Problems with animation flip and frames

Hi, I'm a bit of a Unity newbie so please bear with me.

Right now I have a object with 3 simple animations: a walk cycle to left, a walk cycle to right and a idle pose. I use a trigger variable on the animator to switch between them as I need. It sounds great in theory, but I have ran into 2 problems I can't quite solve.

1) Whenever the animation switches from left to right or right to left, the sprite doesn't turn immediately, but it does this weird turning effect (like turning a page on a book). How do I get rid of that?

2) To achieve what I want I need to be able to "get" what frame was playing on the animation, make the turn, and start playing the other animation from that frame. I can't seem to find a way to do this (remember that I use Triggers to control transitions).