My Camaro

Late last summer, I said goodbye to The California Horse and within two weeks I bought a horse of my own.  I blogged about it here, and since then I haven't talked about him much, hadn't even given him an official name for his blog persona. From now on, he shall be called Camaro.  Partly because I referred to him, when I bought him, as my little sports car of an Arabian.  And partly because I'd dreamed that, when I 'retired' from active motherhood, I would trade my kid-hauler Suburban for a real Camaro.  I talked about that here, but it never happened.  I'm still driving the trusty rusty Suburban--currently closing in on 265k miles, and I doubt a motorized Camaro is in my near future.  So, my four legged sports car gets that as his name here.

For the sake of brevity, I'll say that I had a big mental adjustment to my new horse and new boarding barn.  I'm the only dressage rider there.  And almost the oldest rider, period.  I do love the barn owner; she's a friend of mine that I met over five years ago and have kept in contact with despite her leaving the barn where we met (and buying her own facility--YAY) and me riding warmbloods mostly while she rides a lot of Arabs and Quarter Horses.  However, when The California Horse went home, I was separated from all my great older (three of them in their sixties) dressage barn friends who had become my support system through all the family drama of 2017, 2018 and half of 2019 (hardly any of which made it to be discussed here on the blog.  Rough time.)  It was kind of like moving to a new home and I had to learn a new neighborhood, new people, and make new friends.  Traumatic in it's own way.

I rode Camaro a bit in the Fall, and had intended to do quite a lot of riding over the winter.  Which didn't pan out.  My allergies/asthma flared up as winter started, thankfully not as bad as they had been the previous winter, but still enough that I just didn't have the stamina to both clean 11 stalls and work my horse 5 days a week.  Turned out well, though, as it gave Camaro a chance to lose the muscles he'd had, some of which were wrong for a dressage horse (ahem, underneck muscle), and it gave us time to build some trust between us via short groundwork sessions and the occasional ride.

This Spring, we are back on track for getting a good regular riding program going, he is building muscles in the right areas (yay, over the back and through the topline!), and his 'spooking issue' he had with his previous owner has pretty much disappeared (trusting me rather than worrying about bogeymen in the arena).  I'm very pleased with the direction in which we are moving.  He seems to enjoy our sessions together, and I know that great things are in our future.

Getting decent pictures of him is difficult.  He seems to understand what my phone camera is.  Selfies haven't worked so far, as you can see by the terrible one below. He kept bumping my arm just as I was taking our picture, and this one is my favorite horrible one.  He looks like he has the head of a moose (he doesn't, his is a petite shapely Arabian head)  with a pom pom for a forelock (he actually has a forelock that reaches his eyes) and my head just somehow doesn't attach naturally to my neck (I assure you, in real life my neck isn't crooked or have the texture of dryer hose).

Even when I try to be sly and take a picture of him out in his paddock, he's on to me. Like here, where he dropped his head into the water trough and watched me with his eyes just level with the rim.

Apparently this is what he thinks of my efforts to get pictures of him.