Blogger Makes Me Very Irrrrrritated

So I understand no one could see the pictures.  Awesome.  Perhaps I will try to fix them at some later point but sadly don't have time right now; if you really want to see them try the links at the bottom for lots more photos anyway (especially the second one).  In the meantime I'll try to remember that throwing my computer doesn't cause the internet any pain.

Thinking Sunny Summer Things

Hey all, we're back to the weekly grind out here.  And it's January.  So instead of me whining, it seems like an opportune time to do a summer retrospective.  And show off my dear boyfriend's mad photography skillz.  Apologies if this takes forever to load (no worries for Janet and the supahcomputah!)

August 2010

Wizard Island, or, the remains of Mt. Mazama's
eruption cone

Crater Lake at Sunset

20 Minutes of South Central Oregon Sky

These wacky guys are very very very old lava vents.
Mariel, take it away!

He is incapable of staying out of any water,
even if that water is 45 degrees
(at least there is no ice this time)

Another one for Mariel: this was an old lava
vent, and when everything else eroded, the igneous
didn't (did I get that right?)

I am a lava bubble!

How to void the warranty on your Volkswagen Golf
(and send your girlfriend into a conniption fit)

So if you notice I may have scraped the passenger side
mirror along the entire inside of the tree.  Eli reminds
me every 0.5 seconds that I am the only person he
knows to ever hit a tree at 1 mph in broad daylight.
Who wants to loan me their keys?

The Corkscrew Tree.  We had a picnic in it.

Redwoods are enormously wonderful trees.

You should visit if you haven't already. 

The Oregon Coast is not shabby either.

Of course, Eli is now here:

The Bahamas

So as far as we're concerned, he can just go...

...swim with the fishies.

This has been [largely] an Eli Stevens production.

Not that I'm biased, but he's pretty dang awesome.

Go here

or here

for further proof.

We now return to our regularly scheduled mid-winter doldrums.  I'm already starting my paper-chain countdown for next summer (hint: it involves whole other hemispheres!!)

Unghhhh, or, Finals Zombie Time

Reporting from Pullman, where currently the Shackleton expedition would feel right at home.  I'm going to keep this short and sweet, but I wanted to say HI! and I MISS YOU! and HOPEFULLY I WILL SEE MOST OF YOU OVER BREAK IN TWO WEEKS! and also OH MY GOD THERE ARE STILL EIGHT TESTS AHEAD OF ME WHAT AM I DOING ON BLOGGER?!?!?!

Here because I'm not all there

Just rolling off the end of our first Diagnostic Challenge.  This is an exercise in which classes are cancelled Mon-Thurs, and our class is broken up into groups, given 'clients', and we simulate working through real cases.  It was a lot of fun, although sometimes knowledge is scary.  Our case involved a couple dogs who both contracted multi-drug resistant staphylococcus intermedius infections at 'our' hospital; these bugs were only susceptible to one antibiotic tested, which is the same drug used in humans as a last resort to combat really strong versions of MRSA and the like.  Bringing up the ethical question: should we even be using this drug in a veterinary capacity?  If by using it, we select for a strain of bacteria that doesn't even respond to the strong stuff and that is transmitted to a human, then what?  Obviously if my dog was suffering a potentially fatal infection I would want to treat it.  But I would also be pretty pissed if I or my friends then got a resistant strain and you know, died.  If it's all the same to y'all I would like to crawl back under my cozy rock of ignorance now.

In other news, last weekend I went on a field trip to the largest dairy farm in Washington state--they milk 21,000 cows a day, basically around the clock.  The management system in place on that farm is insane.  We also got to see a calf born, two calves pulled from a cow who was having a bit of trouble, and do jugular blood draws on calves (I feel about calves the same way I feel about cats: it is a crying shame that they have to grow into cows because they're so cute and harmless as babies).

Attempting to locate the jugular under all that fuzz.  Yes it's the size of a
garden hose.  No I'm not a gifted phlebotomist.

Please note the sweet stethoscope.  Thanks Mom and Dad!
Also, it was raining.  So much for "Sunnyside".

We got to do necropsies (autopsies) on a few calves that had died.
I decided that this was as graphic as I would get for you guys.
You probably think my life is way weird already.

I have to run to class at the moment but I'll be back for more later.  It's 5:10 pm.  That's dedication, people.

I Guess My Misadventures Pale in Comparison

I have a project right now in which we are to research a disease and create a case scenario for that disease.  Mine is equine pyrollizidine alkaloid toxicity (horse eats toxic plant, liver shuts down, yada yada yada).  So I am reading about this syndrome in my 10 pound bible entitled humbly "VETERINARY MEDICINE" (one-stop shopping at its best, right?) and it's not looking good for our indiscriminate eaters--listlessness, head pressing, fits of mad galloping--and then I get to a sentence which just tickled my apparently black rotting funny bone: "Death due to misadventure is a frequent outcome".  I know it shouldn't be amusing--but doesn't that sound like the way Scooby and the gang will ultimately meet their demise?

PS To all my horsey buddies: not a common problem.  Nobody we know should be succumbing to any misadventures anytime soon.

First Semester...Second Year--sounds like (but isn't!), lazy!

And we're back!  I'm reinstated in Pullman with so much procrastinating to get done, therefore naturally I have returned to this blog.  This is the first weekend since classes started and we've already got quite a load.  Additionally all the professors this semester are into something called "class participation".  Somebody look this up and get back to me because I'm unfamiliar with the concept.  They are also [almost] all very engaging and enthusiastic (oh god...50 pages of notes in one week enthusiastic!) which makes up for a lot of it.  Grad school is great because the professors, as well as the students, are interested in being there.  And let's see...we have on our plate Systems Pathology, Clinical Pathology, Virology, Bacteriology, Pharmacology, International Veterinary Medicine and Skeletal Prep (in which you make a dog skeleton...from scratch; I'll just leave that one to your imagination).  We've already grown your friendly neighborhood Staphylococci, learned to read a packed cell volume and plasma protein, and have a paper in which we get assigned a different kind of DIARRHEA! to research and then make up a case involving our DIARRHEA!, and on the way talk to another student with a different type of DIARRHEA! and then learn about it and teach it to our classmates (I think this may be getting at that pesky participation thing) and frankly they are all too excited that we are learning about DIARRHEA!!  But there's chronic and acute and necrotizing and cytotoxic--the wide, exciting world of diarrhea is seemingly endless.  Because we are all very mature there have been no comments at all about, What kind of diarrhea do you have? or No, I can't go out, I have to get home and deal with my diarrhea.

It is so nice to be around grown-ups (JESSICA).

I have a lot to tell you all about my epic summer vacation, starring some extremely unauthorized uses of a VW Golf (stay tuned! small rivers forded! ATV trails tackled! trees hit--really, really slowly!), blue water, really large Redwoods, and naked middle aged river beach intruders practicing their early morning yoga (hello, and welcome to northern California).  But that is going to wait until Eli has got his camera situations all sorted out and I can illustrate the points.  Except for the naked people, ew.  What do you think this blog is, gross?  I have standards.  That is the other best thing about Pullman.  Not that there are no naked people, although that is a definite plus, but that Eli is here for a while.  (Well, not right now.  Today he drove halfway to Montana to a ski hill to taunt gravity on a mountain bike, which is his favorite 'sport'.  I maintain that if you have to wear body armor, it isn't a sport, but then I go jump horses around in the woods so I am nothing if not hypocritical.  Whatever.)  He is taking some time to study and do the coursework for his captain's license before heading off to waters uncharted again.  In the meantime he'll be earning food money as the detail dude for a Ford dealership, which to me sounds like work but to him is like hanging out at the pound all day in that he wants to bring them all home with him.  Whatever floats your boat.  And cooks me dinner.  Mmm, dinner.

Off to have Monty Python night with a friend.  See previous comment regarding extreme maturiosity.

In Protest of the Apron Scale or Whatever the Heck That Was, Mariel

The closest thing I've ever had to a 'normal' job was paging at the library, which I did for about two years to pay for my wicked horse habit until I couldn't take being inside ONE MINUTE LONGER one April and quit.  Otherwise, jobs have included shoveling many, many tons of manure, shoving cows around in the wee morning hours, taking apart fresh pigs (yeah.), sidekick for an equine dentist (sidekick is an awesome job: you often get to drive, you look good by association, and while Batman was probably up at night worrying about the safety of Gotham, I'm betting Robin slept like a baby), working for the surgery teaching department at school, and now, general farm whipping boy.  

Last week, I cleaned kennels, got paid for four hours in the sun in a field playing with dogs, dusted the ceiling, painted all the exterior trim of a house by myself with a single paintbrush, Round-Upped the whole farm with one of those backpack things while not humming the Ghostbusters jingle to myself even a little, was the nail in the coffin for the farm's decrepit riding mower, hossed out the sawhorses and an angle-grinder and felt supah BAD-ASS de-rusting a gate for priming, took the power hedge trimmers to the nasty barberries and maybe (maybe) drove Eli's massive truck back and forth across the property to the garage for things that I really didn't need to 'haul' just because it felt cool.  Also I observed minor surgeries, handed the doctor acupuncture needles, and tried to restrain some small animals which I swear is harder than horses because they're so freakin' wiggly.  Why be normal?  And why compose a sentence with less than seventeen independent clauses?

In other news, I'm watching Burn Notice and I was about to ask Where are the cops in Miami? Are all the streets just littered with bullets? And then I remembered my trip with Janet to West Palm Beach late at night and if Miami is anything like that then yes, yes they probably are.