I think setting reasonable goals for yourself is vastly important, so I believe I'll set a few right now.

1- Aid proper walk-canter transitions.
2- Aid proper canter-walk transitions.
3- Aid proper leg yields.
4- Aid proper quarter-turns/quarter-pirouettes.

So, four reasonable goals for myself, but still challenging. The most challenging, with my mare, will be the canter-walk, for sure.

Good luck to me!

So, I've co-owned her for just over a month now, and steadily I'm improving. I finally figured out her canter, which became pretty mandatory after she bucked me off because of a too strong canter aid.

So basically, the correct aid for canter for her is to not ask for canter. So fun! But, my progress with her has been great, considering she's only six, and definitely the hardest horse I've ever been on.

Now if only she'd leg yield properly with my aids!

A friend of mine in Florida is looking for a horse. She wants a young, possibly green, Warmblood or Thoroughbred for under $5,000 that she can train up and turn around and sell, to make a profit.

The problem is, in Florida, she can't seem to find a horse that suits her. Most of the horses she's seen are Quarter Horses or other western-style horses. So, we got on the topic of importing, as I showed her a few links to ads of horses up here in Ontario. She liked a few of them, but we both knew that with her $5,000 (USD) budget, there was no way she could pay for the horse, the importing fee, and the trailering.

So I was supremely interested to find out how much it would cost to import a horse from Canada to the US? And, would it be such a huge deal to ask the seller to pay the importing fees?

There was a horse in Maryland that she liked, however she would have gone overbudget. The trailering from Maryland to Florida was $2,000 USD.

Oh the woes of horse shopping!