Wet Saturday

Well it's the weekend and again it's raining. Not quite as bad as last Saturday which seems like an eternity ago! So I planned on keeping the boys in today for two reasons;

1. It was due to rain alot
2. The track is looking a bit worse for wear - water logged and pogged now too.

The track - the hay at the beginning is my mouldy hay soaking up some mud.

The middle paddock looks ok but actually it has 3 inches of water on the surface!



So I also decided I would play with Maraschino today as well so he didn't get worried again about being in the stalls (or have too much energy or both).

I had to have a nana snooze myself after breakfast and doing the yards and we had managed to avoid most of the first front of rain.... so I got up with a plan (it was lunch time) of playing with Maraschino - opened the door and he was lying down alseep too! I snuck back in and waited a while longer.

Then I took some time to halter him.... he sniffs the halter and then as soon as he sees you don't have a carrot he backs up and or puts his head up and gets all 'no you can't halter me' - as soon as the first part is on his nose he's fine..... I had not been doing it the way Pat says to - by putting the halter over his neck because that was spooking him (working on that too) so I put the rope over his neck to put some the slack into the halter, then I managed to get the halter over his neck.... then I played a while with that and got his nose in. The other thing he kind of reacts to is doing up the knot - one day I accidentally flicked him in the face with the end as I was un-haltering him..... so I flicked the end around alot until he turned his head towards me, then I stopped, and did that a few times until I did it up.

Walked him a whole 9-10 steps to the washbay (concrete) and we mainly played with the carrot stick and savvy string today. I got the CS around his ears and face, and then managed to get to the stage where I could hold the CS over his head and swing the SS round to the other side of his neck and drape it back towards me.

He thought initially (especially on the far side) that the carrot stick over his head and moving meant driving game but he got it in the end. After that he was turning his head with every drape and biting the carrot stick gently.

We played a little in his mouth as he eats both ends of the carrots stick.

Did a little Yo Yo - Garbo helped when he decided he wasn't doing it right (that made Maraschino lick and chew!).

He is so funny with his introversion and his mouth and tongue. He gets his tongue all wiggly and sideways and licks with his tongue way out the side sometimes.

Still very hard to read.....at one point while I was doing the savvy string over the head and drape back over neck he started eating a pile of hay I had in the washbay.... hard to know if he's secretly an LBI!

Oh - and we accidentally did circle game today....in the stall just after I haltered him I played a bit with putting the rope over his head and it got caught on his ear and he circled round me a couple of times at walk. OK so that's not really LBI but not really extreme RBI either hey.

Anyway - wait works for both, food seems to work for him so I'll keep on keepin on.