The title definitely illustrates how I feel most of my life is going right now. This post even sat in my drafts folder for a couple of weeks with just the title.
Scarlet is doing fine. He’s doing great actually. It just doesn’t feel great because while he’s more or less healthy, I miss riding him. I miss doing more than walking him around the barn. I don’t think he minds. He walks around, gets to roll in the arena and then goes back to eating. I think the only more perfect retirement for him would be eating himself stupid on grass. But that would probably be bad for him cause he’d get fat and founder.
I digress.
Scarlet’s been doing well. We’ve been walking around the barn somewhere between 10-20 minutes, depending on the amount of time I have that morning. I had been slacking on walking him for the longer time for a while and I noticed that he started stumbling a bit more often. I definitely felt guilty and have made the effort to increase the time. He’s still interfering a bit more than I’d like with his hind so I called the vet to get on her schedule to give him another acupuncture and PEMF treatment. It’s been close to a year at this point I believe. I don’t know if its going to give him a boost with the interfering but he’s always felt pretty good after the treatments so I figured it was worth a shot. If it does, I’ll just have to keep in mind that he needs a tune up every half year or so.
One interesting thing that I’ve noticed while spending more time just grooming and walking Scarlet is that he’s starting to lean into scratches more. He’s never been a super expressive horse. The only place I ever knew that he loved getting scratched was his face. But now he’s started to ask for scratches in specific places.
I will be currying his neck and he’ll rock back or forward until I get to the one place that he wants scratched. That’s usually somewhere about 1/3 up his mane from his withers right in the middle of the mane. He started just trying to keep me scratching there but now he reaches his neck out and twists into the scratches. Which is adorable but my arms cannot actually hold up to scratching him for as long as he wants. I’ve got noodle arms. Need to work on that.
Another place where he’s been super loving the scratches is his groin. I put him back one day after a walk and he tried to reach around to scratch it himself. Unfortunately, he had to lift one leg to reach it and kept half falling. I pushed him away and was like fine I’ll do it. And he was so into it. When I start to scratch him he will spread his legs and lift his hips to give me the most access possible, as illustrated in the below photo. Its quite hilarious. I am loving that grooming is becoming more something he likes rather than something he just does.
But that’s pretty much my days. 5-6 days a week, never giving him 2 days in a row off. He does fine with one day off but a successive day makes him come out a lot more stiff and less coordinated. I’m still riding Uno one day a week. I’ve got the budget for a weekly lesson as well, I just need to figure out where to go and when to do it. A second horse, lease or own, is a difficult thing to fit into the budget so it doesn’t look like an immediate thing. And that’s frustrating. Like I said, stasis.
The Horse Dream 