A new hope, on two fronts

A comment from my last post by Jester Jigger got me thinking about the possibility of doing a week long boot camp at my trainer's barn. I know I can't afford the monthly board, but I think I could swing a week at a time. I started thinking that I could bring my own hay and grain over to minimize my cost, since I won't ask Marge to discount my current board. If I'm there for a week and I know what week it is ahead of time then I could schedule two lessons. I think I could afford that every 4 or 6 weeks.

So yesterday I drove over to my trainer's barn and ran the idea by her. She said it would be a great idea, and it would be easy since right now she has an empty stall. And even if she ends up filling her stalls in the main barn she has two run-in sheds that have stalls in them. They don't have mats and the fronts have open gates on them so they wouldn't work in the winter, but for the summer and fall they would work out just fine.

She's going to run some numbers and figure out what it would cost me, and if it's possible we're going to make that happen. I'm really pretty excited! I can't wait to get Kaswyn in that arena over there. Yesterday she had just dragged it and the footing was beautiful. It looked, as she said, like brown sugar. I had huge arena envy!

Speaking of arenas, Mr. K has not been able to help us out with arena work. So I finally broke down and called his good friend, Mr. F, who has an established business of putting in horse arenas and outdoor sporting complexes like baseball and football fields. Mr. F also knows his stuff, but I fear that he will be well out of our price range. I called him at 5:30 on a Sunday and left a message. Fifteen minutes later he called me back! I was shocked. I explained the situation and told him that we had been trying to work with Mr. K but that it just wasn't happening. We discussed the situation and he said that he would come out and evaluate the arena. He's coming tomorrow at 9 am, and Susan is going to meet him out there.

I'm really hoping that we can afford his work because I have no doubt that he can do the job and do it well. Something really must be done to the arena because Kaswyn just isn't feeling right. Even though it's only been five weeks since his last reset I think he needs to be done again, so I'm trying to schedule the blacksmith this week. I hope that's the problem. My big fear is that working him in the too deep footing has pulled something somewhere. It's really hard to evaluate what's going on with him because the footing is so uneven that his strides are uneven also and he has to slow down and speed up just to get through the deep stuff.

Hopefully one or both of my plans will work out and I'll start making some sort of progress. Summer is here and I want to get my ride on!