Falling into place

Since I am feeling rather ambitious today, I will post here as well.  Things are slowly coming together and I for one can really appreciate that.

Remember back when Kat had his meltdown at the park, part of the harness broke and it all turned to crap? Well I had ordered my new harness and everything pretty much fit except the traces. They were about a foot too long. Since the cart shafts were a tad too short, I figured I would address that first, then deal with fitting the traces to the pony.

Our neighbor is a welder and we dropped the cart off with him last weekend. I only seem to have weekends to work the little man, we got our workout in and so sending the cart off for adjustments was no problem since it would be sitting around during the week anyways...

Yesterday on the way home from work I was thinking. I didn't know when to expect my cart back. I needed to call and inquire about it...  when I went out back to feed- there it was waiting for me. Wahoo! I called the neighbor, thanked him for the work, let him know I won't get to try it until this weekend to see that the adjustments are going to work, but let me know what I owe and I will get him paid.

Before sending the cart off, I put the harness on Kat again to check everything, measure everything and make sure it was all going to work.  The tugs needed to come down a bit- 2 holes punched on either side, and since the tugs were now lower and where they needed to be, the straps that keep the shafts down and secured from flipping up also needed a couple extra holes in them as well.   Hopefully everything is right where it needs to be now.  The holes have been punched, the harness oiled again...

Then Kat go his first pair of shoes on the fronts this morning and I am hoping we are ready for the Darby next weekend.  There is no cantering allowed for training level and he needs to learn to carry two people in the cart before then, so it will be interesting to see how things go between now and then. 

For those wondering, a Darby is sort of like the CDE's only there is no dressage portion. From the ADCS website-

"A Darby is a short competition featuring cones and hazards in a continuous course, driven just for the times. No fancy dress, no dressage test, just seeing how well you can get through a series of short cones setups and through three sets of gates in a couple of hazards. There is a single setting for cones, one for minis and another for everybody else. We will make you work a bit, however, as the idea is to split the group in half, with the first going through the course while the folks in the second man the scoring and judging, then reversing the process. If you haven't done one before, don't worry, we'll show you how it is done that morning. After all, this is for fun and even after it is all over, you are welcome to go back through the course to see how much better you can do the second time."

So much for his first outing being a simple pleasure class, going around the ring.  He's pretty bored with that though so this may make him appreciate the simple stuff a little more.  The weather is supposed to be cooler up there too. How awesome is that?