December Goals

I know we're almost two weeks in, but there's still the little matter of my November goals progress. And the dumpster fire that I'm going to try and wrangle in called December.

Indy
- First show on the 5th! Stay in the ring and on the horse for both dressage and jumping phases. Indy was better than I could've hoped for on the 5th, we not only stayed in the ring but managed to be pretty fancy prancy about it.
- Go to a hunter pace or cross country schooling. Yeah, this didn't happen. I'm blaming my trailering flat tire incident on my lack of escapades. Also, it got cold.

- Get scoped for ulcers. Indy spent a lovely one-night-all-expenses-paid vacation at Mid Atlantic to get scoped. He's getting all the tummy meds right now. We're almost done his treatment and I've already noticed a huge difference in his mood.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU'RE LEAVING ME HERE
WITH NO FOOD

- Work on canter transitions. I'm actually amazed at how great his canter departs are now. Who taught him that???
- Incorporate more weekend outside ring work!! Medium success on this... It keeps doing this annoying thing where it gets dark. Like, really early. 

Me
- No Stirrup November!!!! Anyone wanna figure out a way to quantify this? One bareback/stirrupless ride a week? Warm up without stirrups? I'm open to suggestions. This was probably mostly a success because trainer makes me abandon my stirrups almost every lesson because I ride so much better without them. I hate it. Indy loves it. But if he's happy, I'm happy (I guess).
- Practice driving the trailer around. Like, a lot. There's a story behind this. I practiced once and got 'stuck' in a cul de sac. I was in tears and someone from the farm had to come rescue me. She pulled right around the cul de sac. Turns out I wasn't actually stuck. Figures.

- Keep up the diet & exercise plan. This'll be hard because... yanno. Turkey. It's coming. I did about a billion lunge/rows on Thanksgiving morning so pretty much, I'm awesome.
- Stick with two posts a week, and try and come up with a 'weekly column' type post. I think I failed this? I really fell off the posting wagon. There's a reason for this. He's fluffy and has four legs and his name is not Indy.

That being said, I did keep up posting besides that and I also came up with a weekly column type post. In the interest of facts I think I still failed though. Whatever, failure is a part of succeeding.

As far as December goals, I think our only goal will be to keep up as normal a schedule as possible despite holidays/parties/there's a winter storm warning for tonight? This is harder than it seems... My lessons are normally Friday nights and lately everyone and their mother has been scheduling parties for Friday.

I was also going to make clipping Indy a goal, but spoiler alert I started giving him a chase clip last night. I got about three quarters of the way through it when he decided he was done so I'm leaving the rest to attempt to finish tomorrow. Let me tell you, he has incredibly reach when he cow kicks. He's like a ballerina.

Artist's interpretation.

One side of him looks fine. The other side looks like he might have mange. Hopefully I can fix it tomorrow.

Hopefully.