Sometimes, you’re just being crazy, and sometimes, you’re RIGHT.  In this case, I’d rather have been crazy and not right.  Before our show, I had a dream that I forgot essential stuff and then I got lost.  See the message below, call it a premonition.

Well, that’s not exactly how it all went down, but I did forget an essential piece of equipment.  The driving lines!  I know, right… The one piece of equipment that connects the driver to control the horse.  Yeah, let’s just hop in the cart and hope he knows where to go!  Uh, no.  Thank God for knowing people, we were able to procure a lunge line, a snap, a cable tie, and a lot of electrical tape from Blair Cecil, trainer at Phoenix Farm and get Cindy in the ring!  Really, we aren’t above ghetto fabulous at this point, and they really didn’t look bad in the grand scheme of things.  See?

So, after the fiasco getting him ready, we were good to go get him hooked!  Except we didn’t know that the first two driving classes were going to take over an hour as each driver went individually to show.  So there we were, in the warm up ring, for an hour before the class walking around with the cart hooked.  Poor Fizzy was rather unamused, but for the most part he behaved. By the time the class rolled around, he was rather lazy probably because he’d already been hooked and walking/trotting around for the better part of an hour.  However, he went in and did his job and didn’t act a fool, which is always a good thing.  After the class when we were unhooking the cart, I had a lady tell me “That is the calmest, most well behaved Saddlebred I have ever seen” which, is a very good compliment!  He CAN be, he definitely has it in him when it counts.  Check out Cindy’s class:

Driving Class w/Cindy

So, on to my Halter class.  I realized when I went to get ready that I had no tie.  Great!  Suit with no tie! What good is that?  Anyway, I had a plan, really, I did for this class I’d never done before.  It was to go last and do what everyone else did.  That plan did not work.  It was an epic fail, because we thought we still had time but they were calling numbers for the class so we rushed up there. We were FIRST in the ring on THIRD call for the class.  SO, there we went.  I just asked the judge “what would you like to see” because I didn’t know the first thing to do!  She had me walk him toward her, then wanted me to trot him away and around to line up “head to tail” whatever that meant.  He wouldn’t trot… then he sorta did, it was rather ugly I’m sure as he was so confused!  When the other participant lined up, I found out that “head to tail” meant parallel to the rail, haha!  So, we quickly moved to match that.  Pretty sure if the judge could have given us 8^th place, she would have, even though there were only 2 horses in the class.  The photos from Bluegrass Girl Photography  turned out great!  All the photos in this post are credited to her.

There’s one other thing… The trailer.  So, Fizzy has developed this new habit of kicking in the trailer.  He’s shredded the wall off his side of the trailer twice now.  The metal toward the bottom is now bent.  SO, in an effort to keep him somewhat safe on the way home as best we can, Cindy had the idea of Duct Taping the metal so any potential sharp edges were not exposed.  Then, we put shipping boots on him to try and protect his back legs (where the shredding occurred) even though it was 93 degrees outside.  Before you ask, yes, I stood and took pictures of the pregnant lady working-and told her, “these are going on the blog!”

THEN, upon leaving (why does this always seem to happen to us?) we got stuck in traffic while some street sweepers decided to close the road and sweep up literally nothing.  No wonder our poor horse hates the horse trailer!  Every time he gets on it we get stuck in traffic while he has to stand back there being all hot with no airflow!

But, we all made it back in one piece, safe and sound. I think someone was really happy to get back into his field.