Quarterly goals recap Jan-March/Second Quarter Goals

The first three months of this year have gone by faster than I could possibly have imagined.  I think I may have found the time to grab the occasional breath a handful of times in the first quarter of 2015, but I can't be sure.  Without further ado, the overdue analysis of my goals:

Make more horse time.  Too many excuses and not enough pony have been happening recently, and I intend to put a stop to it.   Success! The lengthening daylight hours especially have been a huge help in completing this goal!

Play with the Horse Ball.  Jazz's absolute favourite thing and I'm not even sure I've brought it out more than twice in the last year.  Plus a fun thing both on the ground and under saddle. I brought out the ball one day, only to remember why it had been put away in the first place after an immense half-hour struggle to get it inflated enough to be safe.  

Put the Western saddle back on occasionally. I kind of miss it.   Done and done! I had it on at least twice, one of which was  pony sharing with two awesome kids at my barn, and Jazz was an angel for them.  

Do something about my tall boots.  I need to bathe them in boot stretch or get room put in at the shoe repair place because they are much too tight on my calves.  Yes! I bought the most wonderful, most beautiful, bestest imaginable brand spanking new paddock boots and half chaps a few weeks back.

Tack store haul! I also got a new saddle pad and cookies!

Write a product review post or two.  Product reviews are the kind of post I will read 100% of the time I see them on my blogger dashboard, but I have yet to write one.  This one was a failure.  I attempted to write a review of leather care products and was starting to assemble the pieces and then pre-spring break crazy schedule and spring break happened.  

My personal favourite picture from leather care product review day. 

Think about a bitless bridle option. Since my horse needs her teeth done every 6 months at this point, it might be nice to have an alternative when her mouth hurts.  I do own a bitless bridle, but I don't love it and I'm considering a different type of bridle.  At no point did I even think about this at all.  There were too many other things on both the horsey horizon and the personal one.  

Try to talk less in lessons. Pretty self explanatory but a definite bad habit of mine. I definitely made progress, but this is ongoing, so I'll probably repeat it in another quarter.  

Show off the horse.  I have been telling many, many friends for a long time they can come meet my horse, but I have taken very few people out to the farm.  I may end up moving this goal to a different quarter depending on how our winter goes (I probably shouldn't introduce my non-horsey friends who have never ridden a horse to the crazy winter Jazz I know and love).  I had a relative come to visit just last week and we went for a farm visit.  Plus I shared her with the two kids at my barn mentioned earlier.  I like the idea of sharing her, so this will be another repeat goal.

Get better at leg protection. I will divide this one into two parts
a) use the brushing boots and/or open front boots I own much more often
b) polos! I have one set and I am honestly pitiful at wrapping them  Truth be told, I didn't do this, but in hindsight the last three months were not a good time for this goal, as we're lucky to be able to do a good flatwork session most days, so it doesn't seem that necessary to do boots.  This one will probably be back in the summer.  

And because I love sharing him, here's my cat, continuing to be deluded into thinking he's a person.  

Goals for the Second Quarter (April-June)

Survive the next month and a half.  There are huge time commitments coming up on the personal horizon.  May especially will be no doubt roaring along at 1000 miles an hour, and I think it's only fair to myself to acknowledge that fact and try to do my best.

See to it the horse is fed. I think I've mentioned here before that Jazz is prone to bouts of diarrhea that can cause a sore, rubbed bum. I had the vet out on her last episode, and one of the new management protocols we're trying out is more regular doses of her probiotic.  At very least every 2-3 days she needs to be fed a dose of it, and luckily C will be able to help on some of the aforementioned crazy weeks.

Get the horse photo ready.  Some important photos are being taken with the horse very late May.  Make the necessary arrangements (trailer loading practise, thorough grooming the days leading up to photos, cleaning tack, etc.)

Casey is always photo ready. 

Try to get pony exercised.  I'm actually taking May off of lessons since I physically do not have the time.  I have someone in mind who I want to ask if they'd be willing, so if possible, she'll be getting a little training and exercise.


June: Advance.  Make some progress with riding.  More work in non-lesson rides, less messing around.  Get some momentum going heading into our busier riding time in the summer.

Edit: Keep it positive.  It's come to my recent attention that I am often not good enough at talking up my pony successes with my real life horsey friends, and I tend to overemphasize our difficulties.  Work on that.

Curious progress

Well there's no question about it, Jazz is a different horse than she ever has been before.  Practically every day I'm at the farm now I can just ground tie her outside in the sun and groom her there while she dozes.  Her ground manners are almost all there, with occasional hiccups that are usually fixed with just a minute or two of ground exercises.

Things that are getting better #5 (remember when I used to actually remember to do these?)
Ground manners and more ground manners.  She could not be more chill ground tied for grooming most days now.

That being said, she isn't all different in good ways.  Jazz has always had evasions. It used to be laziness.  When I first started her, she was impossible to motivate.  I sometimes find that hard to believe considering how much she wants to go all the time now. Luckily, she isn't usually terribly stubborn, so she lets go of them as soon as I find an effective way to correct or deal with her evasions, that is until she finds a new one.  They usually aren't terribly big or showy (says the girl who's been sorting out her rearing on the ground within the last couple months), they're just little tests from her to see how she can get out of work.  Lately Jazz has been really improving, which naturally means stepping up the difficulty a bit and asking her to engage her muscles more and more correctly.  This naturally leads to a whole host of evasions, because it's much easier for her if she can derail me from our work by acting out, and she doesn't have to work so hard or engage her muscles so much.  She's a funny little mare with an attitude.

Recently it's been a bit of head tossing.  I think I've mentioned before that her main attitude issue, especially when it comes to contact, is to get huffy.  She just gets sort of frustrated, and starts snorting and moving her head a hundred tiny little moves in every direction at once.  I figure a small part of that is a pain memory from back in November when she needed her teeth done and it took me a week or so to realize it.  That being said, it is a lot just attitude.

Today was my first lesson with my new trainer.  I really like her, she's very good and I think she can really help me get places with my riding.  She seems to have a more English slant, compared to the more Western style of my previous trainer, but there is nothing wrong with that.  When I brought Jazz in, she was just as chill as she has usually been lately, and I was ready to get on soon.  We started out pretty standard, and the instructor had me doing 20m circles and working on going straight and bending to the inside and the outside.  Believe it or not, we had never done counter bending before, but Jazz seemed to be picking it up not bad.  Then we worked on it at the trot, and she also did fairly well.  We worked on trot to walk transitions, because the instructor wanted me to work on pushing her forward into walking, so that she would use her hind end to do the transition rather than pushing down into it with her front feet.  That was one thing that stood out to me as something that would be really good to work on, because traditionally, her trot to walk transitions have been kind of scrambly sometimes as she tries to keep trotting (she loves her forward).

Thing to work on #5
Trot to walk transitions

Thing to work on #6
Bending and counterbending using proper leg and hand positions.

That was when things got a little interesting.  The instructor asked to see Jazz's lope, and I started off on her right lead, traditionally her better side, and she did pretty okay.  Of course after that she was getting really rushy and kind of charge-y.

I rode yesterday, and she was really rushing.  She had almost no rate and wasn't listening to my half halts very well.  I decided to just bite the bullet and let her go, because I still felt like I had breaks, just not particularly sensitive ones.  Also I was feeling young and enjoying the summer sun and I don't really feel the need to justify it further.  Anyways I brought her into a lope that quickly turned into more of a gallop.  It was a blast.  She's pretty quick when she wants to be.  I let her go a couple laps of the arena and then slowed her back down, and we both took a rest for a minute or two.  I then made the mistake of deciding to take a lap or two the other way.  She is less balanced heading to the left on her left lead, and she made a fairly wide, leaning turn at the first corner, and just past the second she started crow hopping.  Whoops.  Maybe that wasn't such a good idea.  Anyways, I stuck it out with no problem (thank god.  I really need to make that post about Jazz the bucking bronco soon). And I did a cool down after that and hopped off, telling myself I wouldn't be stupid and push us like that again.  

So, back to today, she was really rushing her trot after her right lead lope.  Then she started counterbending against me and really cutting corners on our 20m circle, utterly ignoring my leg.  My trainer had me slow way down and move back to the walk, where she was still blowing all the way through my inside aids.  Then my trainer had me do a quick exercise that is basically stopping facing the wall and doing a hind end yield back and forth a couple times to re-establish that yes, you do know what leg means.  Then we worked our way back up, bending again at the walk to get her attention back.  Eventually we started trotting and then it got a little fancy.  Jazz was head tossing.  Not like she was before, though, like actually throwing her weight around and nodding like a trick horse.  It was lucky that it happened in the lesson actually, because the instructor was very helpful in keeping me calm and helping me focus.  She said how it was important, especially with a young horse like Jazz not to overreact to her little tantrums and to be extra sure to just keep doing the work as best I could so she's not getting out of it by acting out.  Not gonna lie, it was a little scary at least a couple times, and I was just doing my best to not picture Jazz rearing up and over like one of the horses at one of my gymkhanas last year.

Thing to work on #7
this newest evasion.

On the lighter side there's five new barn kittens and they finally all have their eyes open.  Here's the best picture I have of one of them.

Update: I have been really terrible at taking pictures of my horse lately.  I will hopefully take more soon.  With any luck I'll have something good to photograph coming up soon!

I have confidence that spring will come again

In my second life (the non-horsey one), I'm working on a production of the Sound of Music.  One of the more recent additions to the show is the song 'Confidence' from the movie version as a whole ensemble musical number, so it's been running through my head a lot, and now it seems even more appropriate with the return of what feels like real spring weather at last!

So needless to say I finally get to make a happy, excited blog post again! Yay! I've missed those! It's been a bit of discouragement and slow, slow, painfully slow progress for a while now, but I finally have something happy and exciting to report!

But I'll get to that.  I arrived yesterday at the farm to a very water-saturated yard, and a dirty horse.

I see a dirty horse

"Where?"

"Oh.  You meant me, didn't you? Rude.  You try keeping clean in that pasture."

She was just covered with what seemed to be sweat stains.  She's still retaining a lot of her winter hair (I don't blanket, so she has puh-lenty of that), and I tried the shedding blade, but it's just not ready to come out yet.  Oh well, we'll both be full of her hair soon enough when she sheds out.  Anyhow, she stood really quite well while she was tied, and I tacked her up without any fuss (a big improvement! she always used to wiggle around).

We headed into the arena, and I had another engagement later in the evening, so I didn't have an exceptionally long time to work with her.  Because of that, I decided not to concentrate too much on anything specific, because I didn't want to bring out any issues that I wouldn't have the time to deal with properly.  I had a bit of a play day, or a I like to think of it, a crash course.  I did a little taste of all the exercises we've been working on lately, only doing them once or twice per side until I got an really good try out of her, and then moving on.  She was backing, moving her shoulders, her hind end, and bending around a barrel with changing directions and rolling through her shoulders, all like a superstar.  She also did great with the new exercise we started at our last lesson, which involves taking the rope over the seat of the saddle and doing lateral flexion, and once she's got that down, bending her head around and then asking for her to move her shoulders and turn on her hind end.  There was a little resistance on her harder side (moving her shoulders over to the right), but she did almost an entire circle to the left when I had only asked for one step! What a good girl!

Of course the real main event came next....

Ta-da!

 Unfortunately, I didn't have my usual camera, so I had to use my phone.  It looks very much like there was a big smudge on the lense, which would be the cause of the weird haze on the pictures, but it doesn't matter.  I finally, finally got to get back on my horse! Yay!

These were the best of all the pictures we took

 I started off on the ground bending her head my direction and jumping on the ground, pulling on the saddle a tiny bit.  She took that fairly well, so I started jumping around with my foot in the stirrup, and then I laid across her back, as you can see in the last two photos.  She took that no problem, so I got the rest of the way up, and worked on getting on and off both sides equally.  She did awesome! I didn't want to push too much, and I was almost out of time, so I didn't ask for anything else, just standing for mounting.  Nonetheless I am super excited about this big step towards being back to normal!  Spring here we come!

Moving forward

So since I have kept up with this blog for this long and (*fingers crossed*) seem to have at least a little bit of readership, I wanted to do a sort of quick overview about this blog and how I plan to use it in the future.

It is a big common theme with a lot of the horse blogs I personally read and follow to have goals.  Monthly goals, yearly goals, show season goals, lesson goals, all manner of goals.  I am not a big goals person.  It's partially me and partially Jazz, but it's a lot that I just simply don't really know what it is that I want in the long term. I am far from a veteran in the horse world, and there is just so much that I haven't tried yet.  I hadn't even so much as sat in an English saddle until last summer, and almost all of my horse experience in the pre-Jazz era was trail rides and more trail rides.  There are a thousand and one things I want to try with horses, and I can't know what I want to do with Jazz until I know what I want to do.  So far we've had a lot of fun with gymkhanas and rodeo events (mostly at the walk/trot), and my current loose idea is for Jazz to just be a happy, healthy horse who is safe to be around and has a good foundation of training to do whatever it is that she eventually ends up doing.  My current goal for myself is to learn to jump, and as I take English lessons in the summer, I will be accomplishing it soon with a little luck *knock on wood*.  I also am very interested in learning the basics of working cattle, and endurance, and cowboy challenge.  Since the association that puts on my gymkhanas also does cowboy challenge, I will be hopefully going to any of them that I am able and ready for.

Anyways, the point is that I have a fairly scattered existence with a lot of ideas about what my future with Jazz and with horses in general looks like, so monthly goals is just not a good exercise for me.  I try to go to the farm with no concrete expectations (except some basic manners and respect, of course), and as a result my progress can be very slow and halted sometimes.  I'm okay with that.  I have a young horse and a limited database of experience.  There is no reward for hurrying to accomplish this or that when I have no real reason to.  I don't mean to say that I would be okay with my training coming to a standstill, plateauing at decent and never rising again, but I am perfectly happy to plod along, facing challenges one at a time and really enjoying the ride.

The main reason for this blog is for me to chart my progress, and to help me keep track of my year/month/day/whatever with Jazz.  Also it's encouragement to document my experiences more with pictures, which I am horrible at.  I also have my things.  My things to work on and that are improving.  They are sort of my answer to goals.  It's hard to pay attention to how far you've come when you're struggling through hard times.  They mean to serve as a reminder of all the little victories, and a sort of push in the right direction.  I have no "Things that are perfect and need never be worked on again because they simply can't get any better" because I am working with a horse and that's a ridiculous concept where it comes to horses.  There are plenty of people who've been working with horses their entire lives that still say they have lots to learn, and I hope to be the same way.  You are never done learning, and I simply like to remind myself of that.

Sorry for the long, pictureless post.  I'll make my next one a little more visual if I possibly can.  And thanks for reading!

Oh, and one more thing about this blog.  I think that so far, it's been a fairly accurate representation of my time with Jazz.  I write about anything of significance or interest as honestly as possible with as much detail as I can remember, and I am aware of what these winter months are like.  They are our work time, our time where there's no room for all the love and cuddles if it means the respect has been pushed out, and that is the case with all our Januaries and Februaries so far, but just you wait.  Come summer, there will be a lot more time for fun and all the love for my pony I can possibly express in words.

Positive spin

Well they can't all be good days.  I apologize in advance because as much as I'm going to try not to whine and complain, I can't guarantee my success rate in actually accomplishing that goal.

So as you may have gathered, I had a less than encouraging trip to the farm today.  Jazz was just weird and spooky and SASSY.  Oh my god was she sassy, swishing tail, a very clear stomp of her back feet and a few pushy episodes from her shoulders, plus something new that I'll talk about in a second.  It was just discouraging, and I'm sorry to admit that it just got to me today, and I got a bit frustrated.  Is it too much to just ask for a couple of weeks of steady improvement, even just one week? Is that so much to want?

But I'm getting sidetracked.  Here's something positive: She didn't rear.  Not even close.  No big dramatic 'you're killing me here' head throws or anything.

Here's something less so:  she's found an alternative now that rearing is work.  She tried to nip me.  Five times.  It's so frustrating that I almost want to scream.  Would it have been so bad for her to just not have a big, dangerous avoidance maneuver for a week? a day? I tried to do the same thing I do when she tries to pop up on me, where I just yield her hind end until she really gives with both crossing her feet and bending through her body a bit.  Of course she then tried to bite me while I was at her side moving her hip, but luckily I had anticipated she might, so she wasn't able to actually get her teeth on me.  To be fair, she didn't actually get her teeth on me at all, they were warnings, but even so it still isn't EVEN REMOTELY ACCEPTABLE.  

So needless to say I was a little discouraged and frustrated and very done by the time I let her go.  It just sucks that we're taking one step forward and now what feels like about six steps back.

But to the point: as the title of this post suggests, I would like to try to put a positive spin on the day now that all of that is out of my system.  I did get a bit frustrated and emotional today, but this is the first day in recent memory that that has happened.  This time last year, I was also having a lot of troubles with Jazz (she really is not a January/February horse whatsoever), significantly less dramatic troubles since she had yet to add rearing and head tossing and now biting to her arsenal.  Anyway, I had hit some real road blocks in our training, and I was having a hard time getting someone to help me, and I felt like I was making no progress and Jazz was regressing and it was all my fault and all that sort of very un-fun stuff to be feeling. It got to a point where I would have weeks that I didn't even want to go to work with her because I was just going to be allowing her to get away with bad behavior that I had no idea how to fix and it didn't even seem worth going to the farm just to feel useless and powerless and go home upset again.

That was supposed to be the positive part of the post.  Oops.  Anyways going back to the good part, compare that to this one day out of pretty much all of my recent memory where I felt things didn't go well and got a little emotional while I was working with my horse.  One day.  No weeks turning into about a month of no progress and endless frustration.  One.  Day.  I guess it's not so bad as all that.

Things that are getting better # 3
Pushing emotions aside and just getting what needs to be done accomplished

That being said, Thing to work on # 3
Pushing emotions aside and just getting what needs to be done accomplished (today was big proof I'm not there yet)

Thing to work on #4
This new biting habit.  Nip it in the bud (get it? nip? Oh, I'm too funny).

Plus some good things happened after I left the farm that definitely helped my mood.  Look what came in the mail today!

 I ordered this "Gumiponi" as they are lovingly called from Custom Stall Signs on facebook and was so thrilled it arrived!

It's so cute! It's way tinier than I was expecting.  

I absolutely love their stuff! I also ordered a custom stall sign complete with adorable caricature of Jazz

Jazz lives outside, so her stall sign lives on my Jazz wall of fame.

 Plus a few months back they started collaborating with another awesome facebook page to offer custom embroidered saddle pads and hats.

Look at it though! Adorable! 

Jazz approved.

For those of you who haven't caught on to my obvious product placement yet, go to their page go now.

And speaking of things I got in the mail today, I couldn't help but laugh at the cover of the horse magazine that came in the mail for me today.

A little attitude adjustment is just what I'm needing right about now.  

We'll get there. I know we will.

Sunday lesson

Another awesome groundwork lesson today with Jazz. I got there a bit early for my lesson and she seemed pretty quiet, so I Started doing her yo-yo backing exercise. She was a bit sticky, and wasn't too keen on the going backwards part of it, so she reared, naturally.  So, I sent her off and did more of the lunging my trainer had taught me on Wednesday, and it definitely helped.  Just after I'd gotten her to think a little and come in to me, my trainer arrived, and she had me lunge her again both ways.  After Jazz had calmed back down on the circle, we worked on the yo-yo exercise a little, and my trainer corrected my body language a little.  Then we worked more on her shoulders, and it. was. great. 

As I mentioned previously, on Wednesday my trainer showed me a different method of asking for jazz to move her shoulders, and it has been working so much better.  I started on her left side, and I got a perfect step right off the bat.  I kept going and rewarding until I got three perfect crossing steps with her front feet in a row.  I swapped sides and she had a little harder time on the right, but I got a couple of good single steps and went back to her left.  I got several perfect steps without even having to tap her with the rope, and got four in a row.  She was really starting to get the idea, especially on the left.  I did get a few more good steps on her bad side, and even got two in a row, and by then my lesson time was done and Jazz was completely chilled out and was standing like a champion.  

My trainer even commented that I had good timing with the shoulder yielding because I've been backing her first to help lighten her forehand,  and I had a really good sense on when to switch from backing to asking for lateral movement. Also Jazz was backing well just based off of body language with no pressure from the halter or the end of the rope. 

Which brings me to thing I'm getting better at with horses #2

Developing a feel. I'm in no way there, but I'm feeling really good about how it's progressing. 

Once my lesson time was up, I brought Jazz from the arena to the barn and gave her some minerals, where I snapped a few pictures up close. Lucky horse even got a couple of crunchies.

  

Food!

Fooood!

FOOOOOOOD!

 I played a bit with my newfound moving the shoulders button turning her in the barn aisle and navigating around the gate to the pasture.  She even came back once I'd let her go and closed the gate behind me.  It's amazing even the little changes in this horse over the last month or so.  At the beginning of the new year, she would sometimes come back to the gate and get petted, but she would be rooting around in our hands and pockets for treats, and when we tried to push her out of our space she would just give up and wander away to her friends.  Today, though, she stood a good distance away, with all of her well behind the gate (not like she used to with her whole chest pushing on it and her head digging around in pockets), and being very respectful and sweet.  She stayed there a long time after I walked away too.  She was still there when I drove off.

I can't wait for our next lesson!

Trim day

Well, after Jazz's less than agreeable attitude towards doing feet Tuesday I was a little nervous for how she would do for the trimmer this week. It went surprisingly okay. Far from perfect, but not bad. Certainly not the hour and a half of pure hell and stress that was her final trim with a previous trimmer, but I'll get to that. 

I started Jazz with a new barefoot trimmer last July, and I'm really happy with how her feet have improved.  They are almost entirely new growth now, and they are just night and day compared to what they used to be.  She has actual heel bulbs now! She can walk on gravel without being footsore!

Of course in classic new blogger fashion, I have no reference photos because I had no blog to post them to at the time, but trust me, they look way better.  

The trimmer herself is definitely a character.  She is very excellent at what she does, and is definitely a knowledgeable horsewoman, but I am very happy I discovered her when I did and not earlier. That isn't to say that I wasn't interested in the best possible care for Jazz and her feet, but I needed to learn a thing or two before I was ready to meet her.  This will become clear in a moment.

Flashback to almost two years ago: Jazz was 3 and still at the horse rescue.  There was a lady who owned two of the rescue horses that did the trimming there.  She was new to it, and was practicing trimming on the horses at the rescue.  I wanted to get Jazz's feet done one more time before I moved her, and the trimmer was there, so I decided to have her trimmed.  This was the first time I would actually be holding Jazz for her to get her feet done.  In the past, the owner of the rescue had always brought her in whenever the trimmer had had time for her. So it was me, who was wholly inexperienced, holding my young horse, who was not having the best of days.  Needless to say it didn't go well.  She reared, fussed, squirmed, and generally acted like the young horse she was.  And I, not knowing what to do, attempted to discipline her properly (read: in a highly counterproductive manor).  It went poorly all around. Jazz never calmed or settled, I got frustrated and had to step out several times, and advice was being thrown at me from all around.  It ended in tears and a very poor trim for Jazz.  Apparently the trimmer's mentor had just recently told her that she had been leaving the horses' toes too long, so unfortunately she overcompensated and took off way too much toe.  Jazz was sore for over two weeks, and I was traumatized, so I can only imagine what she went through.  Poor horse.  That was a definite low point of our time together.

Anyways the point of the story is this: remember how I mentioned the advice coming from every which way? Well, the trimmer at one point started palpating her back around her withers and declared that she was sore and probably it was because her saddle doesn't fit.  Well, that freaked me out a whole lot, and I tried to contact a chiropractor and just generally went a little nuts thinking I was wrecking my horse.  That has traditionally been my biggest problem working with Jazz; whenever she used to act up and I would get emotional about it, I wouldn't think, "what is wrong with this horse she's nuts", I would think "I'm wrecking her this is all my fault she will be ruined for life because of me and she will be labeled a problem horse why did I ever think it was acceptable for me to be in charge of a young horse".  So needless to say someone telling me that the saddle I had been putting on my horse and riding in might be physically harming her threw me into a bit of a tailspin at the time.

So flash forward to the trim this week.  I commented on how Jazz always stands wonky when you pick up a front foot.  She cocks a back foot, and I can't usually get her to stand square and balanced.  The current trimmer replied that it was probably because she lacked strength in her loins.  She palpated her loins, and there definitely seemed to be something to it, but the next thing she said was that it was probably an issue of saddle fit.  Don't get me wrong here, I am open to listening to the input of other knowledgeable horsepeople, and I have every intention of talking to my contacts who are more knowledgeable than me about it, but my reaction was significantly different than the last time I was told my horse is sore and it was probably caused by the saddle.  I highly, highly doubt that it is a saddle fit issue.  To be fair, I haven't checked the fit for a few months, but I have checked it multiple times over the two or so years I've been using it, and have been told multiple times by my riding instructor and others who have checked it that it, "fits her like a dream".  So considering that in addition to the fact that I haven't tacked her up and ridden her in over a month at this point for reasons I won't be getting into (read: if the saddle was hurting her, which I do doubt strongly, it is a significant amount of time for it to still be bothering her).

Which leads me to a new feature: Things I am getting better at with horses:

Thing #1
Considering all the facts before freaking out completely when people tell me something is wrong with my horse

I did remember to take a picture just as we were about to leave.  I just got positively swarmed out in the pasture.  Someone is definitely giving out treats.