Epic Pony Weekend: Failsauce

magic blanket ftw

Saturday of epic pony weekend was 90f. Which like, WTF WEATHER IT'S LATE SEPTEMBER. Oh well. I pulled Courage out of his stall and threw him in the crossties to wear the magic yellow blanket for a while.

It's supposed to have magnets or something I think. Anyways. Theoretically, it soothes sore muscles and after two days of jumping (and since I was a little crippled), I figured Courage needed all the help he could get.

As I got him set up, I took a close look at his now strangely larger and lumpier hock, and saw this:

good job, horse.

Yup. Nasty ol' cut inside the hock and another gash running down his cannon bone. Y'know. Cuz that's cool.

all work needed ottb approval

In better news, I had scheduled the saddle fitter to come out and look at him and his dressage saddle that day. Fun fact: I have literally never used a saddle fitter before because bfn DOESN'T HAVE ONE. Until now.

I had a couple mini strokes over what the whole shebang cost, but figured it was worth the money to get C checked out. After all, we can't have a dressage princess OTTB with a sore back.

measuring

It was a very interesting process--the fitter took tracings of Courage's back in three different places and then measured them. She said he wasn't sore at all and that the differences in muscling were not concerning at this point. She also verified that his right hind is the weakest--slightly asymmetrical over there.

She also put the saddle on him and took it off and screwed around with it and measured stuff and we nerded out about tack together, so that was cool. Her analysis was this:

1) My saddle is very nice quality and well constructed.
2) It actually fits my horse very well.
3) The flocking is like WAY super dead, which makes the bottom of the saddle rock hard and lumpy.
4) Rock hard and lumpy is not super desirable.
5) The sweat marks I was freaking out about aren't a super big deal (given his conformation and lack of back sore-ness).
6) We could probably fix it with some minor on-the-spot flocking adjustments that would involve adding new flocking to old flocking as a stop gap until I could afford to do a full reflock.

not gonna lie. this was scary.

So she went to adjust the flocking, but the port was in a weird place and she's like "do you mind if I take your saddle apart a little?" and I'm like "uh are you sure you can put it back together?"

She seemed confident.

I stood there and tried to look professional as my saddle was in multiple pieces and I reviewed what she'd told me, which pretty well aligns with what I already knew/suspected anyways...

So I put on a (hypothetical) steel-toed boot and kicked my checking account in the crotch as hard as I could.

Which is to say, I told her to take the whole thing home and do the full reflock now. It's a good saddle. It fits us both. I want to keep it. It's worth the money to me to maintain it.

And hey. This is the first tine in the history of living in BFN that it's actually possible to do routine saddle maintenance. LET'S DO THIS.

That is the story of how I managed to spend a shit ton of money without even riding my horse one day.

brb have to beat down bank account again