Bedtime Reading

I get so many horse catalogs and mailers it is hard to keep up with them. We order a lot of supplies for the farm so it is no wonder that we seem to be on just about every horse related mailing list. We order so much stuff that we even get a Christmas present from Valley Vet every year.

Most of them I don't even look at, they just go straight in the recycle bin. However I always keep a current copy of the Dover catalog, the Bit of Britain catalog and the SmartPak catalog on my bedside table. Dover and Bit of Britain have such great collections of tack and and horse stuff I can happily flip through them for hours. They will sit on my bedside table completely untouched for weeks at a time. Then I feel the need to reacquaint myself with everything in their covers and they become my bedtime reading for awhile. Happiness is falling asleep with the Bit of Britain catalog on your face. I can spend hours looking at page after page of bits, girths, breeches, polo wraps, supplements, bridles and of course my all time favorite, blankets. Jason cringes when I go through periods where my bedtime reading is a tack catalog since it is inevitable that I will find *something* that I need. He often tries to make helpful suggestions of books he is reading and all but shoves my Nook in my face and begs me to download some new books.

I've collected more (far more) than my share of tack over the years. I've been riding and showing for a long time and I've had a lot of horses of various sizes. I've also kept my horses at home for years which makes it quite inconvenient to borrow things if you want to try them. Hence my obscene bit collection. Every time I needed (wanted??) to try a bit I bought it. Most of them wind up hanging on the harness hooks in my tack room to live out their days in each other's company, collecting layer upon layer of dust after being used a couple of times. The less fortunate bits find themselves buried deep in the recesses of a tack trunk that I haven't even opened in a few years.

My latest fascination is saddle pads. There are so many types of saddle pads and when I look through my catalogs I find myself feeling the need to try them all. Who doesn't need a Back on Track pad, a Thinline pad, an Ecogold pad and a Mattese pad (I will confess to owning more than one pad in that short list . . . )?

The one thing Jason should be eternally grateful for is that I really hate saddle shopping. I find saddle shopping to be more painful than swimsuit shopping - no joke! Trying to find a saddle that fits both rider and horse usually feels like an exercise in torture to me. Even having a huge budget and trying to go the custom route doesn't always make saddle shopping easy if your horse has a hard to fit back. Of course I don't like horse shopping either (I love buying horses, just not shopping for them). Really Jason, now that I put all of this down in writing it could be worse, I don't like shopping for saddles OR horses.

So tell me your favorite horse catalogs. Maybe I can find some new catalogs to add to my bedtime reading collection.

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Fabrizzio, Noble and Walden on the run

Calimba and Cinnamon

Darby and B-Rad

Faune, George, Winston, Fonzi, Silver, Chimano

Baby, Homer, Thomas, Tony

Ivan, Trigger and Grand

Moe and Apollo