Ride-A-Day Challenge & Housekeeping

A couple of little housekeeping things!

I am so, so, so, SO excited to have a new, “permanent” home for the forum – it can now be found at http://www.afatgirlafathorse.com/forum - how exciting to have a .com to play with! Eventually, we will have the blog moved over onto the .com and we can go from there – there are so many options open to us, it’s exciting! None of this could have been made possible without my dear friend, photographic guru, general internet/website design goddess, Jill Renton of Scuffed Boots, who is also responsible for the beautiful professional photos I have posted here!

As for the forum – yes, you will have to sign up again, yes, all of our posts are gone, and yes, I am still planning to trim the accounts that don’t make any posts in order to keep us safe and comfortable. But also – NO, we won’t have any ads and NO, we won’t have to worry about downtime with no backups.

On to other things…

The Ride-A-Day Challenge!

I talked about this a bit in the forum but I have never really had the opportunity to elaborate. I realized a few days ago that I really have a wealth of resources in my hands – I have not one, but THREE horses to ride (I also have a completed 90,000 word romantic suspense manuscript that is so ready for someone to take it and publish it!), and I’m not doing anything about it (nor the manuscript). So, hand-in-hand, I am launching the “Query-A-Day” and “Ride-A-Day” challenge to myself, and to anyone else who wants to follow along (for the Ride-A-Day, anyways – I realize you can’t send query letters to agents without a manuscript, or, you know, an idea for a book!).

The parameters of the challenge are such – I need to at least SIT on a horse’s back five times per week. Ideally, I would be riding and working a horse SEVEN days a week, but I commute 1 hr each way to work and am gone 12+ hours out of the day, plus work a job on the weekends… so I have to allow myself something here or there to recover! If I ride twice in one day, I can use that “extra” ride at another point during the same week to count as a ride when I might need a day off.

Right now, things are a little difficult because Ari is out of commission (stone in her frog turned into abscess and she’s just blown off a big chunk of her frog – she’s on the way toward better, though!), and Rex is… well, not broke. As far as broke horses, I have the two options of Bronwyn and then my sister’s little mare, Jessie. SURELY, in a barn of FIVE riding sized and aged horses, I can find SOMETHING to ride any given day of the week!

I don’t know how long I will be carrying on the challenge or if I might change anything, but I am inviting my forum readers and my blog readers to participate and challenge yourself, within what is reasonable, to ride as often as you can. Maybe we’ll make t shirts!

With that said, I thought I would share a picture or two of some of my rides this last week.

Saturday morning, I decided to try bareback + “bridleless” (technically just bitless as it was a rope halter with reins attached!)… just to see if I could. Granted, it was just in the roundpen, but my mare didn’t go too bad for a green broke mess!







Also, a shot of the new saddle I am currently trying out… it is much better than what I had, so the plan is to keep it for now (because I can trade my mom’s work for it as well) and save up money for something better. We have always handled our horses (through the purchase of different bloodlines to incorporate into our breeding program, our equipment, showing, etc) on the philosophy that you buy the best you can afford and continue to upgrade, providing what you’re using is not detrimental. So… the saddle doesn’t quite fit me, but it fits me BETTER than my last one, and it fits Bronwyn a LOT better than the last one, and if I didn’t have it, I wouldn’t have a saddle at all – and wouldn’t be able to put the work into her that she needs, and riding isn’t a possibility at all because she is obese… and that is that. Meanwhile, saving my pennies for something else!