Nice drawing, Deb. I dabbled a little with that technique in college (pen and ink) but I haven't done any real drawing in decades.
The minis just spent 10 days at the local fair. Latte was glad to have her little neigh-bors come back home. It's a good thing I hadn't entered Latte and Sunny - the Livestock Superintendent sure didn't need dozens of people asking, "what in the world happened to that one?!!" But the scabs are coming off, the hair will be growing back in soon; hopefully Latte won't feel inspired to do that again.
One morning, while the fair was closed to visitors, I took the minis out one at a time and long-lined them. Since I hadn't done anything like that with them in about 8 months, I wasn't sure what to expect. Blondie was really good; we even did a little "pole bending" through some traffic cones in the parking lot. I never actually got behind Betsy; she was really insecure about being so far from her buddies in a strange place. The best I could get from her was walking beside her (nice thing about them being so small; you can reach over their backs for the right rein). A 15-year-old mule is going to be a bit set in her ways, I reckon; she did relax a bit after a while and worked fairly well on the midway. Syd needed to do some lunging before she was ready to stop playing up and start listening, but then she went along nicely. She has always been really spooked by things that flap, so I made a point of working her around near the Pig Racetrack (which has a bunch of checkered flag pennants). She was plenty jittery, but she kept to a walk; all in all, I think it went pretty well. I just wish I had thought to do it several times while they were there.
