Dogs.
The dogs are both well. Brina has had a few 'episodes' this month. Mainly because she is a greedy little so and so. She has eaten my martingale..... again..... that would be the one that I bought to replace the last one she ate. I thought that I had hidden it REALLY well but apparently not. Sheesh!! That leather item of course was 'returned' when she tried to eat her dinner. She also managed to work a bit of a hole in her Brinabal Lector mask and made the most of it. She brought up a bit of a revolting mixture of things, the least objectional being the cow poop. :-/ Sammie is well and is ticking along, she is just no trouble that girl. :-) (Long may she stay that way!!!)
Brina also managed to somehow break her tail. I came home one day to find it all bent and hanging, heaven knows how she did it. I made a splint of a used toilet roll and a bandage that Spyke had won at a dressage comp so she had a lovely bright pink tail. I took the splint off today after two weeks and the tail seems to be completely mended. :-)
Weekend Away
Excitingly I actually managed to have a weekend away in Peel Forest, down south of Christchurch. I went there with a few of the girls from the Chch office. It was a GREAT weekend. We drove down on the Saturday and when we got there at about 2pm we broke out the peanuts and the drinks and spent the next eight hours drinking, laughing, chatting and eating. It was FABULOUS. On the Sunday we went for a walk in the forest and then stopped for a picnic in Ashburton on the way home. Lovely, LOVELY weekend.
Spyke has had a busy time. We competed in the WRC dressage at level 2. We did two tests. The first test didn't go so well. Spyke did some of his throwing head resistance so I tried to really concentrate on not getting tense and he came back to me really well, which is a first. In the past, once he started resisting we were pretty much toast so I was really pleased with him. We did manage to come second to last though. :-/
Resisting
Looking fabulous (him, not me :-)
In the second test he was GREAT!!! He was soft, kind and tried really hard. I was chuffed with him and we managed to get fourth. :-) I was really, really pleased with that result as there were some VERY nice horses that we were up against.
I have been jumping him too and he has been brilliant. He is really keen to jump and seems to be really enjoying it. Today we had a show hunter clinic with Sue Whiddet, a national judge. She remembered Spyke from the showmanship challenge last year (where I had a bit of a jumping melt down), I figured her remembering us was not a a good thing but in actual fact she remembered his lovely dressage so I was pretty blinkin' chuffed. Spyke usually saves his most 'special' behaviour for clinics so I was a bit worried about today. It wasn't helped by me having the wrong start time in my head. I thought it started at 10:30 but it was actually 10. Fortunately Kristina noticed that I had the wrong time and set me right.
Once we got there I had about 2 minutes to tack up and get on so my 'long warm up' that I had planned didn't happen. Spyke however was PERFECT. He did not put a foot wrong at all. Sue's advice to me was to trust Spyke as he is a 'lovely boy'. :-)
