Lesson day today

And I sincerely hope it goes better than my ride yesterday.  Oh, nothing went disastrously wrong, but nothing went particularly right, either.

Somehow Sunny is managing to get rounder.  He's terribly pumpkin shaped, even though the hay isn't out yet.  There's still enough green left in the pasture grass that they just aren't interested in hay, even though they could reach the calf hay if they wanted to.  When I talked to G, he said he's waiting to put a bale out for them until they start being interested in sharing with the calves.  Which makes sense. 

Anyway, back to my ride.  It started out with Sunny standing on my foot, and didn't get much better from there.  Two words: hollow and stiff.  Nasty bulgy/flat-sided circles.  Ugh.  I finally gave up on trotting and just focused on getting him to bend and yield at the walk.  Which eventually did work - he finally gave a big sigh and I could feel him start to focus.  But it took about 45 minutes. 

Yes, it was windy, and yes there was construction noise from the other side of the house - but that's nothing new, really.  I'm sure I was a big part of the problem, since I was trying to feel what I was doing wrong rather than having someone hollering reminders at me.

I didn't push too much beyond where things started to feel better, wanting to end on an up note, at least.  There wasn't any cooling out to be done, but since Thunder'd been a good boy tied at the trailer the whole time, I collected him and we went for a short mosey down the road a ways.  I would have gone further since they were both giving every evidence of enjoying themselves, but I could see cars pulled off up ahead along the tree grove - probably hunters - and in the other direction it was starting to be busy with 5 pm traffic, so I turned around. 

Crossing my fingers that stiff and hollow don't reappear this afternoon!