A Look Into Competitive Horse Showing Through The Eyes Of An Equestrian: Post One of Three: Potbelly's for Ponies and the PET Halloween Party

This week, since so much happened last week I will be doing three blog posts in order to recap everything that we did as a team last week. The first post is dedicated to our Potbelly's for Ponies fundraiser that we had last Thursday and our Halloween party that we had on Friday.

The Potbelly's fundraiser was a skip a meal that was held last Thursday from 5:00-8:00pm at Potbelly's Sandwich Shop on Chauncey near campus. We received a certain amount of the total proceeds made during those hours. We don't have a total for how much we made yet but we were informed that one of the team members invited a professor who came and donated $150 to the team! There was a fairly steady flow of people over the course of the three hours. I was there for about two of the three hours. It was good to see so many people coming out to support the team.

The Halloween party was held Friday night at Alex Clarisse's house. It was an opportunity for us to get together as a team, dress up and have a good time together before the first horse show weekend. It was a food potluck sort of thing so I made my special cookies that everyone loves that I call "Tacodoodles." they are snickerdoodles with Hershey kisses pressed on top named after one of my friends who is allergic to nuts. I was known for making peanut butter blossom cookies but since he was allergic I created a new cookie that was similar to those but didn't contain nuts. His tuba nickname is Taco, hence the name "Tacodoodles." They were a hit with the team as usual and I set some aside to take to my fellow Boiler Brass tuba players at rehearsal last night which they enjoyed. We also played games like three legged races and the bigs and littles were encouraged to do costumes that go together. Everyone else on the team has one little but I have two so we dressed up as ketchup, mustard, and relish. There was a wide variety of costumes that people chose. A few people were characters from Wizard of Oz, some people dressed as animals, and the list goes on. There was supposed to be a costume contest but we didn't get around to that before people started to leave. Most of us had to call it an early night because we had to be up for the horse show at approximately 4:30am on Saturday. I left the party around 8:30 and that's when most people started to head out. We had a great time bonding and I got to officially meet some of the new members who aren't in my lesson group so I hadn't had a chance to meet yet. These team parties as well as the horse shows are great ways for us to come together as a team and have some fun bonding with one another.

The next post will probably come out tomorrow and will cover Saturday's horse show.