pattern. That worked for a bit, except he kept crowding me, and kept trying to bolt out of the pattern. He wasn't really connected at all-he was really concerned for his safety. I decided I needed to take a stronger action to get him left brained again, so I phase four yoyo'd him, and guided him into a back up. This was interesting-as the first couple of attempts of me doing this caused him to rear and try to bolt again (which I promptly interrupted)...hmmm.....anyways, I worked out a plan-every time his attention wavered, I would catch his attention by redirecting him into a different direction. When he had calmed down some, and was asking questions, I asked Erica to roll out the big green ball to us-I needed something to keep his interest, something to keep his curiousity dominating his fear. He jumped away from it at first, but then he started to get pretty interested in it. The next hour was spent interrupting patterns, and getting him focused on the ball-and having treats involved. Lol. Mmm...when he was finally off his adrenaline, and licking and chewing feverantly, I put him back in his paddock, feeling it was a good place to quit.