My second horse show

Saturday was my second horse show. It was at the barn where I board so we had the home field advantage. We warmed up and Semper was on, on, on. He was just floating around, very responsive and willing. I entered 3 classes. I wanted to enter at least one class to school in. The rookie class was first and we started out really nicely until I asked for my first lead change. He kicked out so hard at my spur, big jerk, that I just took him two handed and schooled the rest of the pattern. Kicking out is a 5 point deduction. Kind of pointless to go on with a pattern after that! TL had me immediately take him out to the warm up area and just push him all over the place. Move his hip, move his shoulders, anything that required me putting leg on him. Of course he knew he was in trouble and never kicked out again, but we did make him work more than he wanted to. The next class was Green Reiner and we did a nice pattern. Our stops still need work but for the most part he did alright. We finished the pattern and got a 67 which is 2 points higher than our last show. I was happy with that. It is all about moving forward baby! The last class was the Dumb as Dirt class and boy did I live up to that name! The pattern started with turnarounds and I was so focused on doing good turnaround that I forgot to count! After the first one, I was thinking "shit! I don't know how many I have done!" There is that sinking feeling again. I did 5 rotations and that nabbed me a zero. But the rest of the pattern was very nice and the lead changes were beautiful. I did take too many steps back in the roll back and that would have nabbed me a zero on top the of the zero I already had. I got some nice compliments from people on how nice Semper and I looked and worked together and that is always nice to hear.

This weekend we are showing again. Not really at a horse show - we are performing at a horse show judging day for the FFA judging team. We will run a pattern and the FFA members will judge our run and give reasons to the judges to evaluate. It should be pretty low key and hopefully I won't make any pattern mishaps.

I figure that I am going to have to make each mistake once. As long as I only make them once I can live with that.