Paws & Claws

Things that are not fun: wasting 3 hours of my evening waiting while one of my groupmates puts together our stupid presentation for our complete waste-of-time course (because said groupmate bailed on our previous meeting and insisted we schedule this one, at the last minute, just like I begged the group NOT to do), then having to re-do the whole evening's worth of work because groupmate's computer corrupted the file and I was the only one still awake to put the stupid thing back together.

Do you know how long I've spent on this stupid piece of @$*&? TOO LONG.

When is this semester over??

Oh, and I also booked my plane ticket for South Africa and reserved a spot in the wildlife vet program! It's a three week program in July, so I'll post some more details on that later :)

I guess I actually had a fairly epic week (which is nice, because the next three will be spent in a haze of studying and exam writing). We started sabre in fencing ("foil" is the style that involves jabbing each other with the sword that looks like a car antenna, the sabre looks a little more like an actual sword, and you do more swinging and less jabbing). It's cool in that it's a little more like actual sword fighting, less cool in that it is far too fast for my useless reflexes, so I pretty much suck ^^;. Another major difference is that the head is actually considered part of the target in sabre (thank god for face masks!). I have to be honest, I think me and Nicole (my classmate) got way too much enjoyment out of our instructor saying "stand within striking distance and practice hitting each other in the face". Seriously, I wish I heard those instructions a lot more often sometimes ;P.

On Thursday afternoon, we finished class ridiculously early, so a few of us went trail riding at one of the horse stables. It was a really gorgeous ride- I'm hoping we'll find time to do it again before it starts to snow!! We did a lot of trotting, and I think I'm finally getting the hang of posting, which was pretty exciting (for the non-horseback riders, a trotting horse is insanely bouncy and uncomfortable- "posting" means moving yourself in time with the bounces to be more comfortable). Then we tried to upgrade to cantering, which my horse took to mean "run like a maniac". Unfortunately, I was less successful with that and had my first experience falling off a horse >__<. Not terribly fun, but I managed to not get caught in the stirrups or do any major damage, so I guess it's a learning experience.

I have exams starting next week, and several projects due, so I'll be pretty swamped until Christmas break. My brain has finally switched into "school" mode (about 2 1/2 months too late, but better late than never. I have two and a half weeks to memorize almost 200 viruses). I've also been tutoring a couple of first years for their exams, which actually makes me feel far more productive than studying for my own! For some reason, a lot of vet students have difficulty sorting through piles of information to find the key concepts, and I'm actually pretty good at that, so I'm a decent tutor, and I enjoy seeing people finally understand the material :). I'm really hoping to tutor embryology and parasitology next semester- embryology is super simple if find the right way of thinking about it, and it drives me nuts how many people in my class came out of parasitology without learning how to actually identify a ton of basic parasites, so I really want to teach someone how to do it! (The number of people in vet school without basic microscope skills is stunning- thank you Carol for making my life miserable in Cell Biology!!). Too bad I have no tricks for learning this semester's material :(. Memorization is just not my thing :/.

So much to my shock and amazement, Squirt is actually doing ok! She perked up a lot by Saturday evening, and now she's pretty much back to her old self. Not sure what happened to cause the bleeding, but for now she seems to be under control. She's still going to keep deteriorating, thanks to the tumor (it's already causing her to have some trouble walking and holding her food- I'm hand feeding her a few times a day to make sure she eats enough), so I still suspect she won't be around much longer, but at least she's ok for now!

I had a pathology wetlab last week, which was pretty fun (if slightly disturbing)! It was on necropsy of domestic animals (it was an optional after-school lab for the pathology club). I like to get involved in as many of these as I can (I did an avian necropsy not too long ago), because we don't actually get a whole lot of opportunity to see necropsies. Half of pathology is recognizing when something looks "normal" and when it doesn't, so the more dead animals I see, the better, I guess. Our class pathology labs this year generally consist of looking at abnormal specimens, most of which have been preserved, so practicing on fresh animals is pretty important (apparently the slaughter plant that used to be on PEI closed down a couple of years ago, which resulted in the loss of a good source of fresh pathology specimens- the plant used to send us all of the condemned pig corpses).

I did a cat (I made sure to pick one that looked absolutely nothing like Calcifer- cutting up animals that look like my own pets is disturbing, even for me). I didn't find any terribly exciting lesions- he looked like a pretty healthy cat, but had been euthanized, and judging by the brand of food in his stomach, I suspect he was from the shelter. I did find a good-sized tapeworm in his intestines, though.

Nothing else terribly exciting going on this week, but one of my rats (Squirt) has been really sick. She's been very clumsy for the past 2 weeks, and I suspect it's being caused by a brain tumor (pituitary adenomas are insanely common in rats, particularly females). On Thursday night, she also developed severe vaginal bleeding, so I took her in to school and had x-rays and an ultrasound done. We couldn't find any obvious tumors in her abdomen, so we're still not entirely sure what's going on. Likely treatment would be a spay surgery, but since her brain tumor would likely kill her anyway, I don't think it's worth it. I brought her home for the weekend, since she still seems reasonably comfortable. If she's still bleeding on Monday, I'll bring her back and likely have her euthanized :(.

One of my classmates made an interesting discovery last week- we had a radiology lab and were invited to bring our own dogs in to take x-rays of them. It turns out that the dog my friend adopted from a North Carolina animal shelter a couple of ears ago actually has a bullet in one of her shoulders! There probably won't be anything done about it, since it's clearly been there for years, but it was a pretty unexpected finding!

There is a depressing lack of animal contact in second year (it's mostly theory and classwork), but some of my extracurricular activities give me a little more exposure. I had a small ruminants club field trip yesterday to deworm some llamas, which was an interesting experience. The dewormer is in the form of an injection, so we had to round all the llamas up and hold them still enough to poke them in the neck with the needle. I don't expect many people reading this blog to have any experience working with llamas (neither do I, so I'm trying to get as much exposure as possible during school), but they're pretty tough to control. There's a reason people use these things to scare coyotes- they will pretty much run you down at every opportunity. We coralled them in a tiny pen so that they were packed too tightly to move, then did the injections. Of course, they weren't packed too tightly to spit, which they did. I'll be honest, I could have lived without that experience (by the way, it's no "spit" so much as a spray of rumen fluid, and it stinks). They're still adorable, though, and it was a fun time!

I also did a wild bird necropsy lab last week, so that was pretty fun. I worked on a Canada goose who turned out to have been shot in the chest with a lead pellet (which is apparently illegal to use). There was also an owl with a broken wing and a couple of bald eagles that seem to have been hit by cars, so they were neat to see.

On an unrelated not, we had the disturbing experience last week of getting broken into. Some guys climbed up to our second floor balcony and got in through the sliding doors. They took my roommate's flat screen tv and laptop. Fortunately, they didn't get anything of mine, but it was still pretty unsettling- we were both at home in bed at the time, and thought the noise was the cat knocking things over (not an unreasonable assumption- he's pretty noisy at night). They were already out of the apartment when I realized what was going on. The police were here, but they have yet to turn up anything.

I had CAT action this morning, which is the feral spay/neuter program that AVC runs. Basically, people trap feral and barn cats and bring them to the school. Students get to practice spaying/neutering them, they get vaccinated and sent back where they came from. Students get put into teams of four with one student from each year.

Our first cat was male, so me and the first-year split his neuter and did one testicle each (cat neuters are pretty easy, so it doesn't take long to learn how to do them. The neuter went fine, and I successfully drew blood for the feline leukemia test, so that was pretty encouraging :).

Our second cat was female, so the third an fourth year students did her spay while me and the first year monitored anesthesia. Part way through the surgery, she stopped breathing (which isn't super uncommon, it happens because of the anesthetic sometimes), so we both took turns ventilating her until she started to breath again, but then her heart suddenly stopped. One of the professors stopped by right then, so I grabbed him, but we weren't able to save the cat :(. We had noticed prior to surgery that she was super thin, and once she died, the fourth year student started poking around in her abdomen a little more to see if she could spot an obvious problem that could explain why the cat died. She realized that there were no small intestines in the cat's abdomen! That made us wonder if she may have had a diaphragmatic hernia (sometimes the diaphragm can get a hole in it, letting some abdominal organs slide into the chest cavity). We extended the incision to have a look, and sure enough, the poor cat had almost no diaphragm- Her intestines, stomach and part of her liver were all in her chest! It seemed to have been a congenital defect- it looked as though the diaphragm never completely formed, so it's kind of surprising that the cat lived as long as she did. There was no way for us to have fixed her problem- it was too severe to even correct surgically, so it's probably better that she died under anesthesia, rather than in a field somewhere. It was at least nice to know that it wasn't our fault that she died- even though we couldn't think of anything we had done wrong, it was comforting to find that the cat had such a huge problem (and even though it was very sad, it was kind of a cool condition to see, so most of the other students present came over to have a look at her).

Catch-up time again, since I'm procrastinating studying (I have actually started this time, though- serious!)*.

Stuff from last month that I still didn't really get around to mentioning here:

-we had "industry day" at school, which means a bunch of drug reps put up displays of their products around the school and give students candy to get their attention (I guess that should stop working past the age of twelve, but it doesn't). I actually had some decent conversations about some of the drugs- I'm more familiar with them now, so the whole thing was more interesting than last year, and I guess it will be more relevant in fourth year, when I have to start considering actually buying some of these things.

-I went to a free weekend conference about animal welfare. The focus was largely on palliative care for ill/elderly pets, and deciding when to push euthanasia. It was a good conference with some really good discussions. I largely go to these things (I went to a euthanasia conference last year, which was fantastic) due to a couple of cases (one in particular) that I saw at my old clinic where animals were still being treated long after they should have been euthanized. I realize that it's a tough decision to make for everybody, and I've seen plenty of people who put it off for a while, but these cases were well beyond that point. I never felt that the vet in charge of them handled the situations very well, and I'm always looking for ways things could have gone better.

We also discussed the incredibly awkward situation of parents who attempt to sneak the family pet in for euthanasia while the kids are at school- I've watched this sort of thing happen and always had a probIem with it, so I was kind of relieved to hear the speaker say that he directly asks these clients to reconsider their decision to keep the kids out of the loop. Their are some things I feel you absolutely should not lie to your kids about, and this is one of them.

I have to say that I'm incredibly grateful for my experiences at Sunrise assisting with euthanasias and speaking to clients both before and after. There are a lot of unexpected situations that come up and I've glad I've had a chance to observe some of them without having to be in charge. I feel like I'll be a lot more prepared for those sorts of things when I go into practice.

-I've had two more Animal Care Committee meetings. Reading all of the research protocols is bit of a pain, but I'm generally enjoying being on the committee. It's definitely a learning experience! I'm actually contributing to some of the meetings now that I'm getting the hang of the procedure, and occasionally a really difficult problem will come up, so it's interesting to see how those get solved.

-Completely unrelated to school or veterinary work, I've joined the university fencing club :). I'm so desperate to avoid schoolwork that I am actually turning to physical activity. This may be my healthiest semester ever. I have to say, fencing is pretty fun, and I'm slightly less terrible now than I was when I started! As a peculiar side effect, however, the right side of my body is perpetually covered in small, perfectly round bruises from the point of the foil. It looks like some strange pox.





*I read the entirety of Pride and Prejudice rather than study for my Virology exam, which, considering my general dislike of romance novels, really says something (the prof for that course is somewhat... less than motivating. Aside from the fact that he looks like a James Bond villain)

Since I have five more hours in the Deer Lake airport, I'll attempt to catch up in this blog :) (also, I'm procrastinating on some homework I brought with me, what else is new?).

The last weekend in September was the AVC open house. It's an annual event where the public is allowed to tour the school and students set up displays for them to look at. Unlike last year, I didn't paint any cows (it was done by the incoming first-years, I think). Instead, I painted large animal rear-ends for a pin-the-tail game, which still made for an interesting evening. Our class was also allowed to take advantage of the event to do a little fund-raising (we have to fund-raise the money for our graduation ceremony at the end of fourth year). One of the students in my class has run a carnival and worked as a clown (he is an exceptionally well-rounded student- I think he's also been a firefighter and a pilot!). He brought a cotton candy machine and taught a bunch of people in the class how to tie balloon animals (some of them tried to figure it out before he arrived, which was disastrous and resulted in a lot of badly misshapen but very colourful animals, as well as a good few swords, because that was all anyone could actually manage to make! It also seems as though cotton candy is a lot more difficult to handle than it looks! There were flying sugar chunks everywhere the evening before the open house when people were trying to learn how to use the machine. We made a fair bit of money, though, so I guess it was worth it. I didn't volunteer for any cotton-candy shifts; I was manning the exotics booth which was a lot more up my alley. I brought Squirt in (because she's adorable and it's a good opportunity to show people that rats aren't all creepy-looking!). I also got to spend some time handling some of our teaching animals and showing them off- we had Nitro the bearded dragon, Gretel the box turtle and Voldemort the albino corn snake (who was very popular!).

The open house was on Saturday, and on Sunday, we had our first small ruminants field trip. We went to a sheep farm to do some hoof-trimming. Since sheep have evolved to live in fairly rocky, barren areas, their hooves don't wear down properly when they're kept in barns and on soft pastures, so they need to be trimmed periodically. I did this a few times last year, and I felt much more comfortable with it this year, which was great (it no longer takes me 1/2 an hour to do one sheep!). I also finally figured out how to flip them myself, which I didn't have as much opportunity to try last year. (To explain sheep flipping: sheep hate to be touched, and run like maniacs when you get near them- they look cute and helpless, but they will sooner flatten you than cooperate with you. The best way to keep them still to have their feet trimmed is to roll them over so that their sitting on their butts with their feet in the air. Once you have a hold of their front legs, they're fairly easy to control. This is, however, easier said than done, and involves catching up to the sheep, grabbing it by the head, jamming your knee into it's flank and rolling it over, while being careful not to pull on the wool, which bruises the carcass and devalues the sheep if it's sent for slaughter. Also, a full grown sheep is very heavy). There were a lot of sheep on the farm, so we got a lot of practice.

On the same field trip, we also visited a wool mill, where they not only spin sheep wool, but also pet hair (they had some very nice samoyed hats), so if you've ever wondered if that was possible, it is! They also handle a lot of musk-ox hair that gets sent down for processing from some native communities up north. Musk-ox wool sells for about $90 a roll (and is amazingly soft- if I ever become a millionaire, I want a blanket made out of this stuff), and a pelt is apparently worth $2000! It is an unbelievable insulator- we all held a piece of the un-spun hair, and it literally heats up in your hands within seconds.

Now I'm going to finish my homework and watch some more Battlestar Gallactica. God, there is nothing in this airport.

In my defense, I've been pretty busy lately, and I have lots of stuff to post about, but haven't had time to do it properly! I have seven hours in a airport tomorrow, though, which may be sufficient time.

The school awards ceremony was this evening, and in a dramatic break from tradition, I actually went. I made the Dean's List last year and also won an award for excellence in parasitology, which entailed some money, so I guess it wasn't a total waste? I still hate awards ceremonies, though. It feels ridiculous to have people trot across the stage and hand them more or less arbitrary prizes, largely based on grades in select courses. It encourages people to be competitive and focus on grades, which I really don't feel is something that's terribly important or award-worthy. There was a class spirit award, which was nice, and the radiology professor won a teaching award which she totally deserved, and I support that. I just feel like parading a small number of students in front of everybody else puts pressure on those people, while making everyone else in the audience feel a little stupid in comparison. If they want to give scholarships to academically gifted people, can't they just mail them? I guess some people enjoy the recognition, but it really just isn't encouraging to me. If no one can tell that you deserve an award unless somebody announces it, do you really, honestly deserve it? Also, I had to wear dress pants, which always makes me a little irritable.

More importantly, I'm going home tomorrow!! Only for two days, and it's going to take me nearly twelve hours to get there, but I'm really looking forward to it! The prospect of turkey dinner is pretty exciting, and I can't wait to see everybody :D.

Other occurrences from the past few weeks that I will write up in more detail later:
-AVC Open House (fun times, as usual)
-Sheep flipping and hoof trimming
-being seriously annoyed with one of my profs
-not studying for my virology exam
-writing my virology exam
-Industry Day

I went lambing again on Friday night. Basically, we volunteer to stay on the farm overnight and check on the sheep during the lambing period, so the farmers can occasionally get some sleep! This was a different farm from the one I went to last year, and it's much less intense- we only had one lamb born, instead of the twelve we got last year! (I'll probably be back at that farm again when they lamb in January, though). I actually got to sleep a little this time :). The lamb was born without any problems, but he was a bit of an idiot and had trouble figuring out how to suck on his mom! We wound up having to milk her and bottle feed him at first to get him going! He figured it out in the end, though. It's so much fun to see animals being born (even though they come out all slimy and disgusting!). It was much warmer than the January lambing I did last year, that's for sure! The owners of this farm are super friendly, and they love having students out to give them a hand, so we may be back there again to do some hoof trimming for them :). They actually milk their sheep and have cheese made, which is kind of neat and unusual. I'm not doing this as part of my regular class work, by the way, it's part of the small ruminant club that I joined. I had a lot of fun with it last year, so I thought I'd sign up again this year :).

I can't remember if I ever actually said in my blog (and I'm too lazy to go back and check!), but I officially adopted the black and white cat I had been fostering! I've renamed him Calcifer, because I hated his original name. I thought he'd have to stay with a friend of mine, because my new roommate is allergic, but so far he's not bothering her too much, so he's still here in the apartment :). At the moment, he's asleep on my pathology notes, but he's going to have to move soon, because I need to study them. He's adorable :). Also, he loves to fetch! It's really cute, and I videotaped him with my camera one day-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d91hIsQ0es8 He'll do it for hours!

I just got back from an awesome seminar about zoo animal nutrition at the Magnetic Hill Zoo! It was given by a zoo nutritionalist who was offering it to the zoo employees, and opened it to some students as well. It was super informative, and the lecturer was great. I've go a book of notes with diet recommendations for a pile of species, and we learned a lot about common diet-related illnesses. There were only about 15 people attending, and she was really opened to questions, so we all really learned a lot. She also offered to put us in touch with some of her contacts if we had any other questions or wanted to look for rotations/internships, so that was pretty cool. I also learned a lot about some of the problems the zoo (and zoos in general) face maintaining the health of their animals. It was definitely worth skipping two days of classes for :). On the down side, I had pretty much decided to focus on companion animals and domestic exotics, and now I'm back to being interested in zoo medicine! There is so much room for improvement in the zoo industry and I'd really like to be involved in it! Whether or not I ever do zoo work, though, I got a lot of information that will be useful for exotic pets as well, so it was time well spent. This semester is pretty dull so far, and a lot of my classes are not in subjects that will be terribly applicable for me in the long run, so it was refreshing to get back to learning some really exciting material and seeing the applications of it!!

Finished my first week of classes! This year is apparently pretty dull, and there was definitely nothing very exciting about my first week. All of my lecturers so far seem decent, but I think the novelty of being in vet school has worn off ^^. No fun labs this year, it's pretty much straight lecture. I'm hoping some fun club activities will brighten it up a little.

On the plus side, I'm going to a two day conference in a couple of weeks at the Magnetic Hill Zoo in Moncton, about zoo animal nutrition and pathology, which should be pretty cool! I'm going with a couple of girls in my class and we're splitting a hotel room, so it should be a good time :). I'm going to miss class for it, but I'm sure it will be worth it.

I apparently made the Dean's list last year- I have absolutely no idea what the qualifications for Dean's list here actually are, but I guess that's a good thing.

My new roommate seems fine so far. She's in the first year class. She's done a lot of traveling, so she's got some interesting stories :).

I'm planning on coming home for Thanksgiving, which I'm pretty excited about- I'm dying for some turkey dinner!! (I guess I'm still going to have to wait a while, though)

Had my first day of class today. Nothing terribly exciting, I had bacteriology, pharmacology, principles of health management and diagnostic imaging lectures, most of which were just intorductory, and pretty boring. I've met my new roommate, who seems ok. She had her first anatomy lab today >:). I really won't miss that. It was great to see all of my classmates again, though!

One of my rat's, Kit, is still having major problems with her teeth :(. She's developed an abscess and some ulcers in her mouth where her teeth have been rubbing. Luckily, I ran into the rat et while I was returning my office keys, and got an appointment for Wednesday afternoon, so hopefully he can help me sort her out.

Well, I had a great (but short!) trip home! I got to spend a few days at the cabin with the family, which was awesome. It's so nice out there, I wish I could get there more often. It was a nice and relaxing way to end the summer.

I'm headed back to PEI today, and classes start tomorrow. At the moment, however, I'm stuck in the airport, because the hurricane has delayed my flight to Halifax :(.

EDIT: So now I get to spend the day in the Halifax airport, because the flight delay caused me to miss my bus. Good thing I borrowed Dad's Battlestar Galactica boxset before I left- at least I'll have something to watch while I wait.

EDIT2: I made it to PEI around 9pm (after a 7 hour Battlestar Gallactica marathon in the airport- still, there are worse ways to spend 7 hours). On the shuttle bus, though, I sat in front of two incredibly whiney teenage girls >:(. First they whined about how long the ride was. Then they huffed when we stopped for gas/ rest stop, and again when we left, then half an hour later, started whining that they had to pee and it was ridiculous that there was only one stop. When they weren't whining, they were talking about a school dance, shopping, and how many calories were in their favorite flavour of pringles. Next time I take the bus I'm going to have to get an ipod or something @__@.

I can't wait to be done with this website >:(. At least I'm getting out of here on Friday- after that, it's not my problem anymore. I enjoyed working on my part of it, but some of the work requires the contribution of various other people who make my job way more difficult than it has to be.

I've also had an incredibly frustrating experience with one of my rats- Kit has had an ongoing problem with her teeth- they don't fit together properly, and don't wear down the way they should, so they need to be trimmed periodically. You would think that in a vet school, built around an animal hospital, I could find someone who could trim rat teeth. This is apparently not the case. If I was driving straight to St. John's, I honestly would have considered taking her with me so I could have her treated at Sunrise, and leaving a multi-million dollar animal hospital full of specialists to get veterinary treatment in Newfoundland is just sad. After two weeks attempting to have her teeth fixed, I was finally booked in with an intern this afternoon. I spent two hours sitting in an exam room while she hunted all over the hospital for someone who had trimmed rodent teeth before, and wound up coming back with a doctor who had worked with rats a few times and had photocopied instruction for tooth trimming. Between the three of us, we finally managed to get it done, but I spent 3 1/2 hours for a procedure that should take fifteen minutes (not to mention the fact that I was unable to reach the emergency veterinarian for four hours on Saturday when I noticed Kit had developed an abscess. Good thing I didn't have a *real* emergency). I'm grateful to the vets who did help me out, it's not their fault they weren't familiar with rats. It's just frustrating for me that at supposedly the most advanced hospital in Atlantic Canada, I still can't get treatment for my rats. This is definitely pushing me even more towards becoming an exotics vet- it is unbelievably frustrating to have such a simple problem and have no one able to fix it (and yet these people put artificial hips and pacemakers into dogs). At least now I know where all the equipment is- I can do it myself if I have to in the future. There is a vet who does this sort of thing, but that person is apparently out of town for a week, which wasn't terribly helpful.

Also, I got nothing done at work today, due to the ridiculous amount of time spent with Kit, which means more to do tomorrow :(.

Wow, I'm really doing a bad job of keeping this updated over the summer!! I'm still having a good time here in PEI, but i can't wait to get back to Newfoundland at the end of August!!

Chris came to visit me a couple of weekends ago, which was AWESOME. We went to COWS, saw the Harry Potter movie (which I thought was actually pretty good), made nachos and dip, and went to a Cadence concert (a totally awesome a capella group). It was a pretty great weekend.

Work is still going well. Vet camp ended last week, so I'm done with that. I helped out with a few of their lectures, and it was pretty fun (I prefer children in small doses- I don't know if I'd want to be a camp councillor, but having them for an hour was fine). I've also pretty much finished one of the websites I was working on, and I've made good progress on the second, and gotten a couple more dissections done (I'm really impressed with how much easier dissection has gotten, compared to my first semester. I just did a dog forelimb, which was the first dissection I did back in September, and all the stuff I completely destroyed the first time around I found with no problem this time! I think the anatomy instructors forget how much harder it is to do this stuff for the first time- I could easily complete first semester's dissection in the allotted time if I had to do it now).

I also had my first meeting with the animal care committee. I had to read through a bunch of research proposals beforehand. Some were interesting, lots were painfully boring. The meeting wasn't bad, though, and there are a few vets on the committee that I'd like to get to know a little better because they do things I'm interested in, so this might be a good opportunity to do that.

I've still got my foster kitty (he's asleep at my feet right now). I'm actually considering keeping this one- I'm pretty attached to him! Unfortunately, my incoming roommate is actually allergic to cats, but one of my classmates has offered to board him for the year, if I do decide to keep him. I haven't made a decision on that yet, but considering the number of cats at the shelter right now, I don't think he'll be adopted any time soon, so I guess there's no real rush. I have discovered that he fetches, which is really cute. He brings his toys for me to throw, and runs straight back with them :). I'm going to try taking him outside on a harness this week to see what he thinks of it.

I went to one of my friend's for a BBQ this evening- we made hamburger patties. It was delicious :)

It was brought to my attention that I haven't updated this journal in a while ^^;. I'm really bad at keeping on top of these things!!

I've actually been super busy all summer, but mostly with non-exciting things (I'm enjoying the website work that I'm doing, but it isn't really that interesting to talk about). Since I'm being shared by multiple profs in the department, they each give me their own list of things to do- I honestly have more projects to work on than I could possibly get finished in two summers @__@. I'm basically just supposed to get through as much of it as I can (and I just remembered that I forgot to ask for my dog head from the anatomy guys like I had intended to do this morning- whoops). I'm still dissecting (and I have a three page list of specimens to work on, so there's no way I'll finish that. I just pick out the ones that look like fun and skip over the ones that are a pain ^^). At the moment, I'm cleaning up all the ligaments and tendons of a dog's foot (which is tedious, but not hard, because I've already done it four times in anatomy lab- my lab group hated doing the feet, so I did all of them). If I ever remember to get the head (it's still attached to a body at the moment, and stored in the giant anatomy fridge), I have to clean out all the nerves and blood vessels of the face, on one side, and the muscles of the eye on the other.

Most of my other work so far consists of rebuilding the histology website for one of the first-year courses. That's mostly done now, I've spent the last couple of days making headers in photoshop to make the pages less ugly. Then I start working on another course.

I somehow wound up getting myself onto the animal care committee that reviews and approves/rejects protocols for experiments at UPEI involving animals. I'm not quite sure how that happened! They were looking for a student representative, and our class president (also working at AVC for the summer) mentioned that I had worked with lab animals, and somehow I got volunteered? It involves monthly meetings and reading research proposals, but I'd kind of like to be more involved around the school, and there are some other profs on the committee that I'm interested in working with down the road, so I guess it can't hurt.

I happy news, I went home last weekend for Mom's birthday, which was an awesome time :). Spent most of the weekend at the Winsor's cabin, boating and swimming. I'm pretty glad I went home, it was great to see and hang out with so many people, even just for the weekend. Chris is coming to visit me tomorrow, so this weekend should be pretty fun too!! Then I have a few boring, average weeks before my parents come up (but I'll probably spend some time catching up with my vet-school friends that I'm neglecting right now).

I actually finally cut myself with a scalpel in lab yesterday. To be honest, I'm pretty impressed that after an entire year of dissection, this is the first time I've done it!! It was a pretty tiny cut, so not a big deal (and yes mom, I cleaned it and disinfected it!).

I don't have any pictures from work or the weekend, so have updated pictures of my cat instead (these are already on facebook, but I'll put them here anyway):
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I am totally in love with this guy ^^. If my new roommate wasn't allergic, I'd probably keep him!!

So I've picked up yet another foster cat. I wasn't going to take another one for a couple of weeks, but the shelter has an outbreak of some kind of cat respiratory infection, and they're trying to get rid of all the sick cats before it spreads any further. If they can't find enough foster homes, they have to start euthanizing, so I gave up and took one in. Unfortunately, there's a chance that the infection he has can be spread to rats, so he's quarantined in Courtney's empty bedroom for the time being. He is not happy about this- every time he hears me and realizes I'm still in the apartment and not playing with him, he starts yowling :(. He's super sweet and loves belly rubs, but he's going to have to deal with living in Courtney's room and having me visit him a couple of times a day.

Work is still going well. I've mostly been working on website stuff for the past week, but I'm spending either Thursday or Friday cleaning a horse skeleton, so that will be a nice change (at least for me!). I'm also helping out with the vet camp that starts next week, doing a couple of anatomy presentations and I think a little histology as well, so I have lots to do!! I definitely haven't been bored at all this summer, and the time is really flying. I'm getting home very briefly in two weekends time for Mom's birthday party, so I'm really looking forward to that. I'm basically just flying home, going to the party and flying back, but it will still be nice to get to see everybody, even for a short time!!

I've also tracked down a new roommate for next year- a first year from the incoming class. It will be interesting to have a lower year roommate, and hopefully I'll get to know that class a little better than I know the classes above me (the class ahead of us didn't get along with each other, so they didn't make a whole lot of effort to get along with us either. I'm kind of hoping my class will make more of an effort!).

I'm looking forward to the day off tomorrow- I think I'll spend it painting :)

And here's some pictures of the new kitty:

( He has headlights for eyes )