I saw this special offer from Dana’s Doodles and wanted to share. Everyone at HorseGirlTV® are big fans of Dana’s art! Our HorseGirlTV® cartoon horse was designed by Dana actually!
Check out her SWEET Valentine offering for an adorable t-shirt or stall sign! Choose from hunter jumper, western, saddle seat, and cart horse designs. All t-shirts are just $10.
You can see more of Dana’s artwork online at http://www.danasdoodles.com.
It’s official. The USDF has ruled mandatory helmet rules for competitions. Some are against and many, especially since Courtney’s terribly unfortunate accident, are for it. This HorseGirl rides with a helmet and recommends students to do the same. Below are the rules that, as stated, will start at the top of March this year. So whether you like it or not, get ready to strap one on for safety!
Effective March 1, 2011, the following rules apply to Dressage Competitions and Regular Competitions holding Dressage classes:
1. Riders under age 18 must wear protective headgear, as defined by DR120.5 and in compliance with GR801, at all times while mounted on the competition grounds. This includes non-competing riders as well as those competing at any level.
2. While on horses competing in national level tests (Fourth Level and below), riders must wear protective headgear as defined by DR120.5 and in compliance with GR801, at all times while mounted on the competition grounds. This includes non-competing riders on horses competing in national level tests.
3. While on horses competing in USEF or FEI Young Horse Tests, and FEI Junior Tests, riders must wear protective headgear as defined by DR120.5 and in compliance with GR801, at all times while mounted on the competition grounds.
4. All riders competing in Para-Equestrian tests must wear protective headgear at all times while mounted on the competition grounds. Riders who compete in PE tests must wear protective headgear on every horse they ride, no matter the level or test.
5. All riders of any age while on non-competing horses must wear protective headgear at all times while mounted on the competition grounds.
6. All riders under age 18 and all riders while on horses competing in national level tests, who choose to wear Armed Services or police uniform, must wear protective headgear as defined in DR120.5 and in compliance with GR801 at all times while mounted on the competition grounds. Riders age 18 and over who wear Armed Services or police uniform on horses that are competing only in FEI levels and tests at the Prix St. Georges level and above must wear either protective headgear or the appropriate military/police cap or hat for their branch of service.
7. When a horse is competing in both national and FEI levels or tests (e.g. Fourth Level and PSG), the rider must wear protective headgear at all times when mounted on that horse on the competition grounds and during all tests.
8. While on horses that are competing only in FEI levels and tests at the Prix St. Georges level and above (including FEI Young Rider Tests, the USEF Developing Prix St. Georges Test and the USEF Brentina Cup Test), riders age 18 and over are not required to wear protective headgear in warm up or during competition. However, these riders may wear protective headgear without penalty from the judge.
9. In FEI-recognized (CDI, CDI-Y, CDI-J, CDI-P, etc.) classes, FEI rules take precedence and protective headgear is permitted but not required.
10. All riders while on horses competing in national level classes such as Equitation, Materiale and DSHB Under Saddle are required to wear protective headgear at all times when mounted on the competition grounds.
Protective headgear is defined as a riding helmet which meets or exceeds ASTM (American Society for Testing and Materials)/SEI (Safety Equipment Institute) standards for equestrian use and carries the SEI tag. The headgear and harness must be secured and properly fitted. Any rider violating this rule at any time must immediately be prohibited from further riding until such headgear is properly in place.
Recommendation to competitions:
In order to distinguish riders who are required to wear protective headgear from those who aren’t, it is suggested that entry numbers in a different sequence be assigned to the entries in each group (e.g. use numbers from 1-700 for entries where riders must wear protective headgear and use numbers from 800 and above for entries where riders are not required to use protective headgear).
Short summary statement for use in prize lists:
Effective March 1, 2011, for dressage: Anyone mounted on a horse must wear protective headgear except those riders age 18 and over while on horses that are competing only in FEI levels and tests at the Prix St. Georges level and above (including FEI Young Rider Tests, the USEF Developing Prix St. Georges Test and the USEF Brentina Cup Test).
Now it’s possible to be almost 100% vegan in your stable lifestyle. Step right up to the Dansko Vegan Pro! Famous for delivering a comfortable and supportive design, Dansko has gone one step (tehe) further with these 100% animal-free shoes. They are made entirely of vegan materials yet share the exact same construction and frame as the original us horse folks have grown to love around the yard, at competition and around town. These work with or without socks so you can sock your way right through winter and free-toe it in to your spring and summer months. A quick shopping search reveals they average $125 per pair.
Now this HorseGirl hasn’t personally tried them but if they are anything like the traditional Dansko clogs they’ll be an immediately perfect fit, support and style. My last pair of Dansko clogs “blew out” this past fall after 12 years. YES TWELVE YEARS of service both in and out of the dressage court it was time to retire them so perhaps it’s time to give these new Vegan Pros a try? Maybe the lovely folks at Dansko will send us a pair to test here at HorseGirlTV and possibly even give away a pair to our fans? Let’s just ask and find out!
If you happen to have a pair, I’d love to hear you comments. Please send any thru the HorseGirlTV Contact form online!
How is this blog post about horses or HorseGirlTV? It’s about lifestyle and a massive part of my life and daily lifestyle is with horses and HorseGirlTV here at the farm.
It’s a personal long term goal to reach sustainability. This is not to say a lifestyle looking to end of times, armageddon, type routine but starting with simple things that are not so hard and piece by piece transform a disposable life into a renewable one. Yes, this is a tall order in todays Walmart, flash in the pan, now and me generation, fad world but I don’t believe it an impossible task and while the end result might not look like Little House on the Prairie, it will hopefully appeal to future generations and look good to the Earth.
This is something we can all do and the end result doesn’t have to be living off the grid but just little shifts in our daily lives and the way we function can help. EVERYONE can do SOMETHING no matter how small it’s a shift for the future.
How it started at the studio of HorseGirlTV about 2 years ago was very simple. We bought some land with an old tobacco drying barn, a farm house, and quite literally TONS of clean up work…
STEP ONE: Clean up the trash. Some people in the country tend to follow the regard that burning all trash is ok and when you sell a home I found it also just ok to leave about 10 bags of it everywhere. Rather than hiring a trash service, we painstakingly went through the trash separating metals, plastic, paper and anything else we could recycle. It wasn’t a pretty job but about 30% of that stuff was recyclable, some of the paper was burnable and the rest was sadly land fill city. Again, rather than hiring a monthly trash service we found a local drop off location for trash AND recycling. It’s very near the farm, they are incredibly friendly and one 32 gallon trash can costs a mere $1.50. After the initial drop off of the Seller’s abandoned trash the goal was filling only one 32 gallon trash can per month and even without changing our manners of purchase and ways of eating that was SIMPLE!
STEP TWO: Recycle TONS of metal!.. There was an awesome John Deere hay baler abandoned, among many other things, on the property and after detailed inspection of it’s restoration potential it was decided that sadly it was not salvageable. Instead of it being landfill material, I found a local metal recycling company that would pick it up for free and they also dropped off a large container that we proceeded, over the next month, to fill with all the discarded pieces of metal that were abandoned here as well. We FILLED the container, it was free and the metal was recycled!
STEP THREE: Horse safety. While barbed wire is an romantic notion illustrating the taming of the West, it’s neither safe for human, horse or most other animals and with the entire property strung with barbed wire loosely attached to rotting poles, that was the next order of business. The poles that were salvageable were re-used for a variety of projects, some were used for campfire, some were given away for other peoples projects and all the barbed wired was painfully rolled and sold to the metal recycling center at market value (about 4 miles from the farm) when our next load of metal had been amassed. The perimeter fence was built with the bulk of the post holes dug and set by hand approximately 20 feet apart and strung with the best quality/lifespan of electrified rope and tape combo we could find on the market.
STEP FOUR: While this step did not have the best carbon footprint possible it was the easiest step and looking at the lifetime of the structure does cost out to be a benefit. The J&N Structures Amish Built Modular barn was brilliant. The craftsmanship incomparable, the setup was in 3 hours and the friends up in PA I made are such lovely, lovely people!
STEP FIVE: Again not part of the sustainability path but a necessity for a dressage stable is a dressage court & 20 meter lunging circle. These were installed by the wonderful folks at Attwood Equestrian Surfaces and created near all-weather training abilities! The drainage is definitely in line with a happier earth as we installed EZ Flow drainage by Infiltrator Systems. EZ Flow displaces a significant amount of rock which, in turn, doesn’t require large machines to install and is made from recycled products. The plus side is it works better than any drainage I’ve heard of!
These initial steps were to clean the property and establish it as a dressage facility. With these major projects all completed, the focus could now be on steps towards sustainability. Here are a few of the simple steps that we all can do that have been taken:
What does the future hold for these and more? The focus in Q1 is determining how to reduce. One of the easiest ways is to re-define eating habits and making purchases around less packaging, more fruits, vegis and grain (all of which the scraps can be fed to the chickens thus reducing the need for buying scratch). Less packaging equals less trash and less recycling. Bulk grains, bags of dried instead of cans of beans and vegetables that don’t come in frozen packages or packaging in general. Seriously how hard is it to clean your fresh vegis, chop and bag them yourself for freezer time at home and ask yourself when at the market, ‘Do I really need to have these apples in a plastic bag?’ because the answer is, you do not. Another focus is on buying local whenever possible. This means NEVER going to Walmart of course. 😉 Buying local isn’t easy in all places but you’re supporting your local economy and cutting down the carbon footprint.
I mentioned earlier the manure is ripe for use as fertilizer and this is not the case with all manure. If you’re using shavings you likely have a significant amount of it in your manure and this does not degrade easily. As I mentioned, we use http://equinepine.com/ pelleted bedding which in and of itself is a smart eco-choice. Equine Pine is shipped in 40 pound bags and 1 bag equals about 2 bags of shavings. Do the math?.. Smaller packaging, larger yield means compact shipments doing more and decreasing the carbon footprint for the transport. It’s brilliant for any size stable but for stables with limited storage space it’s ideal as you could store your entire years supply of bedding across 3 tall stacked pallets! Now back to manure… Since we use the Equine Pine and the Shake’n Fork cleaning tool we have little to no waste of bedding and therefore a very pure manure pile. This pile is adjacent to the future garden area and will be spread this winter and tilled in to begin it’s steps to becoming a spring/summer garden.
So the chickens are great and have a fabulous coop but that could be improved as well. With raccoons and fox common in the area it’s best to protect them so we’ll look to the future of a chicken tractor where they have plenty of free range space but simultaneously be protected from predators and can be moved around the property to scratch and peck for bugs, etc which coupled with them getting table scraps will almost eliminate the need to purchase outside grain.
From there the flat topped roof farm house can employ the use of solar panels to turn sun into energy and a long term goal of harnessing the amazing wind we have here near the coast will also turn the breeze into power. The farmhouse, circa mid 80s is drafty so it’s on the list to seal gaps with a no-voc caulk saving. The $ spend on the caulk will be returned in the savings in heating and cooling bills. Another item on the list is putting up low-emissivity films on the windows. This will also aid in heat and cool escaping through the glass.
This list could go on and on but essentially I’m putting together a list for 2011 and com-parting it out by quarters so what might seem like daunting tasks can be turned into realistic and fun weekend projects throughout the year.
So a very long story short. There is no Egg-cuse for not doing something to reduce, reuse, and recycle or to seek options of sustainability. Even if you’re in a college dorm or a loft in SoHo, you have options. While the end result doesn’t need to be my long term goal of getting off the grid, there’s the option to do something positive for the future of quality of life on the planet. Now how is this blog post about horses? It’s looking to the larger picture of quality of life that will trickle down into all aspects of our life including our outdoor lifestyle with horses. Do it for yourself, your horses and for future riders everywhere.
I’m always looking for suggestions. Please if you have one send feedback thru the HorseGirlTV Contact form online!
I’m often approached to try products and do enjoy the opportunity to test new and existing items on the market and I blog about many that are either innovative, practical or just plain kewl for the horse world. I was contacted this past year about trying some neat panties called SkiVvys and they are one – just plain cute, two – super comfy and three – a great panty for riding for a variety of reasons. I wanted to share them with you. HorseGirlTV® is giving away a pair of these neat panties via our Facebook page so just click here for the easy step to enter to WIN! Here’s some info about the SkiVvys!..
SkiVvys are “the prettiest protection you’ll ever wear” and brilliant for riders because as we all know breeches are some of the most unforgiving pants a woman will encounter. They are fairly tight and if you are a dressage rider, they are both tight and white! White or light colors are fine for three weeks out of the month, but for that one more difficult week, the white breeches cause a panic! Enter Vv SkiVvys! Vv SkiVvys are a soft, comfortable, thin, pretty, machine washable pair of protective panties developed by a rider and her sisters. The remarkable thing about Vv SkiVvys is the leak resistant leg openings. The panties are waterproof and leak resistant even in the most difficult of situations.
These panties will help you ride with confidence! You no longer have to plan horse shows or long training sessions around “that time of the month”! Panties feature a soft cotton outside with a wicking light fabric on the inside to keep you cool and dry. Vv SkiVvys are available in a sporty bikini and a vintage full coverage panty in the colors pink or tan. Some of our customers have called them the “Magic Pants”! Vv SkivVys are made in the USA. Vv SkiVvys are available online at www.VvskiVvys.com.