Stormy Weather

My advice to people who want to train a PMU horse - don't bother. It's pretty un-PC of me to say, (to use alot of abbreviations in one sentence), but after working my butt off for a entire year with a PMU and having average results, and now working 30 days with a 4 year Thoroughbred and having stellar results, it's just not worth the effort. It could be that mares are just really difficult. Geldings are more even-tempered. And Maggie came SO far. But I never felt safe on her. Where Dewey is like a lifeboat in a storm. Maggie was just the storm. True, Dewey is looking all around at the dolphins and the buoys and the waves and waving to friends like a teenager, but when I ask him to focus, he doesn't give me the finger. I learned that I'm not allowed to own mares ever again. And Dewey is a rainbow.

My Little Pony

(Waffles, in better days) My really wonderful friend Caroline offered me her pony when our other pony Waffles turned out to be an a**hole. Then it turns out all ponies are a**holes. Her pony was the fourth (and last) in a long line of awful ponies that I have tried and rejected. I had a stomachache all weekend while she lived with us, because she looked like a Barbie troll (long flowing blonde hair on a body that looked like a fat banana). I kept thinking she was going to break in half, her stomach cracking into the ground, she was so U shaped. When we finally got on her, on what turned out to be the ride back to returning her to Caroline, she just started bucking like her feet were on fire. It has cured me, this need for a short horse. I will in fact, if I can ever afford a buddy for Dewey, the sweetest horse alive, find a regular, gentle quarter horse, that is not a pony. That does not have a need to skyrocket its rider into space. A horse like Dewey, who likes people, who likes riding, a gelding that is happy being a gelding and not having any other purpose other than eating and being a good friend. I learned, I think, that the pony that bucked me off and broke my hand was an old, mean mare. That every pony I've gotten on has tried to buck me off. Hopefully that I'm not the bad rider I started thinking I was, but that (with Dewey's help), I'm learning that one must choose one's rides carefully. Taller, gentler. Geldings. All key ingredients.