I took this during a gelding a couple of weeks ago. For some reason it just struck me as being very beautiful. The outlining of the vein, the bright colors, the angle of the light. I suppose this is my repressed artist self coming out for a moment.

 Where am I? Sitting between the two back legs, holding one at the correct angle for the vet.

No, I'm not a serial killer.

I got invited to interview at Missouri! :)

Triplets!

I got to the farm this morning just in time to watch  a ewe, Pineapple, give birth to the first lamb of the season... and then two more! Who doesn't love cute baby lambs? :)

Regrets

This is one of those nights that, seeing everyone else out having fun for Halloween, I wish my life wasn't so busy and I didn't care so much about grades. Some things you can't get back, like time spent with those you love. Maybe I'm just feeling sentimental because I'm a senior, and I know that this coming Spring will see me separated from the friends whom I have made in college and who have made their way deep into my heart. But sometimes it's really hard to sit at home and work on my papers while everyone I know is at a gathering on campus, talking and laughing and enjoying themselves.

On the upside, I dressed up as a phospholipid for Halloween. I put on a hood that was polar-bear-esque in order to make the pun of having a "polar head" and covered myself in the chemical equation for a phosphatidylcholine phospholipid. Perhaps not super imaginative, but it did win me an extension on biochem assignments.

~Melissa

Good Morning!

It's a beautiful day here. The sun is slanting across my backyard, highlighting the tufts of white in the squirrels' tails as they leap from tree to tree. With the window cracked I can even hear the sound of one munching on a nut, something I liken to nails on a chalkboard. My chickies are running around, fluffing their feathers and stretching their wings. I think they might weigh a pound each now. And there goes Big Red, my beautiful Americauna rooster who crows his head off from 4 AM to noon. Jasmine is sitting next to my keyboard as I type, plaintively looking at me (she either wants more breakfast or pets, probably the latter).

It's nice to finally have a break to appreciate these things. This past week has been like heaven. I had an exam on Monday which concluded my six weeks of exams, and then it was like a weight was lifted off my shoulders. My workload has been light, and my birthday was on Friday. I received an invitation to watch a complicated gelding surgery, so I of course took that. It wasn't too involved; one testicle was where it should have been (just not dropped), while the other was  up in the flank. I ended up holding the back leg out, while Doc performed the procedure in a way to provide a really good view for his audience. Two of the pre-vet students joined me (and many more wanted to), and got their first taste of vet med. Both are thinking of doing equine vet med, and so it was a good experience for them. They also got to meet the woman who runs the rescue that the colt is on (someone who I am quite fond of), and Doc and Ms. S. One of the girls set up an interview with Doc to start riding along on Saturdays, which I think she will very much enjoy. Doc and Ms. S. invited the club out to his barn again this year for a hands-on equine dentistry wet lab (which we will definitely take advantage of!).

Later, Jared took me out to the Cheesecake Factory and the large mall in Towson, and his parents joined us. I thoroughly enjoy their company and will be missing the family fall birthday celebration tonight with them, so being able to spend some time with them made me feel a little better about that. It was a really nice night. We hardly get a chance to go anywhere, and I had never been to the C.F. out here, and only been to Towson mall twice. I ended up buying a really pretty dress at Macy's which I found out that the register was marked down even further than I thought, ending up only being $10! Jared bought me a really nice watch of a fancy brand I had never heard of, which I protested strongly (walmart watches are more my style) but am rather fond of. Not sure how often I will wear it though; I am rather afraid of hurting it.

Last night was my brother and I's combined B-day celebration with the family. It was a rowdy and loud time as usual, with a lot of bickering going on across the table! My mother prepared a wonderful meal (of course!) and everyone pigged out. She even made two cakes so Dale and I could each have our favorites. Dale got a shopping trip to get him some new professional clothes, and my mother bought me a 60 minute massage (woohoo!) and an engraved Littman Stethoscope. It is gorgeous and the sounds it produces are incredibly clear (much better than my cheap Amazon one). I seriously hope I get in to vet school or else I will have a very awesome stethoscope and no place to use it! (Jared suggested I could always hang it on the wall as motivation LOL). My mom's small animal vet went to VMRCVM and is apparently head of the program that helps first year vet students get settled... including what they need to bring. So she gave mom advice on which one to buy and to get it engraved (to prevent stealing). I keep meeting vets that graduated from there and they are all so enthusiastic and offer to "put in a good word" or are just outpouring about the program's strengths. I would be happy anywhere, but I would love to stay a bit closer to home, and I do love the school. Here's to hope!

Today (to conclude this long post) I am headed with the club to a small exotic rescue a couple towns over (only 20 mins from campus), and then later to a haunted scream park with my friends! Should be a fun AND beautiful day :)

~Melissa

The Best Thing

This semester has been great in that all of my science classes have been overlapping in really nice ways. Our second unit in Comparative Animal was on muscles, at the same time I was learning about muscle tissues in Human A &P, and just the other day we learned about the detailed bio-chemical aspects of muscles in Biochem. Even in strange things such as learning about crocodile's blood shunting abilities in CAP and then learning about BPG binding (or lack thereof) and hemoglobin affinity for bicarb in crocodile's in Biochem the very next class  (both of which are important factors in croc's ability to drown their prey). It's nice because I get completely different things and details in each course, and then some overlap which certainly helps with the studying.

And then there is my Native American Studies class. I love learning about the indigenous cultures here in America. More than that, I am intrinsically drawn towards learning about the social justice issues, racism and oppression going on in the Native communities. It inspired me to sign up to lead a week-long immersion trip to the Great Smoky Mountains in the Spring where we will be doing service projects and engaging in conversation with the Snowbird Cherokee. This is a new trip this year (also called alternative break trips), and I am trying to act as a bridge between the Native professor on campus and the Center for Public Service. In the past, the trips have been viewed as a bit of exploitation and "let's go see the Indians." I'm trying to re-vamp that and make it into a respectful and mutual atmosphere where students are made truly aware of the issues facing the native people in the Americas. I'm really excited about it (in case you can't tell), but it has also been taking up a lot of time.

A lot of exams and papers and readings lately (have 5 weeks straight of exams, then a week off and start over)... my grades have not been as good as they should be, but I only have so many hours in a day to study for exams on top of everything else. I've even been neglecting writing on here because it takes time!  Speaking of which... I need to go work on my bio paper and my NAS paper and my readings and that video I'm supposed to watch and studying for my exam on Tuesday and working on my biochem HW problems and oh yeah the three or four chapters in textbooks I'm supposed to have read by Monday...

At least its good practice for vet school. Which I may one day get into, and then put myself in debt for the rest of my life.

Happy Tails and Trails,

~Melissa

5 AM Surprises

I leave the window open at night because I like to sleep in the cold and burrow under blankets. This also normally means I wake up with the sun and Big Red's non-stop greeting of it.

This morning I woke up to a different type of chicken noise; a strangled squawking. This noise awoke me abruptly, and it sounded like it was receding into the distance by the time my fuzzy brain recognized it. I threw on my robe and flip flops, turned on the floodlights and went outside. My hens were in the pen, huddled in a corner of the coop, while Big Red was still sound asleep in the house. My two juvenile roosters were nowhere to be seen. I searched around their coop, and checked their house. They weren't in their usual perching spot. There were also no feathers that I could see. My best guess was one of the boys had gotten nabbed by a passerby fox, and the other had run into the corn field across the lane, or was hiding under some bushes. It was still pitch black outside and I wasn't about to go tramping through the corn calling for a chicken that may or may not be there and may or may not come to me.

So I shrugged and went back into the house. Once the sun came up and I had eaten my breakfast, I went back out to investigate. Standing in my backyard were both roosters, who came running up to me looking for food. The white one looked as if he was missing some tail feathers, and he had a strange burr on his belly, but had not a mark on him. There was a trail of white underfeathers spread around the coops and some in the front yard, but how much of it was there beforehand is impossible to determine.

I put an ad on my school digest this morning to try to find them a home. I guess I'm a sucker for a friendly chicken and some pretty tailfeathers. If no one wants them I suppose I'll get up the gumption to eat 'em one of these days but...I was almost hopeful the foxes had taken that decision out of my hands. Guess not. So there they sit, basking in the sunlight beneath the pine trees in my backyard, freely reining the yard since they refuse to stay in their pen and I'm too lazy to figure out a better way to keep them in.

~Melissa