The Muggle Road Not Taken
I’m envious of Ravi’s ability to sleep.
Partially that’s because I’m a lifelong non-sleeper. I come from a long line of neurotic people who’ve carpe diem’d their way through life. I can fall asleep anywhere, but staying asleep is a challenge, and even on my most raucous of youthful nights it was a rare thing for me to be able to make it past 7. These days, I get excited when I sleep to my alarm at 5:10.
I’m writing this at 8:30 on a Sunday morning. I awoke at 4:30, read for a bit, went to the barn for our usual 6 a.m. start (having brought my staff Starbucks), helped with chores, organized some things, and now I’m home, because Ravi, my boyfriend, has a fantastic weekend planned for us to celebrate my upcoming birthday. I’ve already been to work and come home. And he’s still asleep.
There’s no judgment in this: I’m delighted that at least one of us is a normal human, because I think if we were both annoying morning people we’d probably kill each other. I just sit back in awe of it. I wonder what it would be like? Because the other part of my envy of his ability to sleep is my occasional wondering what could have been, had my path taken me somewhere else, had I chosen another road.
Read the rest at The Chronicle of the Horse!
He was coming 4, big and slow and goofy. I brought him an apple from my hotel, and it took him about 20 minutes to eat it, turning it into mush in my hand. He had a huge tail and big eyes and was sweet as can be. I brought him home, got him in front of my leg and taking my hand, and he proceeded to be the most angry, hostile and fractious young man I’ve ever owned from 4.5 to 9, when he realized that if he just shut up and accepted his lot in life, he’d get a lot more cookies and work a lot less hard. But it took so, SO many hours of running backwards, gnashing his teeth and pinning his ears.
There have been so many. A working student’s horse on whom I made it about 20 feet. A homebred 3-year-old on whom I made it half a 20-meter circle. The time my OTTB dropped me into a wall, and I broke my collarbone (though I got back on AND went to school for a few days before seeing a doctor. Ain’t nobody got time for that.) My Young Riders horse, L’Etoile, put me in the dirt recreationally, at least three times in our two-year partnership. Danny’s a repeat offender as well, and once I bit it off Midge while swimming in the pond, learning a valuable lesson that falling off IN the pond is painless, but falling off on the BANK of the pond gets you three days of Vicodin.
So you came in eighth or 12th or 24th. You made mistakes, or you got in the ring and panicked, or you got cocky or you just got straight up outhorsed. Or maybe you didn’t score high enough in qualifying to get named to a team. Maybe your horse got hurt or sick or the money to travel across the country was too great. Maybe you don’t even have access to a horse to teach you that level of work at all.
Last weekend we attended our last show of our summer season. The competition season here in Virginia starts in April, revs up through May and June and culminates in one big show mid-July, after which it gets beastly hot and unpleasant, and it’s terrific to be able to give the horses the rest of July and all of August to basically flop around and have a breather.
We’ve got four awesome upcoming clinics, including bit fitting and groundwork for dressage riders, that you won’t want to miss! Read all about it in 
While show season is winding down, our educational events are just heating up! Join us in July and August for these great opportunities to learn
Summer has hit us like a freight train, with heat indexes over 100* and high humidity here in Virginia. Summer is long and unrelenting here in the South, so it’s acclimate or don’t ride. Of course on the really hot days we use good sense and will adjust our riding plan accordingly, but my team and I have a few tricks up our sleeves to keep our horses—and ourselves!—happy and healthy when the weather gets hot.