October 25th - 9:45pm

Another somewhat early morning here at the farm. The final series show at San Diego was today so Justinian, Benito and Puccini were packed up and headed over for their classes.
After that it was me on Rodrigo duty (as weve come to call it) longing the young ones before he gets on. Meg was riding with Alice and Martin at the show.
Morning was pretty decent with all the young ones behaving well. No silly behavior on the line or undersaddle. Once they were finished up it was on to helping Meg finish up the riding list. I ended up on Luli and Holendesa who were both good. Worked on straight lines with Luli since I have a tendency to just ride her bent one way or another. Did rectangles in the ring trying to make the corners 90 degrees and the four strides straight. Worked on that at the canter and trot. Again having to laugh at the difficulty of riding a decently straight line. Almost without fail I end drifting to the inside or outside. Ive gotten a lot better at riding the straight lines as well as correcting crookedness since I got here which is nice. With Holendesa I think I did a couple hundred transitions. Martin and I did a sort of skewed figure eight exercise with her a few weeks ago and I worked through that. Lots of transitions within the gaits as well as between them. By the end she was much softer and more relaxed than when we started.
Martin, Alice and the horses got in as Meg and I were having lunch at 2:00ish. Once they were unloaded and taken care of we got on the last group and ended up having a flat lesson. I was on Uxmal who was the youngest of the group. Still think I did a pretty decent job of putting him together like an older horse. Virtuoso and Skyline were both able to really show off the difference between working and medium trot. On a totally other side night, congrats to Alice on her purchase of Skyline. We all had some changes to make to our positions, way of asking things and understanding of differences the horses gaits but over all I think it went well. After riding Luli and Holendesa, the horse switch was somewhat interesting to me. Those two mares are like little sports cars to ride while Uxmal is like a high performance SUV. No less sensitive but probably three times as big. Still a good boy though.
Once the lesson was finished we put them up super quick and headed to the ring to build a course. Martin told us to make an outside/inside hunter course but after that it was all on us. Not much you can do to make those type courses exciting but I think it turned out well. Hoping it rides well. And doubly hoping I get a chance to ride something over it!