Hi. Cole here again! Apparently Kate has lost her creative inspiration and now I'm the one in charge of keeping everyone up to date with the goings on around here. Let's start with me! Whilst I would consider myself a smart, nay, clever horse, I'm still trying to get a grasp on the English language. For example 'gallop day' doesn't always mean gallop. There is actually quite of lot of cantering involved. Nowhere near as exciting as galloping. Here we see the English language being misused. Going for a 'quiet hack out with Liberty': again English language misrepresented. There is NOTHING 'quiet' about a hack out with Liberty. All it takes is one squirrel running up a tree or one Llama charging towards the fence by the road and he jumps on top of me like a koala scaling a eucalyptus! And then there's the 'mini' prix. Mario told me a lot about the Grand Prix's he would do with Kate. Most of his stories involved Kate shaking like a leaf in a cyclone in fear at the size of the jumps. And how he would sail over them with the ease of Bionic Man leaping over Empire State in spite of what she was doing on his back. He would also explain how the jumps were above his head and wider than our stalls. So you can easily see how I would be mislead into thinking that a MINI prix would be a very small version of what he was talking about.Perhaps the jumps would be like the dog ones you see at Plantation, ie thin rails, about the height of a human waist. Easily jumpable! So when Kate told me we were doing a Mini Prix at Highfields I was pretty excited. I mean, I DID win the last time I was there! How hard could it be? Let me answer that question in plain simple English: REALLY REALLY REALLY hard! Apparently the only time 'mini' means small is in reference to mini Snickers bars! These jumps were HUGE! Not sure what Kate was trying to accomplish but I don't think I'll ever complain about eventing show jumping again! If I must say, I did rally to the effort and had just the first down, which I think was Kat's fault anyhow. So this brings me to this coming weekend.
Liberty's is the only one with an iPhone in the barn so I asked him to check my ride times for this weekend. He told me I was entered in the advanced! The pre Mini Prix me wouldn't have thought anything of it, just another word for intermediate (perhaps for the horses with an advanced intelligence). But now I'm getting quite apprehensive. Particularly when Liberty said I'm the only one from our barn going to the event! Always a bad sign! So I asked my room mate Arrow what he thought. He's 22 and seen EVERYTHING there is. He went into a LONG explanation about the technicalities of speed, heights, lengths, dimensions of the cross country course. He talked about advanced's. 3 stars, 4 stars, Bruce Davidson this, Bruce Davidson that. He talked about how it felt galloping into the Head of the Lake at Rolex. How the crowd clapped and cheered for him. All this sounded fun and interesting UNTIL he backtracked to the dressage. At the advanced level I'm expected to do flying changes! On command! How do I do that?! I still trot through my changes when I'm galloping out in the field during the day! So now I'm standing here in my stall hoping like anything Arrow is wrong and that Advanced actually means Novice with an IQ test at the end. But given how many changes I've had to practice recently, and the fact Kate lies to me on a regular basis, I don't like my chances! Wish me luck!