gotta love horses

I picked up my art from State Fair this afternoon (the fair ended on Monday). I was unhappy to see that the Jessie drawing (graphite on velour) had shed a layer of graphite dust onto edge of the mat opening. Great, and here I'd hoped to get away with no fixative. Oh well. Popped it out of the frame when I got home and sprayed a LOT of fixative on there. Velour normally feels like velvet. Now it's like velvet wearing too much hairspray. I hung it up in the kitchen and I think I'll thump on the frame a little bit every day to see if everything stays put.

This is a potential problem because "Thankful" (the ginormous drawing that's going to Draft Horse Classic) is also graphite on velour and not "fixed." So I have to verify that fixative looks okay and is going to stick everything in place, otherwise I'd have to get a completely different type of frame, and seeing as how I brought home a frame for it today that has a three digit number price on it, I'm not keen on ordering another style. It's the biggest dang frame I've ever used! I hate big pieces of glass! Yikes! 26 x 34 inches. Eep!

Shylah and Dusty got some work with desensitization stuff tonight. I'm going on the Starbucks ride again this Sunday with Shylah (corner of Bond and EG Florin around 6-6:30pm Sunday) [EDIT: scratch that, I'm not going, it's WAY too hot!] so we had some fun with trash cans and plastic bags and pop cans. She was super, but that's all stuff I've done with her before (not *specifically* trash cans and pop cans, but barrels and buckets and bags and bottles and you name it). She loves tarps too, when she walks over one she likes to reach down and grab it with her teeth. I can completely cover her in a tarp and she just stands there like a big blue lump. Dusty was only slightly less accepting of things. Shylah will take any opportunity to stand still and take a nap. Dusty takes any opportunity to run around, so me tossing a plastic bag full of pop cans into the air and catching it (that's very loud!) was an excuse to run even after he wasn't scared anymore. He didn't like his head covered by the tarp.

Oh and I took an old horse shoe and a hammer and pounded on Shylah's feet for a while. She didn't so much as bat an eyelid, so I'm not sure what was up with her the other day. Just a bad day I guess, or maybe the burning-hoof smoke freaked her out.

I had this random thought today and wondered how many horses I've ridden in my lifetime. I don't consider myself a particularly great rider, but I think in the last few years I've improved a lot just from training my own horse and riding more of other people's horses. This'll either seem like a big number or a little number depending on your background. I'm probably forgetting some.

There were horses I sat on, with adult supervision, as a very young kid. I don't think these count, but there was Babe, my aunt's palomino, and a horse where my brothers too lessons that the instructor used to pack me around on sometimes.

Childhood:
-Smokey, the neighbor's pony
-the ponies at my pre-school (it was on a farm, the class would go on pony rides). Specifically I remember King (bay) and Stormy (b/w paint)
-Kyd, my cousin's gray Arab (I think I only rode double on Kyd)

The horses we boarded for a therapeutic center (and I took lessons on them), still childhood:
-Rebel Anne, world's laziest chestnut QH mare
-Token, black gelding afraid of pigs, I liked him!
-big pale gelding (palomino? gray?) I can almost remember his name but not quite, I want to say Oscar or Wilbur or something like that, I just remember he was HUGE and pale colored, I think he was palomino
-my instructor's old gray horse, he could only walk and trot

And then I started taking "real" riding lessons in 5th grade:
-Blue, a sweet POA mare
-Rascal, black cob type gelding, I really had a soft spot for him
-Dee Dee, bay OTTB (off track thoroughbred), very nice mare
-Lady, bay OTTB, I much preferred Dee Dee but Lady was a more advanced horse
-Sabuken (I always called him Spooky), HUGE bay OTTB gelding
-Prissy, my friend M's black pony mare who only wanted to run

And then began the search for my first horse, I seem to remember looking at 8-10 horses before I bought her, so either I didn't ride them all or I just don't remember them:
-Money, a pretty paint mare who wasn't sound
-a chestnut ranch gelding from the horse dealer, he bucked
-another chestnut ranch gelding from the horse dealer, he bucked too
-a chestnut/flax Arab mare, gorgeous but a little high strung

-Thunder, I bought her in 1992, bay QH mare
-Meeko, my friend M's Arab gelding
-Blue Top, JJ's black TWH gelding

Thunder died in 1999. About six months later the search began again.
-Appy gelding, sooo sweet but vet exam showed him going blind
-another Appy gelding, too small
-chestnut QH mare, nice horse but someone bought her before I got her vet checked
-bay QH/TB gelding, too high strung
-young chestnut/flax TWH X Arab gelding, sweet boy just not what I wanted

-Gwen, black Morgan/Shire mare I bought in 2000
-Ardie, bay Arab gelding who belonged to WM
-Shylah, black Canadian Horse I bought in 2003 (started under saddle in 2006)
-Dusty, JJ's Champagne TWH gelding
-Lina, gray Andalusian mare
-Kaylee, JC's Gypsy Horse mare
-Sugar, chestnut Rocky Mountain Horse mare
-and then there's "that mule" (ha ha!) Sara ;-)