Let me be clear: being a dressage judge is one of the toughest jobs on the planet. First, you're watching for tiny nuances of performance in a 1,000 pound animal, and then holding them up against a standard. I don't care if you're the best judge on the planet, you can't have your eyes on all the horse's body parts all at once. You're going to miss stuff, and you're only human, but everyone expects you to be ON IT, ALL THE TIME.

Michael often says that there are three kinds of riders: riders who make things happen, riders who hope things happen, and riders who wonder what the hell happened. He then adds a fourth category, riders who wait for things to happen.

At first blush, this waiting period seems like a passive process, just sitting around and wishing and praying that some opportunity will present itself, that some rich sponsor will come along, that someone will drop the next Totilas or Valegro into our laps. But that's not what he means.

I am a proud college graduate holding a degree in Liberal Arts, which is a bit like an English major, but even less useful, if you can imagine such a thing. I'm a lover of grammar and syntax, and have an extensive vocabulary in a couple of languages. But I need a new word, because "problem" and its various synonyms isn't cutting it.

Dressage At Lexington is always a big show for us. It's three days long, at one of our favorite venues; it's in the middle of July, after all the chaos of Spring qualifying things has calmed down. We always end up having quite a herd, and the original number was 10-12, with me showing two or three, and Allison showing two or three, and there we were. No big deal.

Tuesday, June 23, noon: Wahoo! Rocky is mine! I love him, he's perfect, he's wonderful, he feels like riding an octopus on roller skates and can't turn right with a gun to his head, but he's a genius and I love him and I can't wait to get him home. So I call a couple of transport companies, and because it's the off season, only one of them has a truck going up 95 with any regularity, but they assure me that he'll get on the van by the end of the week. They'll call me when they know when.

Wednesday: (crickets.)

Thursday: (chirp, chirp.)

Friday: (you got it.)