At last, a post.

Yes. The world must be coming to a close. I'm actually posting.

Anytime anything interesting happens in my life I usually plan to write a post--but then I forget, or procrastinate until I don't have time, or make an excuse not to. I do write a ton in my journal every day (how strange to have both a blog and a journal, right?).

So, since I last wrote 5 zillion years ago, I won the End-Of-Year Championship in Open Hunter on the TSSA circuit. Which is the schooling circuit, and therefore the class is very small, and thus it's not as big an achievement as it sounds. We missed one of the shows before the EOY show because Jones had a bit of a colic scare, but he's back to normal and doing great.

We also went to the CTHJA EOY show and rode in Youth/Non-Pro and Modified Child/Adult Hunter. I believe we won one ribbon if I remember correctly--a 6th in the Modified Under Saddle. The class was huge--35 people-- so we were pretty lucky to pin at all. Also, Jones's original owner told me it was hard to get him to do well in the hack, so I'm very pleased. Our jumping rounds went very well also, thanks to the addition of roller spurs along with a crop. Since we started using them Jones has seemed to like moving rather more quickly than normal, though admittedly he still goes pretty slow.

There was something else I wanted to say but I forgot...

Oh yeah! Debbie's been introducing us to the first full off season Jones and I will have (and the last, since I'm probably going away next year). This entails not only jumping, but also flat work. LOTS of flat work. Without stirrups. We've only had one flat lesson so far, in which all Jones had to do was to jog around lazily and bend to the corners while I strained to post without stirrups. At my old barn I trotted stirrupless every day, but I've been getting lazy. In other words, it was painful.

Thankfully, at our next jumping lesson and all lessons after that, I've finally been "introduced to the corners" as Debbie would say. We've really been improving this year... makes me want to take Jones to the north-east next year. But it's too expensive and besides, who knows if I'll have enough time for him? Of course I could take him and lease him out... maybe do a quarter lease or something... but transporting horses is pretty hazardous as well as costly.

On another tack, I didn't fail my SSAT. I actually did pretty darn well: 98th percentile overall. I got an 800 on the Verbal section but actually did worse point-wise on the Reading section than I did on the math. Percentile-wise, I got a 96th on Reading and 88th on Math. So many of the answers in the Reading section were so arbitrary, though, and since each person's mind operates differently, isn't it to the advantage of people with certain mindsets to have such questions? I think Reading on a test like this should be eliminated--it's just not fair for people with very different outlooks to have to take a test like that.

One final point. I'm hoping to get a cell phone soon. Which is the reason I'm leaving off this post. Because my mom agreed to discuss getting one tomorrow IF I get my room and rather disused but still messy "lair" here in the basement cleaned up by 7:30 and all the litter boxes are cleaned by that point as well. And I should probably get my (very dull) homework done, too.

I promise to try and post more!