man, what a show! This was a pretty small one for an A show. It was in Cleveland, TN, and who knows where that is anyways??? The showgrounds were brand new and jumperland was in the covered arena. Which was great. So I did the 3'3" this time and that was barrels of fun, except one time I forgot to wait for the buzzer to start and got disqualified! So Harrison added me to a level three class, which is 3'6", and THAT was even MORE fun, except we had two rails down and eight time faults. Oops. By then, Matthew'd already done about 36 fences in three trips, though, so he was tired. And I was too, man. That is hard shit. You're not even thinking about breathing or anything, because you have to think about turning or how much of an angle to slice the next fence at, or lifting or collecting or pushing or whoahing or how many strides you should be getting in the combinations. Hard shit. None of that pussy hunter inside-outside crap. And you know what? I don't care. I am in love with jumpers and would only go back to hunters if I had to rack me up some points. Atleast in jumpers, everyone's on an even plane. If you suck, you suck; your horse can't bail you out of it here. So on day one I won my first trip, second in second trip, missed buzzer on power/speed (oops) and got second in the 3'6" trip. Hooray. Today was even better cause I was riding better except I was almost late because I was slow in getting dressed. My first trip was a bit slow but we ended up third anyways. There were some major rollbacks to combinations in that course, to the left, and that's the side Matthew locks his jaw on--but he was turning on a dime today! I was so proud. I was just a bit slow eep. And then the second course I was third too because i had four faults in the power part. sucks. you know why? Because his tail hit it. Yeah. Whatever. They had this HUGE horse there named Scooby, he was this 18 hand warmblood/draft x from germany that I basically coveted the entire show. Ughhhh he was so beautiful. And they had this tiny tiny tiny yearling miniature horse named Roo, and he was just the most precious thing on four legs ever. Oh yeah and I got to see some AMAZING riding from this one girl who was on a really small, ugly horse (I mean UGLY) and she was like flying. It was beautiful to watch. As soon as his feet touched ground he was turning and running again. (She won the $2000 stakes, of COURSE.) All in all, a great show man. My Matthew was the best of them all. I love him so much. Also i have two good rants for my friend and favorite Wronski--on patronization and--damn it, what was the other one? --- JUST remembered. About people bugging you about national identity.