OTTB Charm

I saw this particular blog hop from  the900facebookpony  who got it from hellomylivia . I found it to be a pretty interesting topic, as I noticed from both of them that their own horses had a pretty significant number of the qualities from their "perfect horse". As I thought about it, I realized that a lot of my "perfect horse" qualities mirror Charmer's too. It's kind of a chicken or the egg thing. Not sure if I wanted these particular qualities in the first place, and that is why Charmer has stuck around this long, or if Charmer made me really love and value his particular qualities. 1. Color and Size Right off the bat though, I can tell you one thing that I would hands down have in my dream horse. Chrome . Doesn't have to be anything massive, but like a sock, or a snip or blaze or something ! Fake chrome I pretend he has chrome by putting white boots on him but it is not quite the same. Now I have accepted Charmer's lack of white, and a...

This weekend I attended another local horse show with Charmer. I've been riding him at home, but we don't have any jumps (yet). But even with that being said, when we jump he has been doing really, really well! So I decided to be a little extra brave when signing up and enter him in 2'6" and 2'9", as well as our first ever 2'6" derby for fun. From our 2'6" round. New favorite photo For him, basically every time he has walked off the trailer lately, he just marches right off, looks around a little, screams a few times, and then just eats hay with zero drama. It is so nice I have never had a horse that will just do that. I can leave him tied at the trailer for hours at a show and feel confident he will still be there when I return. This show was no different. He took his look around and then settled right in at the trailer. I wandered around the show all morning talking to people and taking lots and lots of photos. Our first class of...

Charmer has lived at my house for about a month now, and it has been absolutely amazing. He loves living on a nearly 2 acre pasture for most of the time, and is more than happy to be ridden in our arena, or climb on the trailer for lessons and shows. I gave him nearly 3 weeks off when he first moved to our property because we were working on making the arena ready to be ridden in - pulling weeds, getting a drag, etc. Once the arena was finally done, I climbed up on my horse (which was a little comical, as we don't have a mounting block yet, so I wandered around trying to find something tall enough to use as a mounting block for the day). As we were walking around the arena, the horses in our pasture come galloping  over, and I was sure Charmer was going to have a full blown meltdown. Wrong. He lazily flicked an ear in their direction and went right back to work. Even halfway through our ride, the neighbors' horses decided to start screaming and running because ohmygosh there ...

So as I said, there would be continuation from my last post, regarding all of the life experiences that I've had recently. Thunderbird was awesome, and the clinic was even more so, but both pale in comparison to this. I bought a house! Now when I say that, I had immense amounts of help from my family and could not have done it without them. But my name is officially on this house and I am the primary homeowner. This also means that the mortgage shows up on my bank account and makes me die a little bit inside every time I look at it, but I could not be happier with this house! Overhead shot of the property The house is approximately 1,700 square feet, and it sits on 3.5 acres of land. As you can see in the picture, about half of the acreage is just pasture, then there is a dry lot with shelter and an automatic waterer, a hay barn, and there is an arena out back which is approximately 120ft x 200ft. Which is seriously a bigger arena than I've had in some boarding...

I swear at some point I will actually start blogging more than once a month (if that). What a crazy month that it has been for me though! So crazy, in fact, that I will have to write more than one post on it. To kick off the post, I got to have a really fantastic experience with my barn. They went up to Thunderbird from 6/26-7/2. I have been working at the barn for the last few months and they decided last minute to take me as a groom! I rushed to get my passport together, and make sure that I had everything I would need, and we went off to Canada! This was my first experience at an A-rated jumper show, and just WOW. The atmosphere, people and horses are all fascinating to be around. It took a couple of days for me to adjust to the environment of these shows and exactly how to keep our barn running smoothly, but everyone at the barn was helpful and patient while I got the swing of things. By day 3 I was having a blast! We brought 6 horses on the trip and there just happened...