Discombobulated.

I've been feeling a little out of sorts the past couple of days. Part of the problem is that I'm going to bed later than I should, at least for the amount of sleep my body/brain requires. The other part of the problem is that I'm not studying enough, or at least I feel that way. The sleep thing is correctable - just talk to Danny earlier in the evening so I can go to bed earlier - but it ties in with the second problem.

On most days (except Friday) I get home around 5pm. I usually take some time to decompress from classes, either by poking around on some of my favorite websites or chatting with my neighbors. By that time it's 5:30ish. I then get some stuff out to study, but by 6pm I'm thinking about dinner because I try to eat dinner earlier rather than later. I'm good about making a fast dinner, but I usually don't retain all that much information while eating anyway, if I bother to try. So that puts me at 6:30pm. I study some more, anywhere from an hour to two hours (maybe), then take a shower, call Danny and go to bed. So on my more productive nights I'm only getting in maybe two hours of studying. Which doesn't feel like enough.

To be honest, I don't feel behind in the material (except anatomy) and in that case, I don't need to panic. But I know that over Thanksgiving break I'm going to want to spend time with Danny and not study, which means I need to be studying my butt off this week and next in preparation. And to be honest, I just feel like I should work harder! So my new plan of attack is to cut down my decompression time to maybe 15mins when I get home, study straight until 7:00pm, make dinner/eat as a little break, study another 30mins-1hr and then shower. Depending on the day, I should be able to get at least 2hrs if not more in every night instead of maxing out at 2hrs. Let's see if this makes me feel any better.

Weekend

Friday after class I studied physiology. I meant to study all night but then one of my neighbors texted me and asked me over to watch a movie so I did that instead. We watched Bridesmaids which wasn't all that bad. So we didn't finish the movie until around 11pm and then I came home and talked to Danny until at least midnight my time. I meant to go to bed right after that but watched a little TV on my iPad and turned it off around 12:45am! Yikes. So instead of going to the vet school's open house today, I slept in until 10am. Not going to lie, it was wonderful to catch up on sleep.

Around lunchtime I packed Ella into the truck and took her along to do a couple of errands. I went to the bank and got some cash (so I have change for laundry tomorrow), had some Wendy's for lunch and got gas. I haven't had junk food in a long, long time and while that's a good thing, I was really craving some, so I'm happy now. At the gas station I filled up my tank for about the same cost as last time - just under $100. I calculated that I'm getting about 18.5mi/gallon (3.78L per gallon). This is the first time I've filled up in just over three weeks, so hopefully I can keep that trend going and stay under my gas budget. (I've been really good at staying under budget for everything :)

Anyway, mussle (mussel?) bake is at our place tonight. I did a little cleaning in case people need to come in to use the bathroom but it's going to be outdoors around our firepit. I was afraid it would rain today (it was super foggy even through the afternoon!) but it looks as though it will hold off. Which is a good thing, because there is no way 20 people will fit in any one of our houses!

Four things

Aside from the time I was sick, I've yet to have a legitimately bad day up here (knock on wood!). Most days are just regular days but some days are actually actively good days, if that makes sense. There were four things that made today a good day:

1. No immunology! While the material itself might be very interesting, the way it is arranged and presented...just don't do it justice, shall I say? Today might have been a very bad day because we had two scheduled hours of immunology but it was cancelled entirely at the last minute. Therefore instead of struggling through any immunology lecture, I was able to come home and study some physiology. Yay, producivity.

2. Gross pathology rounds! After a couple weeks of having cancelled gross path rounds, the first ones were finally today. The unfortuante part was being late. My anatomy group had to stay a little later than normal to skin our dog's other rear leg because the one we're supposed to be using is black and smelly and crusty. So we were told to see if the other leg was use-able - which it is! - which required skinning it and thus more time. But I did make it to gross path rounds and saw some interesting tissue presentations. I prefer entire necropsies myself, but it was still interesting. If I can remember what the diseases were called, I could look them up. I wonder if Google deals with phonetics?

3. Dr. Pack! One of the college's radiologists, Dr. Pack has been integrated into our anatomy lectures. She's from Louisiana and nothing makes me feel better/less homesick than hearing her accent and experiencing her personality. She reminds me of my southern family members and it's just delightful. Not to mention the woman is freaking hilarious.

4. Free food! I bought a bag of chips from the vending machine in the cafeteria and on the back was a sticker entitling me to all I can eat food at the dining hall. Not that I can eat that much, but maybe I'll hike my butt over there one day at lunch and stuff myself enough to hold over until breakfast.

So yeah. Good day :)

One month down.

Today marks one month on the island for me; I siumultaneously can't believe it's only been a month and that it even has been a month since I started vet school. Even though I've been in school (and working hard!) since the end of August, it's starting to feel like fall around here: days are getting noticably shorter, nights are cold, mornings require hoodies, the crops are harvested and I get stuck behind school buses on the way to class. The island is even more ahead of the game with cheesy fall decorations than back home, but I love that stuff so it's been nice to watch the pumpkins and scarecrows start to make their appearances. And then I look at the calendar and realize September is almost gone and it's like holy crap, where does the time go!?

School is going suspiciously well. I feel like I'm keeping up with the material but also balancing studying with sleep and fun. I wish we had some kind of quiz or test so we could gauge our knowledge of the material and I could see if I'm studying enough but I guess I'll just have to keep up my studying and wait until midterms. Kind of scary, but oh well. I also think I need to modify my strategy a little so that I'm taking notes from my typed notes at the end of the day. Reading over typed notes isn't all that good for studying.

Sick

Back home (I find it hilarious that I refer to it this way), I never got sick during the semester. It was almost like my body knew that I was just too damn busy to be sick. That mean that I'd get sick nearly instantaneously on breaks, but I'd rather be sick a couple days when I was relaxing anyway than sick during school with a ton of things on my plate.

Well, my immune system has decided it doesn't like something up here and I've been coughing like crazy the past two days. I wake up this morning feeling like a sack of lead with my eyes all puffy, aching everywhere, exhausted...and still coughing. So I took my neighbor up on her offer to take notes in immunology for me and went back to sleep. I still have to go to structure and function this afternoon (maybe I can be the disease for the day and my group can make a flow chart out of me?) because they take attendance and there's always a lot of information coming at you, so I don't want to get behind. I also have to drop off my check to pay the remaining balance on my tuition. So off I go to class - hopefully I don't infect anyone else.

Pathology!

Today was my first club-related activity: clinical pathology rounds! When club day came along last week, I signed up for three clubs but will be dropping one so it ends up being the pathology club and the lab animal club that I'm a member of. I chose lab animal because that is my main interest but I added pathology because necropsy has always fascinated me. What I didn't realize is the role that histology plays within pathology. And guess what my favorite class by far is this semester? Histology! So it was kind of like the perfect storm of a club for me, haha.

I got to sleep in today because our farm animal field trips are only every other Wednesday. I did an hour or so of studying this morning (I really need to do more, I think, but that's another post), stopped by the gas station to fill up my two low tires and went to the clinical pathology rounds. The club's advisor is a clinical pathologist and professor at the school and she's the one that heads up the "rounds". She brought two papers for us: one on how to make/analyze a proper blood smear and the other with three real cases that had come through the teaching hospital. Apparently we do one hemotological (blood) and one cytological (tissue). So we got the blood work results as well as the blood smear from the first case and got to talk about regenerative anemia, which was a big part of my structure and function class later in the afternoon! It was really awesome to have it all start to come together. Not to mention that because I love histology, looking at slides was fun.

Anyway, as I said I have some studying to do. Gross pathology rounds are tomorrow afternoon, though; I hope they're as much fun/helpful as the clinical ones were today!

Another one bites the dust

It feels like yesterday was Labor Day weekend and I was clamming and studying and all that jazz. In fact, it is one week later! Suffice to say that the days are absolutely flying by. I've got the basic outlines of a routine happening here at home: wake up, let Ella out, make breakfast, pack lunch, pack backpack for the day. Head to classes, sit through classes, come home, review notes for day's lectures and next day's lectures, make dinner, shower, talk to Danny/family, go to sleep. That's just the basic scaffold of what I expect my days to become, though, once club meetings start up (pathology rounds are at 4:30pm on Thursday) and fourth year student presentations begin. While so much has happened, there is still so much left to do and see.

I started my weekend in the anatomy lab for the second time (it'd be great to get into the habit of going once during the week and once on weekends on top of scheduled lab times) and let me tell you, it made me feel great. I flew through the muscles of the thoracic limb on the cadaver limbs as well as the plastinated limbs provided by the instructors in the lab. I feel like I'm really getting it which is an awesome feeling to have.

After that I went home, gathered my laundry and took myself and my neighbor to the nearby laundromat. We had lunch at the little restaurant next door while our washers ran and then studied a little while the dryers ran. Unfortunately, either because I put it all in one dryer load or because the dryers are crappy, most of my clothes are still damp. So I hung them up in the bathroom with my fan blowing on them to dry, haha.

That's about all I have to update about. It just started to pour here so I'm going to spend the rest of the afternoon indoors wrapped in a blanket studying. I have a new strategey I'd like to add to my repetoire.

In which I go clamming.

I have so much to blog about lately because so much has been going on in my life, it's ridiculous.

Sunday at the dog park was a relative bust because it wasn't actually a dog park. It was something like a large, uncultivated field with a weird paved part up the middle that went on for about a mile. Unfortunately, I carpooled there with my roommate so I felt bad turning back once I realized it was not the place for Ella. She is an old, old dog who cannot (and does not want) to walk for long stretches at a time. So we took turns carrying her to the meeting spot which was basically just the place where the grass met the edge of a beautiful body of water. Ella was polite but obviously wondering WTF we were doing there. There was no shade and it was hot. I'm oversensitive about Ella because she's old and has a heart murmur and bad hips and all that jazz and I really don't want to stress her more than I can avoid. So we turned back after only a couple of minutes but it worked out because everyone else there left too. Oh well.

Monday was an adventure. My alarm went off at 6:30am ("Why is my alarm going off?" I wondered as I groped for it in the dark) and I got dressed and forced some oatmeal down my throat. I bounded (stumbled, groggily) down the front steps and hopped (climbed awkwardly) into the front bench of my Canadian neighbor's boyfriend's truck. My American neighbor, Canadian neighbor and said boyfriend were already waiting for me. We headed off to the beach on a quest for clams!

You may be wondering to yourself, what does one need to go clamming? Our materials included a garden hoe, a couple five gallon buckets and our bare hands. Off through the countryside we drove, stopping at a couple different beaches to dig around. Unfortunately for us and fortunately for the clams, we couldn't find any. So we went to a couple different barns that my Canadian neighbor was associated with on the way to her parents for a barbecue. At one of the barns lived a beautiful pair of black Percherons, 18.3hh! (For those unfamiliar with horses, one hand = 4in, so these guys were well over 6ft at the shoulder). I met my first Norwegian Fjord horse at the last barn. A good day for ponies, if not clams :) We rounded out the day with lunch at Canadian neighbor's parents' house. It was a beautiful house a stone's throw from a gorgeous private beach - so jealous.

I spent the evening listening to my Maryland Terps play (and win!) their opening football game against Miami. It was a good way to end my first weekend on my own here in Canada.

Weekend Shenanigans

I woke up bright and early Saturday morning at met some fellow students at the anatomy lab around 9:30. We spent about an hour and half there and I felt reassured with my knowledge level. We also managed to take some good pictures for studying! Anyway, coupled with the studying I did on Friday evening, I had a very virtuous start to the weekend. The rest of yesterday was slightly less productive in the academic sense. I watched about an hour's worth of Youtube videos on the immune system (at least as far as we've gotten in class) which was helpful if not the most vigorous studying I've ever done. I did manage to do two-thirds of the dishes and vacuum the house though, so that counts for something, right?

The real fun began when I picked up two class mates and headed out to an orientation event at Red Shores racetrack! Unlike back home, racing here is done with Standardbreds instead of Thoroughbreds and they trot (or pace) and pull a cart behind them instead of being ridden. I've been to a couple Standardbred races before so that aspect wasn't new, but the special treatment was! The class had reserved the little clubhouse at the in-field: three stories, right in front of the finish line with a bathroom, bar, great view and its very own betting station. Unfortunately my instincts were of little help last night so I didn't make anything but it was great fun and for the first time I really felt like a part of the group. (Probably helped that I knew how to read the racing form!)

Today has been lazy so far: I read my book, which had nothing to do with vet stuff and talked to my sister and my mom on Skype. I'm leaving in an hour to take Ella to the last official orientation event this week which is the meeting at the dog park! Ella isn't exactly a social butterfly but she does like to watch dogs interact and meet people, so it should be fun. Only planning on staying an hour and then back home to do some real studying. All in all a good weekend thus far.

It's Friday!

I survived my first week of vet school. To be honest, it isn't as much of an accomplishment as it might seem outwardly; a couple classes were just an introduction with syllabus and then we were let go, we got out early today, the material is there but not quite as intense as I imagine it will become, there were no tests. It likely isn't a "typical vet school week" by any stretch of the imagination but it's one behind me!

So my first weekend is coming up. The first weekend entirely alone, without Danny or my sister or my family or friends and it's a bit daunting. I'm hoping that if I can keep myself busy it should go by without the feeling of actually being alone. Keeping busy shouldn't be hard either - I have laundry to do (and then put away), cleaning to do (vacuuming and cleaning dishes mostly), two orientation events and studying, of course! In fact, I was invited to the anatomy lab bright and early tomorrow morning to do some doggie review, so that's a start. Then it's a night at the races at 6:30pm, and the dog park tomorrow. I'll get the chores and extra studying in there, too. The one thing I'm looking forward to the most (even more than sleeping in!) is the chance to read for pleasure in the silence of my little cabin. That will be the true reward :)