The Calendar.

It is time I let you all in on one of my super ultra amazing record-keeping secrets: The Calendar. I've been keeping records like this for years, and will likely continue to do so. My horsey life revolves around it!

While I always make sure to have paper records just in case something were to happen to my computer records, I spend quite a lot of time organizing and planning my training via calendar. It's a simple Word document, but I can spruce it up any way I want, and by having it organized page by page I can get a good visual of incremental training.


The first two months of 2010 in a snapshot:




Here is what a piece of May 2009 looked like:




Annnnnnnd here is what January 2011 looked like:



Right. Well, maybe this time next year I will look back and laugh.


I live by the calendar. I know when she is due for anything, when to alter or increase my rehab work, what I did on a particular day last month, when she cut her leg on XYZ, everything. When she was in serious work, I had a training schedule all set up week-by-week, and I always knew what we had worked on and what I was planning to work on. I planned things out ahead of time, mapped out my show season, and worked backwards from there. When she was in rehab, I delicately mapped out every incremental increase in her workload, and had everything perfectly planned for weeks in advance. Obviously, there isn't much of a use for that kind of meticulous planning anymore.

OR IS THERE! With Marti set to arrive this Friday (3 days!!!), I can actually satisfy my crazy record-keeping goal-setting urges once again! He will of course get his own set of records:





I can't wait to get started with him. He's never really been away from the stable he's grown up at, save for a few times, so this may likely totally blow his mind. It will be interesting to see how he reacts to the situation. He is really quite a baby and he is a very big boy. Honestly though, all I can think about is how totally hellacious Gogo was at his age. She was a nightmare! I couldn't ride her alone outside of an arena. I couldn't ride her at all outside of an arena! She would put her head between her legs and bolt for the nearest horse. She couldn't steer and she couldn't take a contact. And she had an opinion about EVERYTHING. She broke crossties and halters left and right. She fussed horribly for the farrier. And she tried to kill Nicole once by galloping straight into the horse she was riding while I sawed her face off trying to turn or stop her, neither of which I had any ability to do. I really think there is NO way on earth that Marti could POSSIBLY top some of the crap she dished out!

Tonight, it's absolutely pouring and temperatures are scheduled to drop into the teens with windchills in the negative numbers. Sleet, ice and quite a lot of snow are all forecast for tomorrow, so Gogo is tucked away in the barn out of the weather with a nice pile of hay, two blankets, and a fresh pair of wraps (she hasn't been wrapped in nearly two months but she's been stocking up whenever stalled so I opted to wrap her and see if it helps). I trimmed her yesterday, and the changes in her feet are REALLY interesting. With all the snow and wet we've had, her feet have gone back to looking a big Connectict-weather-like, but before that they were so hard, slick and shiny that they actually looked like polished marble, frogs included! When you tap on her frog with the end of a metal hoofpick, they sound the way knocking on hoofwall sounds - solid and HARD. And as expected, she is exfoliating her sole! I'll have to get pictures, it's totally wild - and the sexy sole underneath is gorgeous. Her cuts are all finally healed or healing, no amount of grooming gets her clean (although god knows I try), and she is also putting on LOTS of weight from being on pasture all the time. I see a grazing muzzle in someone's future...



Snowmare.