Oh so many plans

Sorry for the lack of posting.  Everyone has such exciting things to post, but I really haven't had much.

So...the dog.  He's a very good looking boy, he just gets an attack of the dumbs periodically that catches me off-guard.  He wants to lunge after everything on the leash (cats, squirrels, birds, lizzards, the occasional leaf), which drives me nuts, but we seem to be getting past that some.  Treats help.  This dog training thing is completely new to me. Vet trip this afternoon will be the first time I've had him in the truck, so that should be interesting.  We hope to get some training classes scheduled after the next couple of very busy weeks.

So handsome

Crate training is going well.  I say training, but it's really not training so much as reminding.  About two days ago, he decided to show me he knows where bed is and started going there himself when we say it's time to go to bed.  And then again he surprised me by doing it before we even said anything.

I have been tracking steps.  Since we got the dog, I am averaging between 10 and 15 thousand steps a day. I sit at a desk all day, and I remember days when I started wearing a tracker that I was pushing it to hit 5,000 in a day.  Now, I start my day with between 0.5 and 1 miles walking.  The dog goes on three walks if it's just me, four or five if it's a combination of the boy and I.  I'm getting intimately familiar with my neighborhood, which is nice.

We have a busy couple of weeks coming. Tomorrow I head to the barn to ride the redhead on my own and to do lunch and day care for the horses.  Marcy and Ginny headed up to Chatt Hills yesterday. The next week is a busy one at work.  Next weekend I am doing a combined test at the Rocking Horse Schooling show.  Then I am staying overnight to do my first cross country school in over a year.  I can say I'm a bit nervous about that, but Marcy says Violet is going better than ever.  Then the first Thursday/Friday in June we will be heading to Clearwater for the boy's oldest daughter's high school graduation.

Marcy also let it slip that she has a goal of me doing BN at the rated show in November.  Unfortunately, that is the same weekend that I had planned my wedding.  Since I haven't actually got the venue scheduled that might be flexible, but I don't know.  I still don't really know what I'm doing with the wedding thing.  I really just want to go to the courthouse and do it and have parties everywhere rather than a planned wedding, but my parents would never forgive me, and our courthouse doesn't actually do weddings anymore.

Marcy and I had a great talk at my last lesson about where I am now and where we are going. She admitted that the hardest part for her to teach, and the part that she has to teach very often when dealing with adult amateurs like me, is fear.  The reason it is so difficult is that she's never really had it.  She gets nervous, yes, but not afraid.  And I had a lot of fear to get through to even get this far. Like debilitating, I'm going to toss my cookies, let's ride in a fetal position kind of fear.  And now we have to get through some more of that with the cross country.  She figures that the way we got through the jumping fear was to break it down into little tiny chunks, and now I'm having a blast with it.  Since we have all summer, we can break our cross country work down to individual fences if we need to, and kind of add it on to the end of our other schooling.  You know, do a jump school in the ring, then head out and jump over a couple of rolltops or tackle a bank.

I am excited for everything that is coming.  It's very busy, but very exciting.