WHEW, SUMMER is definitely here at Promise Ranch and as you can imagine, June is really HOT and humid with monsoon season on the horizon, so it’s a great time to look back and then regroup and make plans for our activities this Fall and the upcoming ride season.
In the summer, we try to stay cool so we do our work around the ranch in stages and jump in and out of the pool in between, so when Lori and I are working with Masquerade, Diamond, Sandman, and our rescue pup Shadow (who is now in training), the routine is fun and simple.
With the temps at our higher elevation in the low 80’s in the early morning with a nice breeze, we do our horse chores in the morning and ride some as well (working on the basics in the arena) and every three days, the horses all do 8 miles in the walker, and I do a training ride each week, then at night, we wash the horses down and they either roll and chase each other around the arena or they stand in front of their fans and drip dry
Diamond has a full body clip for the summer and with her IR she’s on a diet that is pretty well controlled so she can stay cool while Masquerade has just a trace clip.
Masquerade is still our best boy and handsome and regal even having been diagnosed with Cushing’s in 2017, his medical condition is well managed and he has lots of energy and does his walker workout and a few miles on the local trails as well.
For those who are following Sandman and I and our rides and training, as you may remember, we took a step back last year, to learn or relearn some important skills and after a few steps forward and backward, his report card was straight A’s with one B and one remaining C, in general he did very well this past year and we had some great rides ALL of which he completed and he even had a few Top 10’s. and some fun night rides as well.
Along the way, he has matured and is calmer and more relaxed and of the eight “skills” that I wanted to work on with him last year, he has mastered all but one and with this in mind, my plan this summer and in the fall is to reinforce our learning from last year with more of the basics and practice over and over again, the pretraining routine for which bleeds over into our training rides and makes the start of those rides calmer and more matter of fact.
From a professional and personal standpoint, I’m resigning as the Director of the Center for American Civics at Arizona State University and I’ll just remain as the Senior Fellow for Civics. I started with the Center in 2019 when it was in start up mode and I brought in the training staff and the K-12 programs for teacher training and student learning and the related donor funding to get those programs off the ground and now we are teaching Civics all across Arizona and nationally as well.
After merging Joe Foss with ASU, I had only planned to stay a year which then turned into five years, but now it’s time to transition my work to someone who can take the baton and run some more and take it even further than we’ve come thus far.
The good news is that this transition will leave me with more time and fewer if any administrative responsibilities, which will in turn, allow me to focus more on taking care of Promise Ranch, managing a blog I started on my website and our non profit projects that Lori and I are passionate about and last and very importantly, I’m gonna try to take it up another notch with Sandman and work on some of the bigger goals we have for our riding in the next 13 months. One of those is to host or attend an advanced hoof trimming workshop with Ida Hammer and do a hundred mile ride or two, gotta work on it
These are some photos of a normal day in the summer at Promise Ranch. Lori and I are having a lot of fun and hope to see all of you this summer or fall around town or on the trails or here on Facebook, hope you all have a good summer. Enjoy the ride, we only get one, so we gotta make it a good one.
