The first post, a little bit about us!

Hello there, and thanks for stopping by! I'd like to warmly welcome you to my blog- grab a wine, water or hot beverage of your choice and please take a look around. I love hearing from you, so if there's a post you like (or even don't like) it would make my day if you dropped a line underneath. Seriously, even if you don't like what I'm saying then I'd love to hear it. Freedom of speech is alive and well here in New Zealand, yeaya!

I'd better introduce you to my blog, myself and my horse. He gets a lot of air time on here and, if we're being picky, in general actually. My five closest friends are possibly too familiar with the life of Oscar.

So- Oscar, my fuzzy bear cub and apple of my eye, is an eleven year old Cleveland Bay who introduced me to the wonderful world of Pony Club and eventing. After moving to the other side of the world at seventeen years old, this little five year old, freshly broken gelding became my best friend pretty quickly. I also met my real life best friend, M, at Pony Club so thanks Oscar - I kind of feel like this was a package deal, buy one get one free or something... 

We quickly discovered that our favourite things ever were cross country (Oscar), dressage (Christle) and eating (Oscar)! Show jumping was not our favourite thing ever... But we're working on that, we have to since they insist on including it in eventing - #thestruggleisreal!

We managed to get to NZ Training level eventing - which has since been renamed as CNC90 - when sometime towards the end of 2009, I undertook a farrier apprenticeship. From the age of fifteen I developed a mad, crazy foot hoof fetish! Not in a 'I want to lick Nutella off of your hooves' kinda way because that thought is absolutely horrific, but I wanted to get my hands on every hoof and make all of the horseshoes! Farriery is incredibly exhausting physical work and because of this, my eventing hopes with Oscar took a back seat.

Through my farrier apprenticeship I met my other best friend forever, L, who is also a farrier. I moved from Auckland to join him in the open pastures of the Manawatu and now we are settled, Oscar and I are ready to pick up where we left off.

We are both a little softer after a long, long sabbatical. I seem to have left my confidence back in Auckland whilst Oscar is a little squishy around the waistline to say the least! However, we're excited to get back to where we were at a few years ago, and hopefully tick off the goal of eventing at pre-novice/CNC105!

So, come along for the ride as Oscar tones up, I go hunting for my confidence and we both get back into the swing of amateur eventing down under!

Pssst .. that's the country down under that has all the sheep!