Lovely Day

Warm as Toast

However warm toast is, it was today--in the 70's.

I checked the hay on the way home. Good price and it looks to be high quality. The question will be whether The Boys like it. It is grass and timothy and they are used to a grass/timothy/alfalfa mix. I play to buy a few bales to try them out. The price is good and the transportation is a cinch from just across the street.

I rode all three boys starting with Toby. I worked him in the ring for about 5-10 minutes and then headed out to the woods. Some of the footing was mucky, but on the whole it was pretty rideable. Toby, though, decided it was slow, cautious going. I didn't bother arguing with him. I was kind of nice to just laze along.

I was going to take Chance out too, but when I started a bit of a ring school, he was very unsteerable. I ended up just riding circles in either direction at the trot forcing myself to position my seat exactly where it needed to be despite his considerable effort to put me where he wanted me to be so he could try to flop himself all over the place. He is not being bad, but is just trying to find the easiest way to balance instead of the best way. By the end of a 20 minute session, he was going nicely, so I left it at that, dismounted gave him a good grooming and a nice fat carrot.

I schooled Tucker for about 15 minutes, just asking him to go forward at all three gaits and then went on our "safe zone" trail. He was a delight, nice and forward, and, except for one scoot forward and some invisible monster along the way, a nice reliable ride. I'll expand our territory to the longer trail soon, giving us a few more options. He's been on it before, but I want to keep his confidence at maximun so that every ride out there is enjoyable.

School was a bummer this morning. Our juniors went to the play, which would have been fine if the vice-principal had not decided to run things down in the auditorium. The way the stage was set up, there was a projection screen on the left and in order to see it, the audience needed to be either center or left.

In his stubborn "wisdom" of how to run things, the vp seated all our students on the far right. No amount of arguing with him, reasoning, or even a plea from the drama teacher who knew exactly what she was doing, could change his mind.

He seated about 100 students from two other campuses in our system in the center, leaving several hundred seats center and off to the left completely empty.

Some of our students who ended up stuck way in the back rows could not hear the dialogue and were additionally annoyed by the vice principal and his cronies yakking on their walkie talkies during the performance.

Now, mind you, this was a part of the required curriculum and the students knew they were going to have to do some sort of assignment related to the show.

I complained to the academic supervisor from the Board Office (my school's boss) and will be filing a letter of complaint to my principal and higher up if needed. The whole thing was very badly handled and, as usual, the students ended up suffering for it.

The play itself was very difficult under the best of circumstances, and even though I had prepared my classes with several days of dicussion and introduction, the handicap of the seating arrangements spoiled a good part of it.

The show was beautifully staged and well acted too, so there was no fault of the performance itself.

The ignorance of our administration in this situation is inexcusable.