Hearts, Food, and Gorilla Men

So...I figured I would start with a picture of the school's founder. I honestly think this man looks like a gorilla. I will let you form your own opinion, though...

Secondly, I've been lax in my vet school entries or any other entries for that matter, so here's another glimpse into my day. I spend the morning looking at fresh bull semen. It sounds riveting, I know, but that's not even the half of it. I will just say, I do not ever...EVER...want to be a semen evaluator. The reason for this revolves around pipetting technique. Here is the pipette we were using.It looks fairly innocuous, right?

WRONG!You see that little red piece on the end?
You apply suction to that end...with your mouth...
That's right...you are sucking up BULL SEMEN into a pipette WITH YOUR MOUTH!
What's to protect you if you suck too hard?Absolutely nothing...That was my morning.
I did spend a lab in the past couple of weeks cutting open a sheep heart. That was pretty cool. I'll put in a picture below. [Note: It's a little gory, so be prepared!]
Those little stringy looking things? Those are chordae tendinae or the so called "Heart Strings"!

I also spent a few hours looking at teeth!That is a very unattractive picture of me holding a lion's skull!Here is Kathy posing with a dolphin skull!

Here's me again with an elephant's molar. It probably weighed somewhere between 8 and 10 pounds!

I also got to take some pictures of the new school campus that will (hopefully) open next year. The vet hospital is up and running, and we're patiently waiting for them to finish the teaching building.Here's the school's flock of sheep that greet you as you drive into campus. By greet, I of course mean stare at you dumbly and/or run away.

This is the teaching building that's still in the works (estimated opening in 2011).

This is the animal hospital. Pretty spiffy!

Last but not least, I complain the food here at Pollock A LOT! I figure from now on, I will post a few pictures from dinner every day with a commentary on the meal. I also plan on keeping a running tally of nights they serve carrots (I would do potatoes, but they have those every night without fail)...You be the judge. If you would eat this, I'll complain less.

These are the scrambled eggs I have for breakfast every morning without fail because blood pudding, baked beans, and roasted tomatoes are not appealing breakfast foods. They aren't really appealing any time. Why are they grey, you ask? I have no clue...I just avoid those bits...

Tonight's Dinner:Crofter's Pie?I have no idea what this is, and it looked too much like baby diarrhea for me to want to try it...This was Spring Mash (Potatoes), Cheesy Pasta Bake, Carrots (Day 1...), and Chicken and Mushroom Casserole.

The potatoes and carrots were just that, no salt or butter. The chicken and mushroom casserole was composed of chicken...no mushrooms, nothing else to make it a casserole...just chicken that tasted like licorice was added to it...Yuck...
The cheesy pasta bake was the worst. The sauce tasted like they'd mixed water with a little milk and added some kind of thickener. There was no taste of cheese at all. On top of that, the sauce was chunky/gritty...Yuck...

Here's Emily looking thoroughly enthused about this french fry (chip), one of the few things that's edible night to night.

One last food-related note:Looks like pretty decent apple juice, maybe a little dark.
This glass is actually half apple juice, half water. The apple juice is so concentrated that the sugar could melt your teeth.

To end on a happy note...

BRAAIINNNZZZ!!!

*shuffles around like a zombie*

I have completely given up on counting days. It's the Thursday of the third week.

So the past couple of weeks have been Neurology and Cardiology, and I got to take some pretty cool pictures in lab after I cut open some poor sheep's brain. Needless to say, sheep have pretty small brains. It kind of makes me laugh now when Jesus calls us sheep, because we must seem pretty dumb.

So I figured I would put up some pictures of the school and our classroom, affectionately called "The Dungeon," because of its serious lack of windows and the perpetual chill. You know something is wrong when the class is wearing their winter jackets inside, but I think it's the schools way of torturing us and having a laugh...or some kind of scientific experiment to see if temperature impairs learning.

Here's Summerhall where most all my classes are. The building is rather pretty on the outside. Too bad by next October, it will be sold and torn down.
(Also note the beautiful Scottish weather...clouds + rain)

This is the entry stairwell with the pretty stained glass windows. The man in the window is William Dick, and he looks rather like a gorilla in my opinion. I'll have to get a closer picture for next time. One happy note, they are taking the stained glass windows with them when we move to the new vet campus out in the boonies.

This is The Dungeon (Evelyn Head Lecture Theatre). The chalkboards are really weird, they're made of some sort of fabric, like the pull-down projector screens. (When you look at this, you have to picture it with 3/4 of the lights off...dim and cold and creepy!)


Here's the dissecting room, which I think is the coolest room ever. Unfortunately, my lovely classmates are in the way of the big horse and cow skeletons at one end, but you get the idea.


And if you're wondering what's on all those big white trays.....




That's right! Brains! Sheep brains!
This one was about the size of my palm. There were some bigger ones, but still.
To give you a comparison, I think they said we have a brain that's like 1500 grams compared to a horse's 450 grams.

And here is a slice of brain. The lovely hand model is Nicole (I think).

And last but not least...


Here's some MRI scans from a dog with a really big tumor. I think it's cool. Do you love your dog enough to pay $2000 for an MRI?

Sleep... I wish,,,

Semester 2, Day 3

As everyone will note, I did not write yesterday all due to a chain of events that led to me not going to class. Second day of the semester and I didn't even show up. That has to be a record.

Chain of Events

1. Professor improperly timing his lectures so we had 2 hours for 30 minutes of material. Is 30 minutes of lecture incentive enough to get me out of bed at 7:45? Obviously not...

2. 2:30AM fire drill. Props to the ass who decided smashing the break glass and pushing the button was an awesome idea in the middle of the night in like 10 degree weather with snow and crap. I am 186% positive alcohol was involved considering the way teens drink over here. I'm not saying US college students drink any less, but here it's legal. They can do it publicly. Maybe it's to give everyone the chance to wash the taste of the food out of their mouths, but then, I would be going straight for the rubbing alcohol, none of this weak 150 proof crap.

3. My BEST friend in the WHOLE WIDE WORLD...the twat in our building who thinks kicking your door and shouting your name is an appropriate form of communication. I now know the girl two doors down is named Laura and that she's either a very deep sleeper or is never in at 4 AM on Monday or Tuesday mornings when my BEST FRIEND comes calling. Next time, I'm going have a paintball gun ready. Lets see if he comes around again when they can't walk straight. Inhibiting his ability to have children would be an added bonus.

[I would insert a picture of him here, but you all already know what an ass looks like...]

Thus, I did not go to class yesterday.

Needless to say, the night time disruptions left me sleeping until 3:30 in the afternoon and consequently awake until 6AM.

Hooray for 1.5 hours of sleep before class. I was definitely not a productive member.

On the plus, we did learn gross anatomy for the neurosystem. A topic they decided we could teach ourselves for the renal system. What am I paying for again? They should be paying me for all the teaching I have to do.

Anyway, after class was naptime until dinner and then a bunch of wasted time in between then and now.

There was some talking to my boy and catching up on shows in there as well, but I do believe my dour mood will remain until April when Glee returns... Ahhh...Glee...

The Dawn of a New Era...Or Just More Work...

I figure the first day of classes of the new semester is a fitting day to start a new blog. I was hoping to get this started at the beginning of the year, but with bureaucracy and 2 weeks of catch up, blogging just slipped to the wayside. Maybe writing will give me a little insight about school, life whatever. I hope so because when it comes to insight, I'm usually about as good as a white crayon in Antarctica

Semester 2, Day 1

So we spent the morning in class learning about neurotransmission in the brain. Honestly, I have little love for the professor because of his previous comments about the state of my character, but neurotransmission itself is pretty friggin' sweet. The only reason I say that is because it's one of those intricate little beauties that makes me stop and think, "Wow, God, that was some pretty cool crap you made up." I mean...the whole concept is based upon an equilibrium of two other separate equilibriums, concentration and charge. For those who don't know or just want a refresher course in diffusion, things like to equal out on two sides of a membrane. Think of a party. It works best if the guests are spread out between all the rooms. Getting stuck in the room by yourself with the gangly guy who looks like he did a faceplant in the stretch of life called puberty is super awkward, especially if everyone else is in the other room. On the other hand, you have charge. Positives hate each other, negatives hate each other, but positives and negatives are inseparable. So, if you get a bunch of positives together on one side of the membrane, a few of them try to escape to the other side until it's fairly balanced out. In neurotransmission, all these things play like mega twister until everything balances out and you can get nerve impulses. Pretty cool if you ask me.

An Action Potential (Like I said...Friggin' Sweet!)

Of course...we had two lectures this morning with that professor and are supposed to be expecting 2 more tomorrow. I count 4 lectures...I could be wrong, but I think it's four (And no, Mom, in this case, 4 really means 4). He gave us 18 pages of notes, so I assumed we would get through 9 pages today and 9 pages tomorrow. You know, split things up evenly. Noooooooo...... Of course we can't divide properly. We went through 15 pages today leaving 4 pages for the 2 hours of class tomorrow. So I ask myself...is it really worth getting up at 7am to go to what will turn out to be 3o minutes of class for the entire day? The little devil on my shoulder gives a big resounding "NO!" Of course, the angel on my other shoulder completely agreed, so I don't think I'll bother wasting my time and sleep for 30 minutes of crap I can teach myself.

Last but not least, I spent the last 4 hours of my school day standing ankle deep in hay and cow patties learning about calf husbandry. Granted, the calves are really cute if you can ignore the diarrhea caking their entire back ends. Crap that's probably laden with nasty little buggers like Crypto and Lord knows what else waiting to ambush me and give me a semi-permanent case of the ups and the outs. Oh Joy! Not to mention that it was colder than a witch's tit out in the middle of nowhere Scotland. (Thank you, Mr. Randy and Mr. Joe for pulling that little phrase to the forefront of my brain!) My toes had become poor little toecicles long before we were able to go inside.







Aww....Look how cute they are! You want to take one home don't you!


Then, you see this end...

A note on cow breeds... To me, a cow is a cow is a cow... They're all big and smelly and something I never ever have to work with again. Sheep breeds are a different story. I sort my sheep into two categories: Big Pains in the Ass I Have No Chance of Flipping...Ever (BPAIHNCOF...E) and Small Buggers Who I can Flip but Are No Less of a Pain in the Ass (SMWICFANLPA). I hope the recognize my acronyms on the test. If not, you all can enlighten them.

Brown Cow White Cow

Holy Cow!
That is the extent of my cow identification.

SMWICFANLPA

BPAIHNCOF...E

That was the entirety of my school day...

I then came home, ate some more of the worst food imaginable (...Well maybe not imaginable, but, believe me, the food sucks. I'll rant about that some other day), wasted a bunch of time playing Freecell and Mahjong, and finally talked to my Darling who's jetsetting about sitting for interviews and some such.

He was sweet enough to give me the address to his blog, a space I had wanted to reserve for him and his writings and rantings. For some reason, he wanted me to have it. His entries made me laugh...and cry...(Don't tell him that, he'll get upset...), but they really made me feel loved... Well, one made me feel like a horrible girlfriend (I'll have to apologize later...), but mostly they made me feel loved. It does cheer me up a little to know that, stuck over here as I am in SUNNY Scotland in a WONDERFUL program... Yay....

Look, there he is making a retarded face. Just like in every other picture I took of us together.
...Boys...

I've now decided to design a font that will solely be used to represent sarcasm in text. Be prepared for my literary break through soon.