One week of rotations down and as expected it's been pretty busy. I'm on large animal medicine and it's been quite the learning experience - some clinical skills, some communication skills, plenty of humbling moments. The clinicians and my rotation-mates are all awesome people and I've been enjoying myself.

On the down side, Danny and I are apart again :( We're looking at Labor Day weekend for our next visit but we may be able to squeak in some time together in mid-August (fingers crossed!) Fortunately rotations have been keeping me pretty darn busy so hopefully that time will pass quickly.

Since rotations have been so hectic, I haven't had time to unpack at all and my new apartment is a bit askew. The plan is to get it in order this weekend but so far I've just managed to watch TV and peruse the internet in my pajamas....oops.

The week before I go back to school always goes by so quickly. I know I've said it a million times, but I really can't wait to be done with the traveling phase of my life. Plenty of people consider it a great adventure to travel and tell me how envious they are that I live this "international life" but I've always been more of a homebody sort. I take a lot of joy in the little mundane things of everyday life that I've missed out on over the last three years, especially with Danny. The level of happiness I will attain when we finally (finally) get our own place is almost unfathomable to me right now. The day when I no longer have the next moving deadline ahead of me, or when my friends and family don't have to ask "when do you go back?" will be a happy one indeed.

I've mentioned how there are so many things I want to do after I graduate (aside from the whole residency/career thing, heh); yesterday I got to do one of those things! Danny and I volunteered through his work to help out with the DC area Summer Special Olympics. The company he works for is a big sponsor of the event and provide many of the ridiculous number of volunteers. So yesterday we worked together as "delegation support" and helped the athletes from one particular school get to their events on time. The kids were awesome and the coaches were nice and really appreciative of our help. We had a great time being involved and even though Danny has helped out there before, I think he enjoyed himself even more because he got to be more involved than he has in years past. All in all a really rewarding experience. I can't wait to do more volunteer stuff :)

Anyway, I have more stuff I need to go through and pack. Unfortunately the weather is looking like rain on our way up on Friday/Saturday and I'm bringing a mattress and box-spring in the (open) bed of my truck, ugh. So logistics need to be happening too, but right now I'm just concerned with picking out what I need to bring and trying to get it together. Just a couple more days...

Danny and I celebrated our first anniversary this weekend by having a bit of a "staycation" in Arlington, VA. We stayed at a nice hotel overlooking the Pentagon and Jefferson Memorial and took the Metro in to dinner at a steak place. Danny's best friend knew where we were going and paid for our dinner without us knowing, which was so sweet :) We had a couple of drinks out on the hotel bar's terrace and just talked for a while.

On Sunday we packed up/checked out and went to Arlington National Cemetery which I have always wanted to visit but never have despite living 30mins away my entire life. So we spent the afternoon wandering around, seeing JFK's family plot, Arlington House where part of George Washington's family lived and where Robert E. Lee and his wife spent some time and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (including changing of the guard). It could not have been a more perfect day weather-wise and I love to meander through cemeteries of any sort (they're so peaceful to me). So all in all it was a great weekend.

The sad part is that I leave for fourth year rotations bright and early Friday morning. Danny is driving me up (because I have more stuff than usual due to my new place not being furnished and I need his help to move my bed in) but leaving Monday afternoon :( While I only have six months left of school up north, I have a feeling is going to be extra-tough because I'll be a lot busier and there will be less time that we can squeeze a visit in. No use crying over spilled milk (or milk that is destined to be spilled?) but it still makes me sad. I know I'll be beyond happy to come home for good though, so there's that.

Almost as bad as having to say goodbye to Danny again is the packing/moving. I don't even know how many times I've moved since I left for college back in 2006 but it's been that many times too many. I'm in the process of digging through my old, boxed up stuff now to see what I can bring up north but I want to bring the bare minimum to minimize what I have to turn around and bring back. Ugh. The week will go by quickly, that's for sure.

Okay, so I posted yesterday about considering a new direction for my blog now that patient confidentiality, client privacy, public scrutiny and all that kind of fun thing is a bigger part of my life now. But where to start?

I find so many things out there in the world to be fascinating that I don't think my blog could ever be a one pony show. There are so many wonderful blogs floating around the vast space of the interwebz devoted to a particular topic - cooking, health/fitness, schooling of various ilks, DIYing, parenting, etc - and they're really useful for when you want a step-by-step tutorial on how to bake perfect raw quinoa pies or how to build your very own rain barrel or whatever. The photography is always flawless, the people are always these superstar women (from what I've noticed, anyway; must have to do with our love of babbling) and I always get insanely jealous of their beautifully honed talent, no matter what it is.

If you hadn't guessed from the off-topic rambles I sneak it from time to time, I have an idealist streak. I fall in love with certain ideas and ways of living and I want to be those people from the blogs who have this amazing ability to do whatever it is that they do (the astoundingly photogenic nature of their everyday lives is another perhaps more superficial want of mine, but I digress). I have a handful of broad ideas that I want to incorporate into my life that all very loosely fit into the concept of "modern homesteading." Which means I want to have a compost bin and raise chickens and make my own furniture and learn how to quilt and plant gardens full of herbs and vegetables to make amazingfood from and also be a badass home-maker/wife/mother that is still an independent woman. (See? What part of my brain does this stuff even come from!?)

And really, everything that I want to do with my life (this homesteading business and writing again and volunteering and running and photography and whatever the hell else comes my way that I take a fancy to) just has to...wait. Because vet school isn't over yet. And as much as I'll be glad to graduate and be a vet and stuff, I do worry that I won't ever make the time to do all of this pie-in-the-sky stuff that I so badly want. I don't want to be a suburban mom that drives a mini-van and works all day and comes home and repeats the cycle ad nauseum until I'm 60 and then wake up one morning and say to myself, "Well shit. I never did learn how to make jam out of those weeds that grow in the backyard." or whatever else it is that I could learn how to do.

And so (good gracious I'm rambling), I don't know what will become of this blog. I hope I can write about my life outside of vet med and show people like myself in twenty years that you can be a vet and a real person, too and realize your dreams outside of vet med. Because what the hell good is it to have one dream in life that you accomplish when you're 25 or whatever and then you're done? I'm not going to become complacent and you shouldn't either.

I came here all excited to talk about my day shadowing at a nearby institution. Over the last few weeks, though, I've realized that the further along I get on my career path and the more involved I become in the work, the people, etc...the less I should be writing about these things. I suppose if I had chosen a more traditional veterinary route it wouldn't be such a big deal to talk non-specifically about cases I'd seen. With the nature of lab animal being the way it is though (the public eye especially), it's not really appropriate for me to talk about where I'm going, what I'm doing, with whom...even though it excites me to no end. (A blog topic for another time might be where I go with this blog, as I won't really be able to update it like I have been in school. Maybe more about my "real" life outside vet med? Who knows.)

So suffice to say I had a really cool day at this place and learned a lot. One of the things I learned is that I really do want to do the clinical side of things and less-so the research part. To get board certified for lab animal medicine you need a primary authorship, so it's definitely something I'll have to participate in. And of course I'll be part of it with IACUC and the like as a vet. But my previous mumblings on maybe getting a PhD while I'm there? Not so much on my radar anymore. I think research is vital and awesome and I really admire those who do it on a daily basis for like, their whole careers. But I want be the person applying the findings to the clinical setting, or to the regulatory aspect of lab animals.

My break is winding down and there still seems like so much to do. The biggest thing is to sort through all of my stuff and figure out what I'll bring up with me and what I'll leave behind. For only six months in the apartment I want to be darn sure that every thing I bring up is absolutely necessary; it'll be a spartan lifestyle for me but that's okay.

Definitely looking forward to this weekend as well: Danny and I will be celebrating our first wedding anniversary :)

Vacation continues along much the same.

On the visiting front: On Thursday, I visited my old place of employment and the coworkers who are like family to me. My supervisor has been back full-time since about February (after her crazy hospital stay) and her spirits are so much better! They're awaiting their AAALAC accreditation visit (which I helped with!) later this summer and are looking forward to a new facility (to start construction in about a year's time)! The current building will be demolished, which is sad, but the facilities they'll move into will be AWESOME and as they're expecting about a three year construction period, it's a secret hope of mind that they'll be looking for another veterinarian. That would be my dream job :)

On Friday, I had a girly day with my sister. We got our eyebrows done and pedicures, caught up on each other's lives over Cheesecake Factory lunch and shopped for new clothes for my rotations. I'm not the stereotypical shopping woman, so it took a lot out of me to even get the few things that I did! I also got to visit with my dog-niece (Trudy the Boston Terrier) before heading back home.

This weekend was a busy one, too. Danny and I headed out to where he lives when I'm not around so that he could cut their grass (they're out of town); I read one of the four books I picked up at the library earlier in the week (Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, which is of course wonderful, as it was written by MA). I thought of all the people I know that say they just don't have time to read for pleasure during the school year (to which I always mentally reply, "I make time!" because really, I can't not read for pleasure. Pretty sure I am always reading something.) and hoped they were finding more time to read because it is so very wonderful. I also picked up Dan Brown's Inferno which I started this morning, a new Barbara Kingsolver book (The Poisonwood Bible and a couple others having made a good impression of her to me) and another new thing by someone I don't know (I rarely read for the author, despite having chosen the previous three by their authors alone...hm). I'm not sure I'll be able to finish them all in the two weeks I have left, but I'm certainly trying as the weather is perfect sit-outside-and-read weather.

(Not sure how this got derailed into an "I love books!" post. All we need now is a lab animal segue...)


Saturday night was filled with more friend visiting, as tends to happen on my breaks.

Sunday was a beautiful day for Mother's Day - sunny and warm and spring-like - and we went out to a late lunch at a new place in Frederick (Firestone's) for some excellent food and a beautiful second-storey corner table with a view of the bustling street below. Downtown Frederick is really dog-friendly so we saw tons of beasts out enjoying the nice weather. Danny (with a bit of help from me) had made a new dish for my mom's birdbath (the other had split in half completely unexpectedly earlier in the week) using cement and some plant trays for a mold and damn if it didn't turn out well! I think the feeder locals are still a bit suspicious but a lady sparrow or two have christened it already so hopefully the rest of the neighborhood will soon catch on.

Lots of babbling on my part, per usual. I'm looking forward to starting back at school just so I can get into it and be done, but I'm trying to enjoy the last true time off I'll be having for a good long while.

Today is the first official day of fourth year! Most of my classmates have updated Facebook with some sort of status update, but seeing as my first block is a vacation, I'd feel a little silly doing the same. Still, it's amazing to think that in three weeks time, I will kick off my own fourth year properly with large animal medicine.

So far vacation has gone nicely. Typically when I get home, I make myself a general to-do list so I don't forget any of the myriad of things I need to get done while back in the States. Laundry is always first followed by visiting with friends and coworkers, having a girly day with my sister (the only girly days I ever have), a lot of reading and of course spending time with Danny. This past weekend he took me to the PG county gun range where they have skeet, trap and a sporting clays course. Being short always seems to rear its ugly head some way, so of course the shotgun I used was too big for me. The result was that I wasn't able to keep the butt of the gun in the crook of my shoulder where it's supposed to go and the impact from the recoil (for 84 clay pigeons) left me looking a tad beat up. Fortunately I'm pretty ambidextrous (I actually shoot left handed although I write right handed) so I was able to switch sides and lessen the impact on just one arm. Symmetry for the win! (Also, crazy eyes?)

The weather here has been absolutely delightful (like actually perfect) while it snowed again in Canada. I've had Chipotle twice and will be making burritos tonight in celebration of Cinco de Mayo (and also because I attempt to eat as much Mexican food as possible when home...) Life is good.