Day 5 of Camp

This morning was bittersweet. I refuse to go into detail because I have rehashed it so many times today and I don't want to think about it anymore. It was excellent when I was happy, excited, calm and intrigued. Sideways and Circling were marvelous and I received a rare compliment from Kara. Which made my day.
But then when I was frustrated and predator mode, it went down hill.

To sum up my thoughts concerning this afternoon, I may not do my Online Audition. If I can get a pedestal at Mercy and get my barrels back, I can probably be able to do it. Plus I'll have a trailer (hopefully). Maybe...maybe not...I don't know! :(
However I feel ever the more confident with Liberty. In fact, I have a feeling maybe I will be able to film the Audition by Tuesday/Wednesday.
As I want to do a second Audition, I may do Freestyle after all. All I need is Sideways and being able to trot.


But Liberty is my main focus now. Of course this has to involve some warming up and preperation online, but nothing too challenging. Weave Pattern!

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This evening...wow. Like I said before, I wanted to do liberty and check how everything was. I also wanted to see whether I was able to do the circling game before the Figure 8 pattern.  We usually haven't been able to but I was just curious and experimenting.
Preparing for Liberty was fun! (Got photos!) I did some stick to me at the trot outside the arena but Sharlie really didn't see the point of it so I decided to go into the arena where we could play the 7 games a bit before going to liberty. I was well aware of my boundaries from this morning and did the best I could to stay away from them. We did some squeeze game, stick to me, yoyo, back up by the tail, and figure 8 and my goal was "do it as if there was no rope". Sharlie was very light, especially on the figure 8.
Circling game at the walk and trot was beautiful once again. I am excited about this new way of doing it because it works so well!
I unhaltered her with savvy and she was very soft about it and rested her nose on me for a bit before I moved away a bit. Somewhere around that time, at the beginning, Sharlie decided "I will not go toward the end of the arena where the barrels are because Julia is going to do the figure 8 pattern with me." While this is true to some degree- I did want to test it- it was no where near in my line up of things to do yet and I wasn't even thinking about it at the time. I was thinking about the grass at that end of the arena. She didn't see that. So every time she left me, we did some circling, building up from a half lap of trot all the way to 3 and a few steps of canter to 2 laps of canter! I know I need to do 5 laps of each (give or take) for the audition so we are slowly building it up. Its hard for Sharlie as she isn't so physically fit.
Within a few minutes we were able to go around one barrel but the other one was a problem. I ended up settling for 3 laps of canter at the end as I knew we wouldn't get around to the figure 8 again.
So. Note to self: Do figure 8 before circling.

Even though it didn't go as planned, that didn't frustrate me! I didn't get frustrated once! This is truly amazing progress.
Even though Sharlie's stick to me and circling were slightly off, I think we should be able to do the audition maybe Wednesday...? We are going to move the pedestal to the arena tomorrow morning.

Goodnight
Julia