it's the last days of Saturn in Scorpio, my sun. It's dredging up every bad memory in order to purify and heal them.
This morning it pulled up two memories from before I got Dahli. First, when I first moved up here and had Algiers with a companion goat. Before I was broke I was looking at young hanoverians and planning a trip to the Virginia area for a shopping trip. A distressed breeder was offering a nice, unbroke young mare at a good project price. I made the mistake of discussing my trip arrangements on a horse site, including with the sire's owner. Who got the breeder to send the mare to her farm for training and re-sale at the last minute. I got a snotty email from him about how she was going to go on the market at a much, much higher price in the near future. That one, at least, I could laugh at since I had an idea of the costs of training board in that area and knew he'd end up taking a major loss instead of selling her to me at a small profit. There was another mare I was interested in at the mid-atlantic sale, plus a youngster at a big breeder's farm, so my trip was still on. The big breeder bought the sales mare ahead of the sale, and then doubled her price. And would only show me a gelding who'd had surgery on both hocks. My trip was off.
A couple years later, and any chance at a warmblood was now well out of reach, but I'd also decided that was not going to work for me anyway, given what had taken place not only in my life, but in the market overall. So I decided to go back to my t-bred roots.
A bunch of cyber (and a couple local) horse friends and I were each looking at rescuing an ottb from Fingerlakes. We shared our picks and made group transport arrangements. They were all going for the taller, lankier and generally butt-high types that seem to dominate. I found an unraced young mare with excellent conformation -- the type I learned dressage on back in the 60s and early 70s. Good balance, strength across the loins, nothing stood out in particular. Just very correct. She was 15.2 and stockier than typical American t-breds, more like you'll find from S. America or Europe.
We all contacted their owners. And somehow, a trainer at the track got wind of mine and whisked her right out from under me...and then put her right back up for sale at double the price. Nobody else had anything like that done to them. Just me.
And I sat back and watched while they all bought their horses, finalized their transportation, and brought them home. Everybody but me.
Anyway, while I was having those memories this morning, the shipper was emailing me. We'll see if the weather holds...it didn't do me any favors last year.
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