Checking In

Sorry for the radio silence.

It's a combination of a couple things that are pulling me away from writing.

1. We got a dog. With every intention of waiting until after the holidays, we totally brought this animal home less than week before flying to my parents' house in Maine for Thanksgiving.

Powerless.

It's fine.

So cute, I'll take 7. At least.

Cat meets dog.

2. Holidays and all the fun that goes with it. Including but not limited to: everyone in my family being sick except my dad, the worst family ever in the row behind us on the plane, stressing about finding someone to watch the dog who was still wearing a cone and maybe marking on everything in the world and was of unknown behavioral tendencies towards other dogs/people.

Just toss a wedding in there too.
For fun.

3. Work exploded. And I never work on this at work. Never.

4. General lack of creativity.

I want to write more. I'm happier when I write. Lately though I feel like I struggle with which way to go. My favorite posts are the ones that talk about my feelings where I post cute pictures of my horse and talk about how much I've learned, and how happy I am.

Typically I'm not privy to those earth-shattering kinds of experiences on a week to week basis.

Some ribbons and a little extra protection.
Just in case bellboots aren't enough.

Sometimes I like very training-centric entries discussing how I get Indy to keep his tongue in his mouth or this new saddle pad that makes his back super happy. Or I could write about how no matter what I do lately, even if my girth is so tight his eyes are bugging out, I still can't get my saddle to stop slipping back. Seriously, the breastplate gives him breasts. It doesn't look comfortable.

PURPLE ON PURPLE

Maybe the saddle moves because he jumps like this...

I'm doing a lot with him right now. He's been challenging lately. Our lessons are media-less but endless fonts of information and progress. And for some reason I just don't feel like anyone would want to read about it. A jump lesson where we do his first gymnastics and didn't launch to the moon doesn't seem like something worth reading about. Who would care about that, besides me, my trainer and select captive audiences (here's to lookin' at you, Sara)?

Fails at standing still for pictures.

As I look ahead to 2018 I consider for the millionth time what I want from this blog. Mostly I want it to make me happy, and I want to look back on it and remember things. I want it to be a record of what worked, didn't work, made me happy, made me sad, things that were barely worth doing once and things I would totally do again.