which_chick | (no subject)

Today, I discovered that Nick trots at almost exactly the speed and rhythm of Billy Idol's Dancing With Myself, which is a nice thing to know in the even that I ever have to put together music for a dressage freestyle. (This is not very likely but still.) I discovered this because I was out riding the horse with my mp3 player on. The whole thing here is (as Thursday Pony Lady says) Rhythm, Relaxation, something-I-forget-what. It's so infrequent that I get past Rhythm and Relaxation that I haven't learned more than that just yet. Internet says Rhythm, Relaxation, Contact, Impulsion, Straightness, Collection. We're working on Contact at lesson but I suck at it. I am just full of suck. Anyway, I do Rhythm a lot better with music, which was why the mp3 player in the first place.

Anyway, even though my horse* could not hear the mp3 player, I could. She's very, very close to being exactly spot on to Dancing With Myself. I bet she'd do even better if she COULD hear the music. I'll have to see what I can do on that front. Also my lame-ass cheap mp3 player now has no fucking screen at all and frequently thinks it is stuck in the "lock" position when it isn't. I'm thinking I need another lame-ass cheap mp3 player and probably some kind of thing to keep it on my body (don't they make an upper-arm strappy velcro thing of some sort?) and dry at the same time. I suspect (but cannot prove) that at least part of the reason my lame-ass cheap mp3 player is having all these issues is that in my bra is not a particularly dry and/or healthy environment for mp3 players. I'll have to do some research on mp3 players for small/cheap/plays-well-with-linux.

Also, we tried jumping over the teeny 18" vertical, both at the trot (review) and at the canter (new). At the trot, I experimented with looking at the jump through the horse's ears until the jump was not visible through her ears. (I read somewhere that this might be helpful at improving one's timing over jumps.) That was not so good -- she stuck an extra stride in and jumped kind of late, close to the base of the jump. It was like she was worried about it because I kept staring at the damn thing. Judging from that experiment, Nick does better if I kind of ignore the jump. If I look through the jump, she just *handles* it for me, figures out the strides and stuff, makes it all happen. She also jumps better with some !click encouragement, puts more oomph into it.

To avoid boring her to tears, we only do about four or five jumps a day. The rest of the time we do other things. I worried at the outset that this might not be enough practice for her to get better but she seems to be doing fine at learning so far. I also sent away for a couple of books on jumping and setting up gymnastics to help horses learn to do better over fences and stuff. They should be here in a week or so -- I got the cheap shipping.

*Technically, Nick is not my horse. She does not belong to me. The horse people call her "your horse" when they are talking to me but that's mostly only to be irritating. The horse people tell my people that she's my horse, but again, mostly to be irritating. However, in lieu of an actual horse that I own, she will serve for all future instances of "my horse" on this LJ and in casual conversation until I actually buy a horse. For those who like to plan ahead, the horse that I am planning on buying in the eventual future is a bay arabian mare with three white feet and a crooked blaze, some traffic-safe issues, and a jackhammer trot who is under the impression that her name is "Nick". I am a big believer in try before you buy horse purchasing.