Pretty smells and pretty toys

I had a very nice riding lesson tonight. The past couple weeks have gone very well, actually.

Last week I rode Mindy. She is a little touchy, especially when you adjust her tack and when other horses get too close, and she has a mind of her own (like most horses), but mostly she is good. Last week, though, Victor (my riding teacher) warned me that she had rolled in the previous class, and I should watch out in case she tried it again. It wouldn't be dangerous -- she'd go down real slow, and I'd just kick my feet out of the stirrups and get out of the way -- but I should try to keep her from even thinking of it, mostly by not letting her stop for too long. Near the end of the lesson, though, she kept dipping her legs, and Victor noticed she was trying to paw at her belly, which can be a sign of colic. She seemed pretty much OK once I dismounted, but Victor had me just walk her for the rest of the lesson. It was nice and calming, actually, and gave my legs a good stretch after the stiffness of riding. She's still out this week, Victor thinks, but he didn't know what turned out to be wrong.

This week I rode Jerome. Apparently he also has space issues, but overall he's a very good horse. Victor's daughter won her first ribbon on him. He most definitely knew that he knows more than I do about riding, and he very much wanted to be in the more advanced lesson where they were cantering. When I got him to stop trotting out when I wanted him to walk or halt, he decided to get me back by doing the world's slowest walks and trots. Still, he was a good horse overall; he was a good balance of easy and difficult, so I learned something. His mouth is sensitive -- he uses a rubber bit -- so I tended to let him make more of the decisions than I really should have, because I didn't want to pull on his mouth.

Stephanie and I both got good lessons from our horses (with Victor's help) on how one is supposed to ask a horse to halt. We were both leaning forward into it, which confused the horse and unbalanced us. It wasn't as easy to learn as I would've expected, but once I figured it out, I could feel that it made a lot more sense to lean back into the halt. My balance felt a lot better.

I'm working on endurance with my posture -- I know how to sit up straight, but I get tired and lazy and slouchy. We also did steering exercises today -- figure eights around a pair of jumping standards. Jerome was very sensitive to my leads, and responsive, even when he argued a bit, and he trotted very nicely around the sharp turns. I discovered that, as long as I'm paying attention, it's really easy for me to switch diagonals in the center of a figure eight; the problem is that I don't necessarily start the exercise on the right diagonal! With all the switching, once I'm wrong I tend to stay wrong until somebody points out the problem.

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And now for the less horsey part of the post -- the part that goes with the title.

First of all, I learned tonight that Maryland doesn't always smell horrible. As I led Jerome back to the stable, he was sniffing at the cold clear air, so I sniffed too. It smelled lovely, like open fields and hay and a little dust, the way fall and winter smelled in Nebraska when we drove out to the edge of the country and parked on a dark road and piled out to look up at the stars. Maybe I'll go live in the barn.

And the pretty toys? Well, for reasons completely unknown to me (not that I'm questioning them!), my mother decided to pay for half of an iPod for me to take along to England when I go in a week or two. I'm debating the relative merits of the iPod Mini and the iPod Photo. I'm leaning heavily toward the Photo; it's just that it costs so much more! We'll see. I'd better go work on making a decision so I can eventually get to bed. A brief mention of the evening's other pretty toys: Adam got his iPod Photo yesterday, so he let me poke at it tonight to see if it helped my decision, and he cooked the most wonderful tender juicy spiced chicken for dinner tonight. Mmmmmm...