What’s so beautiful about these days is that life feels like it’s everything all at once.
Best sunset of the year so far.
I borrowed this line from a longtime favorite blogger, JoytheBaker. It rung true for me last week the way few other things have, as the calendar page flipped and instead of feeling like I was trapped in the dark winter doldrums I walked out into 2019 throwing punches.
First, I started a 30 day yoga challenge, which I’ve tried before but never succeeded at, my body and brain always deciding after some non-critical juncture that it has better things to do, like play with my horse. But not this time.
Then I went to my first pottery class, a Christmas gift my my beloved who seemed to sense a rising need for a creative outlet bubbling up in me. I’ve done pottery before and flung myself into this thing feeling confident and excited.
Next, I vowed to read more books than ever before.
And THEN, I saw a post on Facebook about a horsemanship challenge starting January 6th. The goal is one horse, 30 rides, 40 hours over 12 weeks. I said hey, I’m on a roll here, everything is fresh and new and doable. I’m not scared of anything!
So here we are, feeling everything all at once; going for it. At the end of week one I have 3 hours and 2 rides. We started out with a hand walk/hike over on the BLM land bordering our property which was a lot of fun. Then, on my birthday, we took a leisurely stroll around the property, and finally, on Friday, with the footing outside steadily turning to crud from the freeze/thaw cycles, we worked in the arena for an hour. I downloaded some songs to my phone that were supposed to have a beats-per-minute value for trotting, and stuck it in my breast pocket. I’m not sure how good we did at matching the tempo, but it was definitely fun to add music to the mix.
Stopped to check the game cam during my birthday ride and someone was creeping on me.
I finally did the math and realized that I’ll need to keep an average of 3+ hours/week to complete this challenge. Going to try to stick to a Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule and add in weekend rides when I can. Right now the old snow is hard and crusty and does not make for good footing, so we’ll need to get creative about arena time quick so neither of us lose our minds.
After our Friday arena ride. The days are getting longer!
I’m hoping to also get back to a habit of regular (weekly?) posting here. I can’t promise the content will be riveting but it will be honest and perhaps make you chuckle once or twice.
Bring on Week 2!
