If you were a Flintstone’s fan as a child, you might remember the character Schleprock.  He was the poor soul who always had the rain cloud following him around Bedrock.  Well move over Schleprock, here comes Eisenrock with his unfortunate rider.  We seem to have found a rain cloud that doesn’t want to leave.

I have already filled you in on our lack of show last weekend because of the pouring rain at the ungodly hour of the morning, but there were two other rides this week that were either shortened or cancelled because of rain.  Make a note – if I am scheduled to attend a clinic or show, there will be a greater than normal chance for rain.  Keep that in mind when making plans and feel free to contact me to find out if Ike and I will be attending a particular event.

Our lesson was on Thursday afternoon this week.  When I left home, there were blue skies with some fluffy white clouds.  By the time I had travelled the 18 miles to the barn, there were some darker clouds looming on the back side of the tree line.  As soon as my butt hit the saddle, I heard the first rumble of thunder.  Super.  Ms. C had checked the radar and there was nothing to note.  How is this possible?  We decided to give it a go and got to work without further delay.  Our 25 minutes of work was stellar.  We focused our efforts on keeping Ike in front of my leg with a steady connection.  Once we had that, I asked for the next gear.  Ike could give me 5-6 strides at most and then he would get unbalanced so we’d slow things down.  There are still more gears to discover, but the thunderstorm decided that we would not find them on Thursday.  The thunder got louder and angrier and the rain arrived, so we decided to head to the barn rather than push our luck as the tallest moving object for any lightening to play, “tag, you’re it.”

Friday was supposed to be a fun show outing.  We were going to invade my friend’s barn that has a Friday afternoon fun show a few times a summer.  Never mind that it is a hunter barn and the classes are for hunters, western pleasure, and games (barrel racing, pole bending, and costume classes).  We were going just for the chance to get off the farm to school.  I’d planned to warm up and then enter the command class and the two flat classes…if Ike was calm and could do his stretch down trot, he could pretend to be a hunter for a few minutes.  Well, the forecast for the day was a cold front arriving midday with showers from 11 a.m. until 1 p.m.  Wrong!!  It rained all afternoon and the rain stuck around until 5 p.m.  The show was cancelled and rescheduled for this Friday.  I will not state whether or not we are going so as to not doom the show to another cancelation.

We finally had the second half of my lesson yesterday.  Ike was in such a cooperative spirit that we worked on leg yield, leg yield to the right with a change of bend to left lead canter, leg yield to the left to right lead canter, and 10 meter canter turns to centerline.  So proud of the big boy.  He tried his hardest and succeeded at all of these exercises.  This was the sunny spot of the week.  🙂  I have no doubt that the rains will soon return.