An Abundance of Spaz Attacks

Hey y'all, sorry my post last week wasn't that interesting. It was a bad week therefore my blog post was bad. Anyways, I think spaz should be a word. Many of us use it but it's not a word, but it really should be. If combinations of letters like twerk and selfie can be considered words, why can't spaz be word? I mean it describes many of us teenage girls at many times, and we're always looking for new descriptive words, right? I just don't get it.

I've been like such a spaz the last weeks and here are some of the reasons why:

The Good

25 Days until Summer!

Like OMG YAY, I mean school is great, you learn, you get killed with homework, you wake up at 5 am five out of the seven days of the week, and really it's just an overall great time, but SUMMER, IT'S ALMOST HERE! 

I can almost taste it

Even Less Days until Marching Band!

Molly, fellow band geeks, this should also be good news for you. Marching band is a place of many disturbing but hilarious inside jokes, suffering, and pain, and yelling at each other (but somehow, at the end of it, we still manage to talk to the other people), five mornings a week of sweat and sun, and very uncomfortable black shoes.

Fatality

I Have a Horse Show on Saturday!

Yay, again! I'm riding this horse named Bay Magic, and let's just say he's amazing, and he's making getting over Gambit a little easier. But like OMG, I have a show on Saturday, and it's a three phase (which means nothing to you but oh well)! It's an actual eventing show where they have all three phases: dressage, stadium jumping, and cross country.

Fun times

We Have State Band on Friday!

Again, EEP! Like, I don't even know how we made it, but we did, and we get to miss out on another day of school, and I get to spend the day with people I actually like, and it's going to be so much fun!

I couldn't think of a gif to do for this one.... Pardon my lack of creativity.

The Bad

SAGE Testing

One word to describe this: ugh, gross, goshdarnit, crud, yucky, stupid, useless, glitchy, clearasmud, ridiculous, poopy. Oh wait, that was eleven (11, 1, same thing, just bear with me here).  I just love having to spend 50 minutes out of our given 80 minutes in the tech office while my computer is having software reinstalled (and not working), just for a glitchy, rough standardized test. Yup, definition of a great day. 

Can anyone relate?

Spotify

I'm still going to blame this on SAGE Testing, because through the software updates, they removed Spotify off my computer. And my main source for listening to music, gone? Yeah, I'm not a happy camper.

I. Have. A. B

Many of you are probably like, "Oh, boohoo Pauline, deal with it," but really, it is that bad.

You may think they are fine and innocent, but really they're just out there to ruin your dreams

I just reread the Divergent series and The Fault in Our Stars

I don't even know what to do with myself.

I can't look at pictures or gifs because it's going to bring back the feels, and no one wants to see Pauline spazzing out with the feels. Actually you might want to grab a video camera. 

Ciao!

Justa Fast Mule

Fun fact for the day, Gambit's race name was Justa Fast Mule. And his show name is no longer Dare to Compare because my trainer decided all horses on our show team had to have the word 'sweet' in their show name, so we had to change it. It's now Sweet Masquerade, and if you know the horse, this works much better.

Well I have a show tomorrow (YIPPEE), but this means massive work. How to prepare for a show:

Your tack has already been cleaned, and  you stayed up till 11:00 the night before washing your horse and loading the trailer. 

1) Be at the barn at 6:00 in the morning. The barn is in Heber, and I DON'T WANT TO BE IN HEBER FLIPPING UTAH AT 6:00 IN THE MORNING! 

2) Clean up your horse and wrap his legs for shipping. This is a tedious process consisting of, "Oh hey look, I just spent the last five minutes rolling up that shipping wrap, and wow, I dropped it." **10 minutes later** Yes, it's wrapped again and I got every minuscule piece of dust out of it. **Trips** Oh, would ya look at that, I just dropped it. Again. *Tries to stomp off melodramatically and trips again.* 

Five minutes later, try this again.

Whisper to yourself frantically, "I will not drop the shipping wrap, I will not drop it, I WILL NOT DROP THE FLIPPING SHIPPING WRAP!"

Your whispers scare your horse so it farts and you, in pursuit to not smell the horrible gas, cover your nose. Their goes your shipping wrap.

It NEVER works like this

3) Take care of kids horses. Yeah, you not only get to take care of your horse, but of the other eight year olds' horses because they always arrive fashionably late and are "Too young for the responsibility." Too young my butt.

4) Run frantically around barn trying to make sure you packed everything. Leave that bridle you really really really need out because you need to change the bit before putting in the trailer.

5) Once your horse is (by miracle) wrapped this morning, wait in line to load it.

6) Load horse. This consists of pulling on the lead rope and the horse following, then stopping right before the trailer. You pull harder, the horse stays. It's giving you the  I'm-1200-pounds-you're-115-who-do-you-think-is-gonna-win-this-battle-hmmm-let-me-think-oh-hey-I-think-I-got-it-ME-HARDY-HARDY-HAR-HAR-HAR-HAR-NICE-TRY-HUMAN look.

Story of my life

7) Repeat step six eight times.

8) Get in car, then all the little kids arrive, fashionably late, totally innocent, completely clean, in show clothes and well rested (meanwhile you're in the car, hair ruffled, sweatpants and sweatshirt from last night on, hay sticking out from the back of your head, bags under your eyes, and you smell bad).

9) As trailer pulls away, realize you left that super duper important bridle on your tack trunk, and scream and beg your trainer to stop so you can go grab it.

10) Run with as little coordination as possible, grab the bridle, grab the bit, and hey look, your water bottle, grab that too, oh wait there's your video camera, might want that, oh and look, your show breeches!

11) Run desperately for the truck, jump in, slam your foot while closing the door, cover your curses with wonderful things like daisies and butterflies.

12) Now you only have the show to worry about! What could possibly go wrong?!

Wins, Losses, and Bandapalooza

First off, hey guys! I know I promised a video of me riding, but as mentioned in an earlier post, I lost my video camera, and I still can’t find it. I’m going with the theory that it vanished off the face of this Earth. I apologize.

Bandapalooza

Before I start on this, I’m not even going to try to explain the amount of chaos in this.

Bandapalooza is a giant band concert our band system does, and it starts off with the best band, and we keep adding the bands in until sixth grade. By the time the sixth graders get on, we have like 300 people on stage. It’s a blast. Our song, Gathering of the Ranks of Hebron, I thought, went pretty well. It sounded really good with two bands, instead of just one. I couldn’t hear the Wind Ensemble’s song because Symphonic Band was waiting in the back hallway behind the backstage, and let’s just say, if there were a competition to see how quiet a group of 44 people could be, and 101 groups entered the contest, we would be ranked 102. 

Then the Eighth Grade band got on, and they were pretty good. So all three good bands playing together, it’s pretty magestical. This would be considered a win. Then things went downhill after the second Seventh Grade song. None of us were used to playing in a group of 220 people, so playing just ended up being mass chaos. This would not be considered a win.

Sorry bad quality, but this is us

Other wins

Riding outside in February: My ex racehorse has only one speed (I’m-going-so-fast-that-I-just-cut-off-four-different-people-and-my-poor-rider-is-apologizing-to-every-single-one-of-those-slowpokes-she-doesn’t-understand-the-need-for-speed) and he’s much easier to control when theres actually space. 

Not failing my science test: After Bandapalooza, I had to come home and study for a Biology test the first thing in the morning. I took the test, and it didn’t end up being an epic fail. Well, actually, who knows?

Losses

Losing my video camera, leaving my coat in a friend's car, and playing one of the worst solos I have played in my life.

Basically

Losing the state championship hockey game: What else is there to say besides it was a really good and intense game? But we lost. I mean we did go into the third overtime, but we lost in the first minute of it. Everyone was surrounded by our goal, and the goalie lost sight of the puck for less than half the second. Once he found it, you can guess where it was. In the fine netting of our goal. It was really quite disappointing, but good job Park City! It was close and we played well. Until the very end. But we can forget that.

Mayo is from our hockey team

Crazy Dressage Interpretations

Well, people who have been following since my first post (if any of you exist), you should know that I switched horses fairly recently so I could do a sport I love: eventing. This consists of jumping, cross country, and dressage. Gambit, my horse, however, prefers the jumping and cross country part of it much better. That's not to say I don't either (I definitely like jumping better, I mean, who gets adrenaline from making your horse bounce and do unnatural movements, sitting, and smiling and pretending that you are doing what you should be doing? I don't! But it's necessary, so whatever), but dressage is definitely a main part of eventing.

After today's lesson, I realized dressage was going to be much harder than everyone originally planned. Yes, Gambit is very good at looking pretty, and is fairly good at listening to instructions but he hasn't mastered these things called leads, and so that means no matter how good we look, dressage will be impossible. Well maybe not impossible, but the art form we would be doing would not be called dressage, but more like let's-prance-around-the-arena-and-scare-the-crap-out-of-my-rider-and-make-her-cry-because-I-wanted-to-eat-those-flowers-instead-of-trot-from-k-through-x-to-m. Yes, I'm not over exaggerating. I also would go into much more explanation, but I would bore my few readers of this blog away from this URL for unhappily ever after.

Back to riding, if I were to go into competition right now for dressage, my test would look like this:

This is not what a dressage test should look like.

Well what happened today in the lesson? It wasn't a bad lesson, but I definitely wasn't a star today. Let's say we were supposed to be cantering in a circle, a 30m circle, and picture this: A teenage girl on a huge black horse racing all over the 200m riding ring, speeding around on the wrong lead, changing directions every few seconds, and the trainer telling the poor teenage girl to calmly to toggle her reigns, sit back, think slow thoughts, breathe, and think what she wanted to look like. Ladies and gentlemen, Pauline and Gambit. Yes, because these are things humans love to do when speeding around crazily on an ex racehorse.

Who here knows what dressage is supposed to look like?

I promise, I really can ride, I'll start posting videos soon when I actually remember my video camera has a working battery and can take videos. Well in the meantime, if any of my readers (like five or ten of you) are actually riders, here's a short survival guide about how to relax and have a dressage test go well. Go riding!

A Closing of the Dewey Chapter

I've been riding this horse named Dewey the whole year and we made a pretty good team. That's not to say there weren't the ups and downs. Dewey was a paint horse, but he didn't have spots. That meant the gene skipped him. He was silly, quirky, a little bit rotten, and very naughty. Despite this, I loved him. He went back yesterday. Of course, there was the emotional roller coaster. It's saying good bye to a best friend, to a teammate. On a tangent, horseback riding is a sport. It is very much a sport. And the horse is your teammate. We can communicate with them, very differently than you would communicate with a person, and that's what makes riding flow like magic.

Last lesson with Dewey, he's side stepping in this photo.

Back to Dewey, it was sad to see him go. I had been working with him for a full year, but I decided it wasn't going to work anymore. The rotten little horse that I came to love, did the wrong sport. He is a western pleasure horse. It's not his fault, and I tried for six straight months to fall in love with the sport, but it wasn't my thing. Just for a quick explanation for what western pleasure is, it's when you put a huge honking saddle on a horse (a western saddle), and make them look very pretty while you look like you know what you're doing. It's all about being slow and controlled and looking gorgeous at the same time. If you ever watch it, it looks like it's pointless, but let me tell you, it is hard as heck. But then again, what do I know. Dewey was a regional champion and he knew what he was doing. It was my job to sit on him, pretend I was as good as him, and win all the blue ribbons. Blue ribbons are first place.

Western Pleasure is a difficult task for the horse and rider, and many people have different views on western pleasure. This article is about what western pleasure is trying to complete.

Dewey warming up.

I event, and that's why I'm moving to Dare to Compare, or Gambit, as we call him. He's this guy.

The Mafia Horse, or Gambit, in the aisle.

Eventing is dressage, show jumping, and cross country. Dressage is like western pleasure, the goal is to make you and the horse look very pretty and relaxed. It's just faster paced. Show jumping is when you and your horse are in an arena with a specific height of jumps that someone conveniently dropped in the arena. They expect you to jump it. And of course because if you are the best at it, you get a blue ribbon. And winning is everything. Cross country is jumping but in a huge field, still in a course, but it's a race. Whoever doesn't fall, their horse doesn't bite the dust, they don't get lost, and they have the fastest time, they win.

Dewey rocked at dressage, but didn't quite take to show jumping and cross country. That's alright, he was afraid of heights. He wanted to keep all four feet on the ground. And I still love him for that. He went back yesterday, with a big, sad, tearful closing of a chapter, and I'm still very achy in the heart over him going back, but I'm prepared for a new chapter.

My favorite photo from my last photo shoot with Dewey.