No, I will never do that again...

Finally the time is here for us to host a Western show. Since there are three reining divisions in Western, the shows are run continuously so that riders can get enough points. Otherwise the show would take two days to complete. The same riders may ride but new horses are drawn and a new judge is brought in for the second show. These shows tend to run pretty smoothly and quickly with no major quarrels, but leave it to me to mess it up! I typically do not ride Western on a regular basis, nor have I had very many Western horsemanship lessons so usually I ride in these shows for fun rather than as a competition, even though everybody knows it’s more fun to win! So when I drew the horse that was tending to be on the excited side I just tried my best to have fun and keep the horse from passing every other western pleasure horse in the ring more than twice. Apparently the judge liked what he saw because after we lined up he called my name for first! Now I didn't really believe it and as you can imagine I was quite excited but there was something strange about the way they called my name...it seemed as though they didn't know what my number was. But I didn't really think much of it, I just collected my ribbon and headed up into the office where I had been working before my ride. Well by the time I got there, there was quite a commotion! It turns out I had the wrong back number on! How did I manage that you ask? Well easier than you might think...last year one of my teammates had forgotten her number so I let her write her number on the back of mine so she could still show. Well I guess I needed to put a big X through it because I asked a friend to pin my number on and did not think about the 50-50 chance that they would pick the wrong number! After much debate and a quick call to the national steward (Yes they called the NATIONAL Steward!!!) I was disqualified from the class because my number did not match my name. Thank goodness I wasn't a point rider otherwise I would have felt terribly bad for my mistake! So they called everyone back from my class and moved every rider up one ribbon and I was bumped out. Yes, I have to say that it wasn't fun to give up my blue ribbon but I knew that if I did it once I could do it again. So my word of advice to you is...make sure that you have a friend do a quick once over on you before you go into the show ring just in case you "pull a Sara" and wear the wrong number!!
Keep riding and keep reading!! Thanks! Talk to you soon.