4 Minutes

We started our second 2 minute set of trotting yesterday! 4 minutes total per ride, plus the 30 minutes of walking. Per the vet, we're doing 10 minutes of walking, 2 minutes trotting x 2, then 14 minutes walking to finish.

I aced Lily with 2.6 mls. We finally broke the 3 ml mark! She behaved beautifully, and we had an audience too-Heather was riding Nate and a friend of hers was visiting; one of our leasers was tacking up her horse by the arena, and BQ was hand-grazing Ramsey on the grass by the outdoor.

Lily felt fab. BQ, who has as good an eye for lameness as any vet, actually made a comment about how sound Lily looks! *knock on wood*

Lily seemed confused about the second trot set, and tried to break to a walk a couple of times. "No, we really are trotting." I said. She's gotten into the habit of divebombing her head to rip the reins out of my hands towards the end of the 2 minutes, in anticipation of stretching afterwards, so I've been incorporating stretching into the last 4 minutes of the walk before dismounting. Yesterday was the first time she didn't try to divebomb.

Afterwards, she got a bath before it started to pour. She'd been sweaty in her stall despite the fan, but she was comfortable because she is sweating!

Wet mare

Today when I arrived at the barn, Miss Mare nickered when she saw me!

Happy Lily

She received a million treats for that. :) And she was a good girl for her injection. Only 2.4 mls of ace today. We started out in the outdoor for our initial walks and 2 trot sets, and then I maneuvered her so I could open the arena door from her back (it took a couple of attempts before she understood that I really did want her to line up with the gate)...I then took her over to Nate's paddock next to the outdoor arena, which involved opening another gate, where we did our last 10 minutes of walking.

Nate's paddock is the largest of the semi-private turnouts. It looks huuuuuge in this photo!

It was a nice laid-back ride.

On another note, Charles switched jobs. He is officially a Maryland nurse, not a travel nurse anymore. I think I've mentioned before that he is a pediatric RN. Up until now, most of his experience has been in what is called step-down peds, which is non-ICU hospitalized cases. The monitoring isn't *quite* as intense at is in the pediatric ICU, but when working at Level I Trauma hospitals even step-down patients can still be quite serious and majorly involved.

Since graduating from nursing school, Charles wanted to work in ER. He finally got it at the new hospital. This hospital is a Level III Trauma, which basically means that anything super complicated gets stabilized, then sent to a Trauma I facility (if you watch Grey's Anatomy, you saw the episode where they were concerned about losing their Trauma I status. This is why it's a big deal.) Charles was hired for the pediatric ER, but when that department is slow, the nurses are expected to help out in the adult ER department. What this hospital doesn't have in big trauma cases, it makes up for in psychiatric, stroke and heart attack victims. Because of this, it is considered the second-busiest ER in the state.

He's still supposed to be in training, but to say that he has simply been thrown in is kind of an understatement.

He worked Sunday night, and this was his conversation with one of the patients:
Charles: Sir, do you know where you are?
Patient: Hospital!
Charles: Do you know which hospital?
Patient: Hospital! All hospitals are the same!
Charles: Do you know what year it is?
Patient: 19....1964!
Charles: Do you know who is the president?
Patient: Obama!

His legs ached when he got home this morning. Welcome to Sundays on ER, Charles! :)