At Dawn

So, I lived up to my blog's name Thursday. Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve morning, actually.
My alarm went off at 5:30.
I left the house by 6:15.
I arrived at the barn some 7-9 minutes later.
I got to drive the truck. That was fun. :-) It was cold and wet and rainy and very very windy. It was pretty much the front end of the storm that brought the sleet and eventually snow through Tulsa.
It was before the sun came up. Actually, the sun didn't really come up until a few moments before I left the barn at 7:30.
Why would I wake up at 5:30 am on Christmas Eve to get out in that horrid weather by myself in the dark, you ask? [Or maybe not. Maybe I'm just hoping. Or maybe you're a person of average intelligence that has read some of my blog before, or you know me, and you already surmised my reasoning.]
I went to ride my beast. I had just gotten into a good habit of riding at least 5-6 days a week, and I didn't want to lose too many days when I went to Missouri for Christmas. And we had to leave the house before noon [so we wouldn't get stuck in Tulsa with all this LOVELY weather! (/sarcasm)]. I also wanted to get it over with before the temperature dropped. It was supposed to drop from low 40's to low 30's and below at 7:00. But I think it waited until 8:00. Which was just as well, because I spent 30 minutes longer than I meant to at the barn since I didn't get to the barn right at 6, as I had planned.

So, there I was, out in the dark at the barn with the wind howling. I jumped Koda in the indoor. Obviously, we had to go to the indoor so that we wouldn't get soaked through in the awful rain. He was a brat at first, mainly because [okay, this is a guess here. but I'd like to think that I know my horse well enough to say this] the weather was freaking him out when it made the doors creak on their hinges and the rain pound against the roof and walls. I was a little creeped by it too, just because it was dark out, but I locked us into the indoor and once we started trotting I was much more comfortable with the whole alone-in-the-beginning-of-a-storm-in-a-metal-structure-in-the-dark scenario.
Well, it wasn't completely dark. There were lights inside. But outside it was still dark, so you get my drift.

Anyway... we jumped. A lot. It was fun. :-) Once he got his manners back. We jumped pretty high too. About 3'2. Though the third time I had to get off to put the pole back up I remembered why I usually don't jump that high without Kim. But we got it. He was good about it. We did lots of tight turns with three jumps set up in the indoor. :)
And so, add in 4 hours of travel, several hours of watching REAL TV channels [not just the basic channels we have at home], and insisting to my Grandpa Pat several times that no, I wasn't freezing without socks on and that in fact, I was a bit warm all over, and there was my entire Christmas Eve.