Bye Sasha!

Sasha left this morning to fly back to New York, then off to Russia to visit her family. We will definitely miss her here - it's pretty different without her!

Sasha's last evening at Mustang Camp. Look at those ominous clouds...

Spot
Zebras are so much fun to train. Spot is so smart and once he is engaged in the training, he tries really hard to figure out what you want from him. By the end of our session today, he was consistently stepping onto the mat with both feet and staying on the mat (while treats were being fed at a rather high rate) until being targeted off. Now we just need to work on duration :)

Hammer
Poor Hammer got eaten by mosquitoes like crazy. Today his whole body was covered in lumps and he definitely wasn't looking too thrilled. He was a little grumpy during our training session, but I bet he really wasn't feeling so well.

Lefty
Took Lefty out to practice walking into the ground trailer again to prep him for learning to load in the trailer, but he was being swarmed by mosquitoes and biting flies, so I ended our session pretty quickly.

Amigo
Now that Sasha has left, Heather and I are teaming up to train Amigo. Today, we just took Amigo and tried to see where he was in his progress. We ended up working on being polite and having impulse control since he started getting frustrated and nipping/biting when he didn't think he was getting food fast enough. That was a big no-no, so we stood on the other side of a fence and worked on "easy" with duration (up to 10 seconds holding the "easy" position). To end the session, I got up in the saddle and Heather held onto Amigo's lead rope just in case, and we went from cone to cone and practiced turning, walking, stopping, and backing up. Amigo did surprisingly well at those things, so we know we really need to focus on that self control and teach him that all that other naughty stuff doesn't work...

Muddy shoes...

I swear that every time I look down, my shoes are a different color. This weekend they were basically drenched the entire time so they were dark brown. Now that the mud has dried, they're starting to look lighter in color. So much rain, so much mud!

One of our faucets had sprung a leak, so we were digging down to try and figure out what was going on. We took out the heavy-duty vacuum to see if we could vacuum up the dirt that was in the hole we were digging. Unfortunately, the dirt was too heavy so it didn't work well. But somebody else got to enjoy the vacuum instead :)

Chester the mule gets vacuumed - and loves it!!