break time
Tomorrow instead of going to class I get to stay home and sleep in because it's the start of our two-week vacation! Well, I don't really get to sleep in because I have to be at the hospital at 8am to give platelets. And it's not really a vacation because I have to work my butt off to try to get caught up on all my study and assignments, because the second half of the semester is really scary.
But at least I don't have to go to class!
I did not study at all this weekend, figuring that I deserved at least a couple days of actual break before I get down to it. So Thursday night (yeah, I know, not really the weekend but we only had four lectures on Friday that I didn't need to be too awake for anyway) I went possum-hunting with Richard and Leith! It was reeeeally cool. We went to a forest near campus that has a couple good hiking trails and did this one called the K-Loop, which goes up along the edge of some farmland and then back down through the woods; started around 8:30pm and it took us about three and a half hours, but we were walking slowly for most of it because we were searching for possums. And we found 'em! Five of them, but two had babies so really we killed seven possums. Remember that possums do not belong in New Zealand and are evil and destroy the native flora and fauna. Plus they have really luxurious fur (these are fluffy Australian brush-tailed possums, not ugly North American opossums), and you can pluck out the fur immediately after killing them and sell it for about $110/kg. Our five possums yielded about half a pound of fur, but after a few more trips we will have enough to be worth selling. So it was a fun night of hiking and spotting possums. I even shot one myself (after Richard shot it first but it wasn't quite dead, so he let me shoot it in the head to finish it off).
Friday night was also fun, it was the Alpine Club's Annual Dinner, which is our formal dinner where we eat a nice meal and have a guest speaker and give out awards. We had an entire restaurant booked out, and the food (Italian) was excellent. The speaker was also excellent, it was a guy named Clive Jones who has climbed Mt. Everest and many other big mountains; he mostly talked about Everest and had really cool photos. The awards were good too, Hank got an award for Best Dog (he has been on several club trips), but I had to accept it for him since he wasn't allowed in the restaurant. I also got a small award for services to the club. It was also Russell's birthday that night, so I had made him a two-layer chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting (I even put writing on it!) and it was mostly shared out to people sitting around us. It was yummy. After dinner we went down to a bar in the restaurant basement, which was very crowded and had a DJ playing very loud techno music that people were dancing to. I eventually got into the dancing as there was nothing else to do and no way to have a conversation with anyone, but I was happy enough when we left to go to the Celtic. There was a live band there but it was at a reasonable volume. We hung out there until the bar closed at 2:30am, then we crammed six drunken people plus myself as driver into a station wagon and I drove around dropping people off all over town.
Didn't do much of anything Saturday, mainly due to not getting out of bed until like 1pm and then going back to bed at about 7pm. Today I had agreed to drive Sara to the airport in Wellington, which was fun because Leith and Kay came along and we made a day trip of it after dropping Sara off. We went to Wellington Zoo, which is small but was neat because Kay did volunteer work there, so she knew all the animals' names and could tell us all sorts of stuff about them. Then we went to Lush and I bought a bath bomb, and then we got gelato.
Tomorrow I must crack down on the studying. After giving platelets that is. For purposes of reminding myself, here are the things I must do in the next two weeks, in order of priority:
-read a kajillion articles about a drug called pimobendan and write a 1500-word summary of its effects on dogs that have congestive heart failure due to dysfunction of myocardial contractility
-review and memorize everything about all the bacteria we've been taught in the last semester-and-a-half of microbiology
-answer nine questions about bovine and equine obstetrics in 300-500 words each
-review and start to memorize all the drugs we've been taught in the last semester-and-a-half of pharmacology
-study for the parasitology test that is on the Tuesday we get back
-study for the poultry/fish/wildlife management test that is on the Thursday we get back
-meet with my group for the poultry/fish/wildlife poster project, decide on a topic, research it, and mostly do the poster
-study some virology
-study some pathology
That should keep me busy.
But at least I don't have to go to class!
I did not study at all this weekend, figuring that I deserved at least a couple days of actual break before I get down to it. So Thursday night (yeah, I know, not really the weekend but we only had four lectures on Friday that I didn't need to be too awake for anyway) I went possum-hunting with Richard and Leith! It was reeeeally cool. We went to a forest near campus that has a couple good hiking trails and did this one called the K-Loop, which goes up along the edge of some farmland and then back down through the woods; started around 8:30pm and it took us about three and a half hours, but we were walking slowly for most of it because we were searching for possums. And we found 'em! Five of them, but two had babies so really we killed seven possums. Remember that possums do not belong in New Zealand and are evil and destroy the native flora and fauna. Plus they have really luxurious fur (these are fluffy Australian brush-tailed possums, not ugly North American opossums), and you can pluck out the fur immediately after killing them and sell it for about $110/kg. Our five possums yielded about half a pound of fur, but after a few more trips we will have enough to be worth selling. So it was a fun night of hiking and spotting possums. I even shot one myself (after Richard shot it first but it wasn't quite dead, so he let me shoot it in the head to finish it off).
Friday night was also fun, it was the Alpine Club's Annual Dinner, which is our formal dinner where we eat a nice meal and have a guest speaker and give out awards. We had an entire restaurant booked out, and the food (Italian) was excellent. The speaker was also excellent, it was a guy named Clive Jones who has climbed Mt. Everest and many other big mountains; he mostly talked about Everest and had really cool photos. The awards were good too, Hank got an award for Best Dog (he has been on several club trips), but I had to accept it for him since he wasn't allowed in the restaurant. I also got a small award for services to the club. It was also Russell's birthday that night, so I had made him a two-layer chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting (I even put writing on it!) and it was mostly shared out to people sitting around us. It was yummy. After dinner we went down to a bar in the restaurant basement, which was very crowded and had a DJ playing very loud techno music that people were dancing to. I eventually got into the dancing as there was nothing else to do and no way to have a conversation with anyone, but I was happy enough when we left to go to the Celtic. There was a live band there but it was at a reasonable volume. We hung out there until the bar closed at 2:30am, then we crammed six drunken people plus myself as driver into a station wagon and I drove around dropping people off all over town.
Didn't do much of anything Saturday, mainly due to not getting out of bed until like 1pm and then going back to bed at about 7pm. Today I had agreed to drive Sara to the airport in Wellington, which was fun because Leith and Kay came along and we made a day trip of it after dropping Sara off. We went to Wellington Zoo, which is small but was neat because Kay did volunteer work there, so she knew all the animals' names and could tell us all sorts of stuff about them. Then we went to Lush and I bought a bath bomb, and then we got gelato.
Tomorrow I must crack down on the studying. After giving platelets that is. For purposes of reminding myself, here are the things I must do in the next two weeks, in order of priority:
-read a kajillion articles about a drug called pimobendan and write a 1500-word summary of its effects on dogs that have congestive heart failure due to dysfunction of myocardial contractility
-review and memorize everything about all the bacteria we've been taught in the last semester-and-a-half of microbiology
-answer nine questions about bovine and equine obstetrics in 300-500 words each
-review and start to memorize all the drugs we've been taught in the last semester-and-a-half of pharmacology
-study for the parasitology test that is on the Tuesday we get back
-study for the poultry/fish/wildlife management test that is on the Thursday we get back
-meet with my group for the poultry/fish/wildlife poster project, decide on a topic, research it, and mostly do the poster
-study some virology
-study some pathology
That should keep me busy.