Ah, the weekends!

I almost forgot how gratifying weekends are. During my months of job-searching, I would spend hours a day searching for and applying to jobs from Monster.com, craigslist, Careerbuilder, etc etc and etc. That was my "job".

But still, I was on my own schedule, at home, and could take a break and go to the barn whenever I wanted. I rarely did much job searching on weekends because I wanted to spend more time with my husband then. But other than my husband being home, weekends were really no different for me.

Now, after my return to full-time work, I'm relishing the weekends again!

My first full week at work went by amazingly quick; I take that to be a good sign. Days at my old job would often stretch on f-o-o-o-o-rever. I felt like a lab rat on an eternally-moving wheel, always afraid to stop. I even felt guilty taking restroom breaks! They expected you to work, work, work your butt off, even when there was no work to be done. On such rare days, I would have a momentary sense of panic. And throughout it all, I would keep an eye on my computer clock, watching the seconds tick by towards the end of the day.

I was with that company for three years.

And now, my new boss is telling me to slow down and pace myself. What! Slow down?! Whenever I get some new files in my inbox, I speed through everything as fast as I can without making errors before hurrying the files back over to the lab. Several times this week I found myself without any work to do because I had done it all so quickly. I had to restrain myself from asking my boss for the zillionth time, "Is there anything else I can do for you?"

"You're done already?" she would say.

At the end of the day yesterday, I got some new files about an hour before closing time. I dove right in, fully intending to finish everything before the end of the day. But before long, the administrative department had to clear out all the chairs, trashcans, and other floor-bound items for the carpet cleaning guys that are supposed to arrive today. While I can work without a desk chair, it would be a little awkward.

"What do I do with the work?" I asked my boss, worried.

She just laughed. "Hey, at least you'll have something to do on Monday morning!" she said. "Don't worry about it. You need to pace yourself; you don't need to rush through everything."

I don't?

The stress of my former job is trying to make a comeback but the laid-back, happy atmosphere of my new job is not allowing it. It's going to take some time to get used to...but it's a good thing to have to get used to!

Limerick is doing okay. My vet visited on Thursday morning (another nice thing about the new job--they allowed me to come in later that morning to accomodate the vet. "No problem!" they said...and they even asked me, with geunine care, how Lim was doing when I arrived to work! Shocker...no supervisors would have cared at the old place!) to float Lim's teeth and do another lameness exam.

My vet now believes Lim just has pedal osteitis, or inflammation of the coffin bone. While not pleasant, I would definitely take it over laminitis. My vet concurs that Lim's hind end looks better, almost normal, and her front end, while still sore, is also better. She is coming back on the morning of the 31st to further evaluate Lim's feet. She wants to give those Sole Guard pads that my farrier put on another couple weeks to work, and from there we will either inject her coffin bones (although how exactly that would work, I'm not sure!) or work with my farrier to put specialized pads on Lim's feet--or both.

Lim had some major hooks on her teeth, including a huge one on the back of her upper molars that is not visible, just felt. My vet believes that when Lim had her teeth power floated in October, the old vet completely missed these hooks because she was not feeling for them.

My vet spent some time with her arm in Lim's mouth, palpating all her teeth. Then she hand-floated Lim's teeth. She got all of the hooks except the large one in the back--she said that one is so big that she could only file off half of it at one time; taking off the whole thing at once may make Lim's jaw sore. She will come back in about 3-4 months to remove the rest of it. She also said that now that Lim is 17-years-old and her teeth are no longer growing, I should only have her teeth hand-floated. She believes power floating takes too much unneccessary tooth off and prefers the finesse that a hand-floating provides.

In the meantime, I'm to stick to the bareback walks I've been doing. I am just dying to get back on the trails again but I know that my patience will pay off.

I'm thinking of getting a McClellan saddle sometime this fall specifically for trail rides. They are open along the spine of the horse's back, lightweight and comfortable for the horse, and pretty cool looking to boot! They were used as war saddles in the Civil War, World War I, and World War II. I have found a few complete ones in decent shape on eBay for about $200-300 so they are affordable.