As promised, a quick update about my "spring break"! I had a busy start to the week with a lab animal club meeting with our club advisor on Monday, an animal care committee tour on Tuesday and a fish health final exam on Wednesday morning. I'm excited about the club because we got some good wet lab ideas hashed out and we're going to start the process of applying for ASLAP student chapter membership! It would be so awesome to have the club be recognized that way. The ACC did a tour of multiple animal use facilities looking for things that didn't align with the Canadian Council on Animal Care standards for animal use; these tours are done by the ACC twice per year and they submit recommendations for improving animal facilities as needed. I can't really share more about it as it's a confidential thing but it was really interesting to get to see the facilities in more depth and ask the university vet a bunch of questions. Then we had our fish health exam Wednesday morning which I felt woefully underprepared for but turned out to be OK.

After that I hit the road for Portland! I was exhausted but made it to the hotel around 4pm. Danny's flight wasn't due until later that evening so I had some Chipotle (always my first stop there), read my book and took a bubble bath. We were worried that Danny wouldn't make it in that night because DC was due for a whopper of a snowstorm but he squeaked out just in time even though his flight was delayed. Whew.

Having been to Portland numerous times already, we'd already visited a lot of the places (still open, that is - like PEI, much is closed up over the off-season) and were content to watch the Olympics and visit nearby stores like Cabellas (where we did some target practice) and the L.L Bean headquarters (where I swooned over flannel sheets). Portland got its own share of heavy snow but fortunately their plow guys are amazing and we didn't have much trouble with it. We had dinner out on Sunday night as a make-up for Valentine's Day (we aren't really big into that kind of stuff) but neither of us was very hungry with thoughts of having to part ways again the next day.

I dropped Danny off at the airport early on Monday morning and headed back. The roads weren't bad until I hit New Brunswick and when I finally made it to PEI around 2pm it was a mess (not helped by the heavy snow coming down!) I made it to my place safely and curled up to read and watch the Olympics. It's kind of bizzare to watch them in another country, though - they interview the Canadian athletes and keep track of the Canadians in the standings! Which makes total sense of course, but after all this time watching summer and winter Olympics are home...it's just strange :) I started to feel crummy last night (really tired, achey, stuffy, etc) and I'm not looking forward to studying for our renal midterm exam tomorrow morning. But there is snow in the forecast so maybe we'll get a bit more time to study. Fingers crossed!