December 2005
Naming is fun. My English friend informs me that in GB, the chain of command is Prime Minister, Deputy Minister, then Chancellor. Miraculously, the JC says that “Chancellor” is not taken. I love one word names, so I grab it. Chancellor. By Deputy Minister out of Cozzene’s Angel. It has a nice ring.

November 2005
We decide to keep our Deputy Minister colt. Encouraged by our friends, we syndicate him in less than a week. Everyone is excited. Richard Mandella has agreed to train him, so we will send him to Florida with the other Mandella yearlings to get started.

11/22/05
The WTBA just e-mailed me an interesting list. They took the top performing yearlings from each sale and analyzed how they did versus how they sold. In the winter sale since 1966, the yearlings sold for a total of $282,900 and earned a total of $9,038,856. The summer sale horses since 1971 sold for a total of $2,883,700 and earned a staggering $22,673,086! Personally, I think those are amazing statistics! We can be proud of our Washington horses.

11/12/05
Back from Keeneland. The sale was tough this year if you were a buyer. I say that every time I go, but it was very hard to find the kind of mare that is good enough for our local market without pricing myself right out of it. Fortunately, I was able to purchase a nice mare for Tribunal. She is by Rahy and is the dam of a multiple G3 winner of $267,990, and from the good Washington family of Miss Cenyak. I had to take a mare one year older that I would have in the past, but I am very pleased with her otherwise.

10/28/05
It is the night before the Breeders’ Cup, and like all breeders, I am dreaming of a homebred running in it someday. I am thrilled that Greg Gilcrest, trainer of Lost In The Fog, chose to wear one of our Griffin Place hats in his interview on TVG. I wish him luck. That’s as close as we’ve been so far, but I still dream of having one of our horses compete. Well, as long as I’m dreaming, let’s make that a win! I think that is what this sport is all about. It is the dream. Tomorrow, after the coverage on TV, reality will set in and I will go out and record the markings on our weanlings for their Jockey Club Registration papers. But tomorrow, they won’t be just weanlings, they will all be future winners of the Sprint, the Turf, the Juvenile, the Classic…………

10/27/05
Chancellor. We are told that in the chain of command in the UK, there is the Prime Minister, the Deputy Minister and then the Chancellor. In the USA, a Chancellor is a high ranking official in academia. Either way, we thought it would be a nice name for our Deputy Minister colt. When he failed to meet his reserve at Keeneland, we thought it might be fun to put together a syndicate and run him. So we did. We have a group of very enthusiastic people in our syndicate and we are all excited about a chance at the “big time”. It is a great group of people, and win or loose, we will all have a good time. Currently the colt is at a training center in Florida, learning how to be a racehorse and until he proves otherwise, he is “any kind of horse”. Isn’t this a fun game?

10/20/05
Kindergarten begins. We started with the fillies this year, hatefull things that they are. Don’t get me wrong, I really like them, but they were drama queens, and they made our lives difficult. They settled down after a few days though, and we forgive them. Right now they are learning how to be by themselves in a stall, walk in and out to the field, to be groomed, to wear a sheet, to take a bath, to wear a bit, to load in the trailer, and whatever else we can think of. After about two weeks, we will give them a trailer ride to the other side of the farm for their graduation present where they will be turned out and be free to play until late next spring.

9/8/05
We just concluded the most successful yearling sale we have ever had. We were the leading consignor by average and we had the sale topper. We would like to thank the buyers, our friends who consigned with us, and our great crew.

Updated: 8/16/2008