Fall

I have been pretty busy with school.  I've been able to do a few things with my horses (primarily maintenance stuff and riding the old steady-eddies), but Griffin has really been put on the backburner.  Today, the weather was so nice.  I had to get out and do something with him.  We went for a walk in the late fall woods.  He is such a good boy.

Stopped to try to get a nice shot of him with the yellow leaves in the background, but he wouldn't stay back and kept following me when I tried to back away to get a pic.

The bright maples have pretty much lost all their leaves, but the brownish red oaks and yellow aspens are still holding on.

Griffin has very soft eyes.  They were not always like this.

You can see the faint whitish scar on his cornea that is currently remodelling - it used to be much more opaque.  I think it will eventually go away completely.

My mom watched my daughter while I played with Griffin and she took this picture of me working with him in my neighbor's arena.  It was the first time I'd taken him over there, but he was pretty relaxed about it.  In fact, as I was talking with my neighbor about the fact that Griffin can still occasionally be reactive when I move too fast toward him, and I tried to demonstrate by jumping at him and startling him, he didn't hardly react at all!   He just backed away from me, but there was no overreaction.  I think his overreacting primarily happens when he's loose in the pasture and hasn't been around me for a while.

The horses got a new round bale today and they are quite happy.  They are not so happy that I haven't let them out in the pasture for a month and a half now, and the grass is still green.  I wanted the pastures to get a bit of a break before winter.  They've been heavily grazed for several years now, and are showing signs of damage in the favorite grazing spots (the lawns).  There is still a lot of taller grass (the roughs), but they prefer to go over and over the same short spots and the poor grass there is starting to thin out and it doesn't recover even after it's had a break.  It needs a whole year off, but I'm not sure how to give it that.  That would require fencing in the field around the pond, and I don't really want to do that.  It's too nice to have to ride in.