Carrot Stick Riding

Played with Gizmo a little before riding and he got straddling the pole almost instantly. We did it on a small pole first because I haven't done it in a while, then we progressed to the telephone pole size log. Got it, we moved on to figure eight. Online first, then I took off the lead rope to see what I had. He have me 3 revolutions at the trot at liberty. Not bad, huh? Very proud of that. Our liberty really doesn't exist because I have no round pen. Sometimes I play with it in the pasture. His sideways with speed along a fence would have probably made Pat Parelli fuss me. We rode with carrot stick today because I don't do enough of it. I'm always doing the pattern follow the rail and million transitions. It seems to me that I do that an awful lot and we still don't have it, ha! Gizmo was introverted today. It is funny to me how he changes. We did indirect turns that led to direct turns. He did very nice but very slow. He went into the canter from the trot, but I asked for it while we were walking. More practice on that! Lately I've been asking him to lope for longer periods, like one full lap around the arena, today we went one and a half and I cut through the middle and kept him in the smaller circle. He didn't have any problems with it. He didn't turn with my body today like I thought. I had to go to the phase 4 of the carrot stick almost everytime. I'm figuring he was so introverted today because I saw him and Can Do in the pasture for about 30 min playing dominance games. They were doing a lot of cutting up and running. He was probably whooped from that. Who knows!