I will put the bite on this one

Lear has been so mannerly of late that I have stopped wearing my tacked cheap gloves and switched to a spendier microsuede-and-mesh pair. Too much too soon; Lear nipped my index finger right at the first knuckle last night as I was taking him out, and had it not been for luck I might be typing with a stump (or, more likely, slamming painkillers and whining dictation). They may be vegetarians, but horses have significant dentition.

For this resurgence in nippage, I unfairly blame the influence of Manny, the barn's newest rescue project. He has a JC tat and shows some signs of understanding dressage, but his last owners must've left him in an astroturf paddock; paint him white and he'd be Death's toast-rack of a mount. The barn is working on feeding him up, though it's beyond me why they thought he should be doing any work at all, rather than eating his head off in a decent field for a few months. And someone put the pain on this horse at some point, because never was such a schoolie for biting and kicking. He works fine under saddle and has an adorable muley face, so it's a shock when he tries to knock the crap out of anyone near him on the ground. It takes two people to get him groomed, one wielding the brushes (gently, what with all his ribs right there for everyone to see) and one holding his halter or a crop to distract him. His rider had trouble with him after class, so I left Lear for a few minutes and stood at Manny's head while she went over him with the soft brush and picked out his feet. He didn't try to bite me, and he stopped trying to kick her; maybe in the past he got smacked around by someone who couldn't get away with it in front of other people. Pat is considering spending a few hours just grooming him so that he learns that the brushes don't mean bad things—if he can hang in there, he'll soon find that grooming time in a barn full of city girls is his ticket to fat city.

Lear continues to be my problem child with a work ethic. He managed a few strides of half-pass to the left; going to the right, Pat thinks he twists a hind leg oddly and worries that he's got an undiagnosed conformation hiccup. It might be that, or it might be that he's still not 100% sure of what I'm asking (as is only fair, since I'm still sorting out the signals) and is woggly on trying to keep his balance. We had him back in his old saddle—one of these days I'll get stick for using his standard girth but not his marked saddle—and that seemed to make him calmer. He still frolics a little when asked for the canter, so depart work is in order, but the spooking and stargazing were much reduced.

The most shocking thing about this week's mini-med lecture on emergency departments and the "golden hour" following trauma was not that the segment on ED structure, program, assets, and challenges was the most interesting section, or that there was a minimum of gooooore, or even that the size of a janitorial service can affect an ED's ability to process patients efficiently. No, it was that the presenter, who is in charge of the university's thriving collaboration with MedStar, admitted that he had never seen an episode of "ER." How scandalous! How will he ever know to learn Life Lessons from his patients?