What Are You Going to Do?

Saturday morning, I headed out to the ranch for my weekly virtual lesson with Sean Cunningham, owner and trainer at STC Dressage. This time, my phone was firmly placed in my pocket. If you'll remember, I forgot it last Saturday and had to drive all the way back home to get it. This weekend, I was P-r-e-p-a-r-e-d. I also had a new  cooling device to combat the over-heating that's been going on during the meet. The night before, I unwrapped it, read the directions, and plugged it in. It seems to work really well.

​When I got to the ranch and hooked everything up, I discovered one itty-bitty problem. With the cooling device attached to the back of my phone - it's magnetic and only sticks in that one particular spot, there is not enough phone sticking out to slide into the bracket of the Pivo. For the lesson, I jammed my phone into the gap which dislodged the cooling fan a bit but it was mostly working.

Except for one thing ...

I started the meet, but almost immediately Sean asked about the jerking motion he was seeing. I hopped off and saw that one of the cables was caught which was not allowing Pivo to spin smoothly. I fixed that and got back on. Within a few minutes, Sean complained of a serious lag in audio followed by a lag in video. These are complaints I am quite familiar with as I am still teaching virtually. I told him it was his internet connection, so he hung up and switched hotspots. 

That seemed to work for a moment, but then he experienced the same lag in audio and video as he had before. I next suggested that he join the meet with just his phone. That too yielded good results, for about two minutes. Eventually, the quality of the audio and video were so poor that he couldn't hear or see me. Ultimately, we had to call the whole thing off as there wasn't any way to communicate.

A possible fix.

I finished the ride on my own, which by that point was heading south as Izzy isn't a fan of me getting on and off over and over. Every time I get off to check Pivo, he's certain he's done, so by the third time, he usually runs out of patience. He did what was asked though, and since it was hot, we finished earlier than usual.

Once Izzy was cooled off and grazing on the lawn, I texted Sean a few technology suggestions. One being that he head to Starbucks the next morning to use their WiFi while he coached me at a show. He sheepishly texted back - or at least it sounded sheepish, that he had probably blown through so much of his data while he was watching sales videos of European horses. I hope it's not a secret, but he's off to Europe in a few weeks to have a look. 

If my lesson is going to be cut short, sales videos of European horses is a very acceptable reason.