Nikita has been on vacation the past 3 days off this week thanks to the heat. Sometimes she feels great and is very fresh, and then she suddenly feels tired and perhaps a little burnt out. What we're doing is hard on a horse, I suppose, so those feelings are normal and expected. So, she's had her mini-vacation, and yesterday seemed all the better for it.
Yesterday we picked up our work on 1 tempis again, which we hadn't done in a while. I've been sleeping through 2 tempis for a while, and decided yesterday that I'm for a new challenge. So, we came, we saw, and we conquored those 1 tempis, and I hope we can do more soon. I'm not confident in them yet, and yesterday Nikita seemed a little fried after, so we're sticking to doing 2 consecutive 1 tempis until I sleep through that exercise. Then we'll start adding more 1 tempis as I become more confident.
I noticed in my last video that my canter pirouettes weren't really in one place, so we've focused on making them smaller. In Harry Boldt's book, Das Dressur Pferd, he states that if the pirouettes are too large, it's because the horse hasn't been set up correctly by the rider. Thus, I've made sure Nikita is very straight and very collected before I attempt a pirouette. And they've been smaller since. I've achieved straightness by looking at whatever letter I'm heading towards, and then looking at the horse once the pirouette has started. Yay for Harry Boldt!
Nicole, on the other hand, in on vaction because she lost a shoe, and super-farrier Mike isn't coming out until Tuesday. No loss, since Nicole does better with periods of downtime anyway.
Note to self: Stick to your knitting. If you can produce a good product, you're almost there. Alexander didn't become Alexander the Great because he had a good PR guy.
