Oh my 'lanta, have I been busy.

Work has me meeting with PI's (principal investigators) and facilities managers left right and center for easily an hour and a half each day. I enjoy getting to interact with different people every day and learn about different management styles within the same institution, but I'm getting behind with transcribing my written notes into their respective Word documents. So instead of planning more meetings, my goal is to finish getting everything typed up so that when others come in behind me, they don't have to sift through my notes and try to decipher what was written and what I was trying to say and then meet with more people. Except that my boss has signed us up for two more facilities to visit next week! Ack. One of them is right across the street from campus but the other is a solid drive to a completely separate facility (dairy) so that should be interesting.

But man oh man, I am loving work. I love the people I work with, I love learning about the administrative process and AAALAC, I love that my boss constantly invites me to do other things outside of the administrative realm. For example, I got to do the initial physical exams on six new ferrets (still in quarantine) and one ferret getting spayed (general population) - by myself! It was a bit intimidating at first but I realized that - surprise! - I know how to do these things. I found a skin rash on one and enlarged popliteal lymph nodes on the other and while neither were severe, I was glad I was able to pick up on those kinds of things. (I got to observe the spay this morning, but all of my time in the small animal clinic has made routine surgery a little plain. That is, until I'm the one at the helm - eek!)

Another awesome thing? My boss has hooked me up with one of his people over at another research facility and I'm going to get to go hang out with them next week! I think the exposure to different facilities, different management styles and perhaps some new species will be great. I'm finding that literally every thing I do in this field makes me fall even more in love with it. And I'm sure I'll look back on this post ten years from now and chuckle or roll my eyes but right now it's hitting me like a teenage romance and it's glorious.