Spring is here...at least today.

The sun is shining, the frogs are croaking, the mud is drying up and the horses are shedding. Could it be spring? At least today it is. Tomorrow, who knows? I can look out the window and see the trees starting to bud and blossom, we have some crocuses coming up and best of all, the mud is starting to dry up.

I am SO ready for spring, after a wet, cold winter. Usually, Western Washington winters are reasonably mild, allowing us to ride the trails most of the winter. This year, not so much. When it hasn't been cold, it's been wet. When it hasn't been wet, it's been frozen. Thank goodness for covered arenas! The first endurance ride of the season is coming up soon, either this weekend or next, but I'm afraid I'm not heading out for it; one conditioning ride just doesn't cut it, even if you ride conservatively. Just to be perfectly clear - it's not Galen I'd be worried about...every year it takes a little more conditioning for me to get in shape for endurance rides and I'm not there yet.

On the other hand, this nasty weather has promoted working with the youngsters - Danny is doing very well under saddle and Andre has had two 'sit-upons' now. We'll do another one tomorrow and see if we can get a few drunken circles in for him. It's always amusing to see the youngster's expression when they realize having someone on their back isn't as easy as it looks. Happily, they figure it out fairly quickly and it's on to less basic instruction.

Enough being inside! Lunch is finished and I'm heading out to enjoy shedding horses and sun.

Sunshine and Ice!

It is an absolutely gorgeous day out, so I hooked up the trailer and Galen and I went for a trail ride. We went to Lord Hill, a regional park that has lovely trails and lots of hills. I figured, as we haven't been on a trail ride since last JULY, we'd do very little, just get our feet wet, so to say.

Good plan, as the trails were almost all either icy or muddy/slippery. Galen had hoof boots on in front and bare behind, but he still slipped a few times. Galen was very happy, as he's been agitating for a trail ride since, well, last July. We will need to get a lot more conditioning in before our first endurance ride, whenever that happens to be.

I did see some really strange fungus/mushrooms on a bunch of dead sticks. It almost looked like snow, until I got a little closer and could see that it was a bunch of tendrils, or skinny stalks. I've never seen anything like that before, so perhaps I'll go look up mushrooms later on.

But, we had the park to ourselves (a few trailers showed up just as we were leaving for home), the sun was shining, the weather was reasonably mild (about 40 degrees, I'd say). Ahhhh....

I did think about bringing my camera, but didn't actually do it and my cell phone doesn't take very good photos, so you'll just have to take my word that it was lovely.