Appropriate things to do when you find yourself confronted with a large, unexpected tax bill (tick one):
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I looked in the paper the next day and saw an advert for a “dapple grey arab mare, $400”. So I went to see her.
She was a sweet little thing. Unbroken, ~14.1 hh and about five years old. She was in a pasture with two heavily pregnant, bitey, alpha mares. The woman was going to breed with her (she has a paint stallion), but had just been laid off her job, so decided to cut her losses. She'd only had her 4 months.
I thought about it and worked out, with the tax bill, that’s set us back in our “buy land and build on it” project by at least a year, so I will have to wait even longer to ever get my horse (wail).
If I got this horse, I'd have to break her and train her and everything, so it would be ages and ages before I need to start shelling out money for saddles and bridles and shoes. Plus it'll keep me really busy all summer (and the next summer, and the next summer...) and, in the end, I'm going to have a horse that is mine (all mine!) - trained the way I expect her to behave, with no bad habits picked up from other people letting her do bad things (why do that, when I can train her to have all my very own bad habits?).
She stood happily and let me pick up her feet, licked my hand for half an hour, never showed any signs of being pushy, bitey or kicking, despite being poked and prodded all over.
If I wanted a nice mellow horse to train, that I wouldn't get into too many battles with, she was probably going to be it.
To make sure, I took Patrick to look at one other horse (also dapple grey, arab, broken, for $800, which turned out to be horrible and ugly) and realised that the first horse was actually rather nice. So I dragged P back. He agreed that she was probably a good bet for home-training...
So the next night we went back and gave the lady $400.
Her name is to be “Mouse” (named after Patrick's first cat - who was a great cat, apparently). However, after watching her plunging around when we tried to get her in the horse box, doesn't quite seem to suit.
She needs lots and lots of exposure to things (has led a sheltered life) (she’s convinced that hose pipes are snakes). She is halter broken, so leads, stops and starts fairly well and is lightly responsive (you don’t have to shove her to get her to move). So saying, she does keep getting in “stuck feet” mode, where she stops and stares at ???, and needs quite a lot of persuasion to get her moving again. I'm hoping that once she becomes more trusting of me/relaxes in her new surrounding, this will wear off.
I'm keeping her
at a boarding stable up the road from us. $100 a month for a pasture with
one other cobby chestnut who is fairly mellow. They feed her twice a day
on pellety things and a flake of alfafa hay. She is rather plump (understatement),
but is very sweet and likes to "hang out" with us.
At the stables they've got a round pen, as well as a covered pen (for hot sunny days - gonna need it when summer hits and the temperature soars to over 100°F), a big arena for barrel racing (?)(yeah, right) and a smaller arena with excitingly rustling eucalyptus trees all around it, for dressagey type activities (?)(may take a while) <grin>.
We spend our time in the round pen.
I've been lunging her, but she's a bit flightly, so I had P help me last night to keep her from trotting - I just want her to learn walk and stop and once we've got that down, we'll move on to "exciting trotting".
Her feet, esp. the front ones, are desperately in need of a trim, so she trips a bit (and treads on the back of my feet), so I need farrier attention.
I am the happiest girl in Christendom (wherever that is) and keep going round saying “I've got a horse!” in disbelieving tones. It only took me 24 years to get this dream under way and no doubt she will provide many more years of entertainment.
14 April 1997