Just got back from judging the Welsh and the Riding Ponies at Toowoomba Royal. What a dream job for a breeder of both!
My Champion Welsh A was a dreamy little filly, Bordershow Dandelion. I really could have packed her up and taken her home. Pity I dont breed A’s! My Champion B was a pretty, big moving mare, Woranora Serena. C & D were light on the ground, and my Supreme went to the Welsh A – Dandelion. I was thoroughly impressed with the quality at the top of the line in both sections.
The Part-Welsh was a pleasure to judge. When I had my championship line up – I really had a hard decision. I liked them all! My champion was a beautiful filly – Kolbeach Chantilly.
The riddens were once again light on the ground for the Welsh section. Champion ridden just had to go to my champion B mare – Woranora Serena.
Champion Part-Welsh ridden, I awarded to a very light moving elegant mare, Wesswood Vixen.

Next day onto the Riding Ponies. I must say what an absolute snapping line up in QLD. The taller the ponies got – the stronger the classes got! By the time I got to the 13.2 – 14.2 inhand class – I almost could have given out a first to the entire line up. Very impressive. I’m so glad I dont show a big pony in QLD. They are sensational.
My Supreme in-hand went to a beautiful type of Riding pony mare – Bradyvale French Kiss. What a mare!
The saddle classes were also lovely to judge. I was really impressed with three ponies for the day. First was the First Ridden pony – Mondiso Park Jerrylee. This pony gave his little rider the most beautiful soft, careful ride of the day. A pleasure to watch.
Champion Newcomer – wow – is this pony going to go places – Beckworth Swansong. Keep an eye out for this pony, everything a riding pony should be.
Supreme Ridden was judged by myself and Annie Coxon. We didn’t have to chat about our decision, we both agreed with the beautiful Holly’s Work of Art.

I must thank all competitors for their sportsmanship. Especially the children. Not one primadonna amongst them. They are truly a credit and you were all a pleasure to judge. Thanks!

Well thats it for another show season for us. I certainly didn’t stress myself out by going to too many shows this season. If fact, I’m a bit ashamed of the lack of showing I did.

Thanks to Daniel Harvey for showing our colt, Keyi Havana this season for us in NSW. Daniel as usual did a fantastic job. Also thanks to Daniel for sending us his beautiful hack (well he did try to tell me she was a galloway!) Atheena Rose. As well as being beautiful, Rose has the most wonderful nature. This is her first show season under saddle and she handled it all to perfection. Topping off her limited outings, she made Top 10 in the Newcomer Hacks at Barastoc HOTYS. We are hoping Daniel wont be too quick in taking her home!

Lonely Oak Lothlorian (Little Boy) has gone off for a holiday at the Dennisons. Holly is a lovely little rider and she is having a ball on him. Robyn and I are just over the moon he is being campaigned by a child, Holly is only 11.

Five of the seven foals have been bought in to start all the handling. I’ll probably show two of them, not sure which ones yet, will keep you all posted!

I believe that it was way back in 2007 when I first unleashed the Lonely Oak website on to the World Wide Web. Now we are in 2010 and at the start of a new decade, I thought what better time to bring a major overhaul to the Lonely Oak website.

Why bother you ask? Well quite simply it was more out of necessity than anything. Sure the old Lonely Oak website I believe was laid out well enough but when it came to updating anything, it was quite the pain in the proverbial! Just the simple task of adding a new horse was so hard because I had to find my way through an alphabetical soup of code.

With the new site I have started from scratch using css and making sure each page conforms to W3C XHTML markup standards… for all you non-web techies this simply means that the source code behind each page is more cleaner, laid out according to css standards and much easier to follow when it comes to making changes to the site now and in the future. These changes will also make it possible (hopefully) for mum to make her own edits to the site!

The biggest change (well according to mum at least) is the addition of the guestbook. Ever since I first created the Lonely Oak website, mum has been nagging me about adding a guestbook. Why? simply because “all my friends have one”

Well mum, finally I have done it!

Nick

Well we’ve certainly had a filly streak this season. All mares so far have given us little girls. Two more to go, both in foal to Silkwood Chalkstream. Will probably give us colts!

Well, I’ve finally weaned the last two foals. One is Annie’s filly – Stanton Park Lavender Brown and the other filly is mine. She is a lovely little bay out of Imperial Lady Alexa. I can’t for the life of me get into the groove and name her! I just seem to have a mental blank, or am I just being lazy? LOL, probably lazy.
Anyway, both are in the box. They seem to have settled in fairly well and eating everything I give them. I dont have halters on yet – waiting for the next door neighbour to come over and give me a hand. Actually at the rate they are going, I’ll be able to get them on by myself in a day or two.
Now, for another inch or so of rain!
And to sell a few!

Finally some rain. Not quite an inch! Wooohooo, that should get the lucurne growing again.

Why do I always do it?
I was ‘playing around’ with some settings and I ended up completely locking myself out of the administration page for Lonely Oak’s blog site!
So I tried everyting that I could think of to restore the setting that I changed. But dispite many upon many attempts, I decided to bite the bullet and un-install the blog site on Lonely Oak and re-intall. This meant that all of the previous posts were deleted Luckily for me I was able to at least save my mother’s most recent post… only because I had that tab open in my web browser.
Oh well, everyting is back up and running as it should. And the moral of the story?… well at least for me anyway is: stop stuffing around with things that you don’t understand!

Nick

Had a really nice relaxing day today. Robyn and I took ourselves off the Bellarine Agi, taking Lonely Oak Lothlorian. Ok ok,,,Lothlorian. Read Lord of the Rings – its where the fairies live and hes a bit of a fairy.
Poor Little Boy as he is known has been ridden by myself for the last couple of weeks. I think he was so relieved to have Robyn back on his back, he won his saddle class and went Res Champ open ridden!
It will be interesting to see him next year with a bit more education under his belt. As with most of Chalkstreams stock, he is very easy to educate, they just seem to love being ridden.