Nobody is to do the Stick and Bucket Dance

The First of May, the First of May,
It is too cold and rainy for the rest of this doggerel to be applicable.

Here, have other verse instead.

The usual post-dressage report: Cappi was in a fantastically cooperative mood last night. I can't get him on the bit consistently, but then I can't do that with any horse, so the pleasure comes from having him successfully do different speeds within a single gait, bend and leg-yield, transition up and down between gaits, ignore spooky things, and stand still without falling asleep. I still can't believe that this is the progress of less than a year, most of it from the last four months; I'm thisclose to filling my wallet with Cappi photos and showing them to people on the Metro out of sheer glee. Pat wants to see about getting him out of his curbed pelham and into a lighter bit; she thinks that he's been allowed to be too forward in jump classes, because it is exciting to have a zippy young horse who loves to fling himself at the poles, but nobody taught him how to be fast and controlled. Now that he's responding to subtler cues and not misbehaving whenever he's confused or thinks he's not going to like whatever is about to be asked, we might be able to switch him into softer gear. Or I might just get a few sessions of pulse-pounding terror out of it—that'd be fun too.