Stress Sweat

I am pretty awful.  I completely forgot about my camera again on Sunday.  I had a (semi) legit reason.  Okay, it was pretty stupid in hindsight.  Saturday night T tried to call my mom but we missed the call and it was much too late to call back when we noticed she called.  Because there wasn't any message saying the horses were injured or anything, my mom wouldn't let me call.  So being the crazy horse owner I am, I spent the entire night stessing out about it(my poor best friend had to listen to me ramble on about all the worst case scenarios) and only got about two hours of sleep.  So needless to say when I woke up, my camera was the last thing on my mind.

Of course when we did get to the stable (Sunday morning- we help out on sunday mornings) I found out that T called for a reason completely horse unrelated reason and all my freaking out had been for nothing.  I need to relax, I start panicking when I get an email from her even though I know she'd never tell me bad news in an email.

Anway, moving on.  Sunday was cold but not freezing as it's been lately.  We brought Artemis in and then saddled up the big guys.  Like we usually do on Sundays when no one's around, we let Artemis free in the arena while we rode.  That was our first mistake.  The little princess was definitly feeling her oats that day.  She kept racing around the arena, bucking and rearing as high as she could go.  My mom was riding Jimmy along the railing and Artemis came running up, slid to a stop in front of them and started rearing like some wild stallion.  Jimmy thankfully didn't react. 

Artemis did spook Socks and Jimmy pretty badly later on.  She was rolling when we rode past and once our backs were to her, she jumped up, bucked and came galloping at us, completely terrifying Socks and Jimmy.  We ended our ride shortly after that before anyone got hurt. 

Artemis was still full of energy so we figured to help her get rid of it, we'd get her to run around the arena.  That was our second mistake.  I swear she was convinced we were angry at her.  She got so upset that she was a gross, sweaty mess in about a minute.  And just our luck, we had to leave pretty quickly because we were meeting people for lunch.

We put the cooler on her (she was actually great about that, it was the first time she's ever had it on and I literally just threw it on her) and walked her around but when we had to go she was still pretty sweaty.  We decided to put her in a stall and come back later that night to put her back out.  First we put her in D's stall, in the back of the barn out of the way.  That was our third mistake.  She threw a major fit.  She's been great about being in a stall for a while now but something about being in the back set her off.  Usually I let her go through her tanturm and settle down, but we had to go and I didn't want her breaking something or hurting herself.  So we ended up moving her into the main part of the barn where she could see another stalled horse.

All sweaty and gross.  Notice the tongue, she is definitly her mother's daughter.

The monster in prison.

We came back later that night and got there literally a minute after E had put her back in the pasture.  I was disappointed that I missed seeing her, but at the same time I was happy someone, especially someone male, had led her.  She's pretty much only been handled by women since she was born.  E said she was great to lead and he had no problems with her.  Her stall wasn't a mess either so we're pretty confident she wasn't too stressed out about being inside.  T told us she didn't even realize that Artemis was in the barn for the first bit of their ride because she was so quiet. 


We were out Thursday night as well and rode the big guys.  Socks was Miss Sociable.  I couldn't get her to focus on anything, especially her own feet.  She wanted to go visit with every horse in the arena.  I ended up putting her blanket on her because the windy was nasty and although she wasn't warm anymore, I had made her work hard and I felt bad about putting her out in the cold. 

That's all for now.  I'm not promising I'll get pictures this Sunday.  I'll try but I suck at remembering.