A Whole Heap of Stuff.
1) I suck at technology. Big time. It turns out the story I sent to the wrong person was my own. It went with a lovely little "Dear X, I wrote this and I think it sucks." Kind of note, so X thought I wanted her to read it for me. *headdesk*
Plus, I'm having a bitch of a time trying to figure out how to get Semagic to post to my other journals at the same time. I can do it if they're all LJ ones, but that's not the point.
2) I saved a horse's life on the weekend. Make that two horses. One of the mares started foaling in the middle of the day, which is unusual, but not unheard of. So, I noticed she was laying down and went over to find baby's head (with a purple/black tongue. Extremely bad.) and two feet along with a suspicious looking ball sticking out the back.
Luckily I had my phone with me and called the vet to tell her the mare was prolapsing something that looked like an internal organ and the foal appeared to be dead. We decided I should leave the foal where it was because it may just be holding the mare together. Then the foal blinked, changing everything. In the words of the vet, "Save the foal, the mare's probably a goner if she's prolapsing."
So I pulled the foal clear and gave it the good old tip and bash to clear its little lungs of all the fluid he'd inhaled, while I clamped it's cord with one hand to stop it losing too much blood. I am woman, hear me brag about my ability to do two things at once. Meanwhile the mare was having a break from pushing, poor darling.
I kind of pushed what I could back inside, making sure nothing touched the ground and held it there until the vet came and had a feel. Turns out she'd been trying to give birth to her bowel. The foal had managed to put a hole in her uterus on the way out, because he has terribly contracted tendonds. (He stands on the very tips of his toes.) With all the pushing she'd managed to push a segment of bowel out of the tear and it just kept coming.
So we stuck foaly into a wheelbarrow and very slowly walked the mare up into the crush, where my Miracle Vet poked everything back in properly and stitched the hole shut. At that point it was touch and go, because peritonitis is almost always deadly to horses. We have her on a course of antibiotics and are monitoring her temperature a few times a day, but she's over the danger period now.
Baby has a splint on one leg to stretch the tendon so he'll be able to walk, but he's perfectly fine other than that.
While we were washing the blood and muck off, the vet informed me that if I hadn't thought to push back what was hanging out before it touched the ground, the mare wouldn't have had a chance. I'm just pathetic to take some credit for her life, even though the vet was the one that sewed her up. The thing that amazes me most of all is that she'll probably even heal well enough to breed again in the future.
3) I have skates!!! Ice skates of the hockey variety. I had to have them baked in the oven and wear them while hot to make them fit perfectly and now that we've bonded we'll be together for life. They even read my mind. I think I might want to go that way and they just take me. Amazing. No more sliding around on blunt bits of metal.
4) I passed 3 levels in my skating lessons, despite having to deal with the week I couldn't do a damn thing right and then having to take my final test in new skates that are actually sharp and have a break over point much further back than the Tupperskates I had been using. I would have failed the snow plough stops, but Evgeni found it amusing that I just had to think about pushing out and I came to a dead halt and then started gliding backwards. Plus, I'd been the only one in the class that had them nailed from the beginning.
I can do all the really basic stuff, like two foot glides and dips. Thay were all first day stuff that I could pretty much do when I started.
Thanks to Evgeni teaching me about keeping my knees bent, I can now do one foot glides, but I still feel pretty unsafe doing them.
Swizzles were a bitch to doo in a straight line until the new skates made me realise that edges are not just a tale made up to give losers hope. My left knee still doesn't like them, but it lets me do them for long enough.
Slaloms! OMG! I had such a hard time with these. I kept losing one leg or the other, depending on the day. Evgeni spent ages trying to explain weight bearing and all sorts of stuff to me, but I was getting angry at myself and the whole situation was almost comical until.... you guessed it. NEW SKATES. I can slalom like a mad thing now. I don't want to ever skate any other way. It feels incredible to be going somewhere without having to lift a foot.
Bestest of all? I can do backward swizzles. They're about a hundred times easier than forward ones. It's kinda weird, but in a very nice way.
The not so good bit is that I found out I can get up when I fall down. I discovered this when some idiot skated into me at a public session. It wasn't like he was a learner, either. He'd been weaving in and out of traffic all night. He just turned around to go back out the door and ran into me. I did try to move sideways, but only mananged to go into a slow spin, leaning closer and closer to the ice until I completely over balanced and gave up.
He was terribly apologetic and tried to help me up, which is the absolute last thing anybody should ever do with me. I told him I was fine and asked him to go away and let me get up by myself. He kept trying, though, until Frog came over and told him he was only making me angry and that I was fine.
5) There's a kid at the rink that I want to adopt. He's like 15 or something and he goes out of his way to help Frog and I with everything from skating tips to making hot chips when we take a break. He spends his break time with us and takes us into the pro shop and shows us sticks and pads and gloves and jerseys. He's got an awesome sense of humour and he gets so excited when he has something new. He rushes over and shows us. He even squeed when we got our new skates, even though he helped fit us for them.
6) I just spent a small fortune getting an upgrade to my cable to make sure that every hockey game this season gets recorded for me to watch at leisure. It's brilliant, because it'll get the whole Stanley Cup final game for me, where my DVD recorder just doesn't go long enough. Then I get told that we may not even get any NHL this season. I think I'll die if we don't. I cannot live without hockey. That's like taking due South, Buffy, Firefly and Slings and Arrows away from me all at once. And then hiding all my Duran Duran stuff.