Good News, Beer Cans and Birthday Cake.

Thursday saw Tilly and I trundle up to Rathmell to visit Uncle Joe.  It was a bit of a nightmare of a journey as one of the roads was closed which meant we had to detour and this took us past....Skipton Horse Trials, Craven Country Ride and Coniston Cold... all cross country courses we would love to do but are not able to at the moment, it was torture!
However....the day improved no end.  I trotted Tilly up and down on the hard surface first, then lunged her on both reins before lunging in small circles on a hard surface.  The result....sounder than she has been for a long long time.  She is now just 1/10th lame on her left fore leg on the small circle on the hard surface.  Next Joe took some x-rays to check how Barry's shoeing is helping and again there was much improvement.
So Tilly is now having her work upped and I can start schooling and introducing canter and if all goes well we can start jumping again after Christmas.  If she stands up to the work then hopefully we may be able to event again next year.  If not then Tilly's eventing career will be over.  So send your good vibes to Tilly please and lets get fit and kick some butts next year!!
The down side to my visit to see Joe was that he made Tilly go on the weighbridge!  After remarking that she had lost quite a lot of weight I thought I might have got away with it but no...poor Tilly...no girl should be weighed in public!!!!!!!  Well the outcome was she weighs 670kg.  We need to lose another 50kg at least but now with her work increasing and the grass decreasing in value hopefully we are on the right tracks.  The only thing that has ever helped her keep her weight down is work and unfortunately I have not been able to do much of that for the last year!
I schooled her for 10 minutes in the field yesterday and the little rascal tried to hump me off twice!!!  I didn't dare canter!!!!  She obviously thought her schooling days were over!!!
I have hacked Mez twice this week, just round the little hack which is about 1/2 hour.  I have done it early in the morning so not to meet anything to big traffic wise and today's hack was certainly an improvement on Tuesdays!  We only had one scary moment when an empty beer can came rolling down the hill in the wind towards us!  She is so nosey and wants to stare at everything but I need to remember that it took Tilly about six weeks to relax on a hack so she's not doing too badly!  We are going to box her up to my friends tomorrow and school then she can stand in the lorry with her haylage whilst we have tea and birthday cake......uuummmmm!