November 20, 2006
Today was one of the last nice (warm) days we're supposed to have for awhile, so I decided I'd better spend some time out with my babies! I decided to take Nova for a walk. We started off doing the old 'start, stop, start, stop, stop, start, stop, etc' routine. I feel he is doing it mostly because he thinks he can get away with it, rather than being that concerned about what is over the hill. Heck, the stuff at the top of the hill hasn't changed in the year he's been here! He is still concerned about those german shepherds, in that they seem to be the turning point in the walk. Before we reach them, he doesn't want to walk forward, but after we are past them, he puts on an awfully big walk. We just went a bit further, and while he did stop a few times, he was quite good. Well... Except for the bucking and dancing around like a goof a bit. He was worse on the way home though, because by then he was really quite excited. He did get into a bit of trouble when he tried to give a half-rear right beside me. Stuff like that is for the end of the lead rope, thank you very much (if at all). And we did have to take a couple short breaks - to allow him to gather his thoughts again. For a horse that can be the laziest thing on four legs sometimes, there are times when he's just a maniac. I guess we could say that's because he's only a year and a half old, and hasn't been handled much this summer, and hasn't been out of the pasture doing fun things in... ages.

Anyway, he settled down on the way back down the hill to our driveway - which is what he usually does, and it's nice because it allows you to end the walk on a positive note. But, by that time I was thinking that maybe he needed a bit more work since he was so spunky. So I ran up, grabbed the lunge line and whip and we went back down to the circle to do a bit of lunging. I'm always impressed when I go to lunge Nova about how well he listens and how quick he has figured out the whole idea. I got him out and moving around a little bit - we did some walk/trot and trot/walk transitions. He's going to be easy to slow down... "Nova, walk" and you get an instant walk most of the time. And the bonus is, he gives you the walk, not a whoa! He was really good and listening to me, so we ended it after a few minutes and I just put him away in the pasture.