Monday, November 29, 2004
Feeling Bison Butts
Monday morning I tagged along to read some TB tests on bison calves. The test is just like the TB test we humans get, but it's injected right under the tail, where the skin is nice and soft.
The bison are corraled and coaxed one-by-one into a gate where they can be restrained while Dr. S palpates the spot that was injected a few days earlier
After the trauma is over, this baby bison heads back to his pasture
When we were done, we got to feed the herd!
This cow kept mooing at me
RAVS Weekend
The weekend before Thanksgiving, I took a trip out to a little county in Ohio for a Rural Area Veterinary Services (
RAVS) clinic. The clinics provide free veterinary services (exams, vaccinations, spaying, neutering) to low-income areas that have or are at risk of having pet overpopulation problems. (I guess it's like a Planned Parenthood for animals.)
Basically, the RAVS truck shows up with all kinds of surgical and medical equipment and a surgical suite is set up in a school gym, or in this case, a fairgrounds garage. Vet student volunteers from all over come to perform the exams and surgeries under the supervision of a few veterinarian volunteers.
The portable surgical suite is set up in under an hour. (We had about five surgery tables.) It's kinda like M*A*S*H, only with vets instead of doctors, and no Korean war.
Susan and Mey give a dehydrated kitty some fluids prior to surgery
All the animals need close monitoring while they recover from anesthesia
After the last patient is sent home, the surgical suite goes back to being a garage, the volunteers go home, and the RAVS equipment is sent on its way to the next town.
In all, we performed about 50 surgeries on Saturday and 30 on Sunday.
The head vet for this clinic was
Dr. Leo Egar, who was great to work with--organized, laidback, tough when he needed to be. Check out his site for more photos!
I smell. I need to take a shower. But sometimes I just don't feel like getting wet! What a hassle. So I'm blogging instead.
Anyway, the reasons I haven't posted in while:
- I feel guilty blogging when I could be studying or working. But we all need some form of diversion. . .
- I have some big fat exams coming up, and now I've got a wonderful group project to buckle down to
- Week before last I was web-researching bacteria for the Bacteriology skills test
- I took a
RAVS trip last weekend that wore me out, and instead of sleeping in Monday I got up early to ride up to a wildlife park to look at some bison
- I subsequently got sick for the rest of the week
- While I was sick I was lying on diggerblue's futon, and his internet is to SLOW for blogging
- Thanksgiving
- Recovery from Thanksgiving
I must admit, whenever I see the face of Osama's right-hand man gracing the ten o'clock news with yet another threat agains the U.S., I react with a sudden urge to punch in the television, hunt the guy down, and take an uzi to his deranged ass. But I'm
not convinced that any benevolent God would condone these actions. A
just God, maybe, but can one be both merciful and just?
That aside, I wonder how stealthy we're being in the Mid-East. The whole strategy that caught
us off-guard in the first place was the stealthiness of the attacks, the way terrorists hid amongst us and used our own resources against us--no obvious tanks or missiles or Blackhawk choppers or uniformed soldiers. . .and it makes me wonder. Is a
military strategy really the kind of tactic we need?
I really have no idea how many spies we have implanted in their terrorist networks or how well our intelligence is using such potential spy information to bring down the organization from the
inside (and I don't want to know, because that would defeat the purpose of employing spies, wouldn't it?). Maybe this whole "bomb-em-all (in the wrong country)" tactic is just a ruse, a distraction from the real inside infection and takedown of the Al Qaeda terrorist network. . .?
Monday, November 15, 2004
My new obsession
Richard Nixon. Not Watergate, but Nixon
the man.
I started reading
All the Presidents Men, only to put it off until break--I found I have to make charts of names just to keep things straight, and I've got my hands full of enough charts and graphs right now. But it got me to thinking about what made the man tick--the book only gives you the reporter's side of the story.
Then I remembered
diggerblue talking about Nixon's memoirs, and this weekend I finally saw Oliver Stone's
Nixon. (I highly recommend!) The movie made me kinda think the guy was just plain evil, but at the same time I really felt bad for the guy.
He was clearly bitter, resentful and paranoid, he used people, he lied (especially to himself), he let others take the fall for his sins, he bombed the shit out of itsy bitsy Cambodia, but was he a bad guy? Was he mentally ill? Was he merely a victim of the system? Was he just plain evil? Or, like the rest of us, did he just want to be loved?
So I've got to get it directly from the source (not that it will make anything clearer)--so I'm headed to the Urbana library to check out his memoirs.
"The tricky thing about 'evil' people is they don't think they're evil."
--D. Blue
Sunday, November 07, 2004
It's National Animal Shelter Appreciation Week
See The Humane Society of the United States'
website for the
article and
video.
A Great Excuse to Sit on Your Arse
A grad student here on campus was
hit and killed by a mass transit bus a few weeks ago, and now my friend uses this as an excuse to not walk in the campus town area. "I feel safer in my car."
I'll quote Dr. Grimm (and imagine my arms flapping): LIFE IS FULL OF RISK. You can slip and break your neck walking down the stairs, but if you take the elevator, not only do you increase your risk for diabetes and heart disease by avoiding exercise--but also, the elevator could jam or fall off its cables! In your car, you run the risk of hitting a pedestrian (especially if you drive like my friend--hee hee), and you can still get into a serious accident with another vehicle, or a telephone pole, or tree. Hell, you could choke on a garlic breadstick at the Olive Garden--so does this mean you should stop doing everything you enjoy?
If we cannot even take a walk on a nice evening because we're afraid, what's the point of living? Instead of making excuses, we can limit our risks by walking down a safer side-street, being defensive pedestrians, and most importantly, being courteous and careful drivers wheh
we're in the driver's seat.
I'll say it again: We, as a nation, need to be more conservative about our gas use--unless we wish to make a mockery of all the folks sacrificing their lives in the Mid-East (I sure as hell hope they're not fighting for our "freedom" from high gas prices just so we can be lazy and wasteful).
We need to get off our lazy, frightened asses. We need to enjoy the weather and the serendipitous interaction we have with other pedestrians when we walk. If we're lucky enough to have a nice neighborhood with services within walking distance, we should take advantage of the opportunities.
I think the "risk" excuse for avoiding simple, healthy, enjoyable activities such as walking is absolutely lame, and I think it
is little more than an
excuse, so to put things in perspective, I've come up with a list of all sorts of everyday things, healthy and unhealthy, that come with risks and benefits:
Pleasure: Walking, running, biking
Risks: Getting hit by car, spraining ankle
Benefits: health, interaction with others, discovery of your surroundings, free transportation, reduced emissions, reduced reliance on foriegn oil
Pleasure: Driving
Risks: Expensive, can get
flattened by semi-truck, can kill biker, walker, runner with deadly 2-tons of steel, can become lazy and dependent on vehicle, foriegn oil
Benefits: convenience, speed, control of your comings-and-goings, airbags
Pleasure: ice cream drinks, crab rangoon, french fries, pizza, fried egg and bacon sammitches from Mickey D's
Risks: Obesity, diabetes, artherosclerosis, can be expensive habit
Benefits: tastes good, convenient
Pleasure: Reading
Risks: Eye strain
Benefits: Education, entertainment, often free via local library
Pleasure: Friendship
Risks: High phone bills, fights, gossip, bad advice
Benefits: Fun, good conversation, mind expansion, unconditional acceptance, laughs, good advice
Pleasure: Dating
Risks: getting rejected, hurting someone else, meeting jerks, stalkers
Benefits: Fun diversion, companionship, entertainment, free backrubs, spooning
Pleasure: Working with animals
Risks: getting your face bitten off, getting your spine cracked in half with one strong kick, catching an incurable, deadly parasite or disease, being overworked, underappreciated, underpaid
Benefits: . . .oh no. . . now I forget. . .
Pleasure: Speaking your mind
Risks: pissing someone off, embarrassing yourself
Benefits: Being honest, saying what a million others are thinking
. . and there's plenty of others that I don't have time to think of now, because it's a beautiful morning, and I'm going for a walk!
Any other risks that y'all can think of?
Mindless Manual Labor is Underrated
Lawrence and Peter had it right in
Office Space--working with your hands and getting out in the fresh air is the best way to work--which is part of the reasons I chose to pursue vet med; you have to use your brain, but there's still a lot of manual work involved, and if you work with big animals or wildlife, you get to spend time in the field.
Saturday morning, Linea and I worked at a
Habitat for Humanity site on Maple street, and I realized that after studying all week, it's nice to work without having to think. Someone tells me to dig, I dig. They say "hold this," I hold. They say "hammer this," I hammer. They say "move this," I move. I just do what they tell me, and for half a day a week, it's great.
They fed us promptly at 11:30, a home-cooked crock-pot meal. (Manual work also reminds you how good simple food and water can taste.)
Insulation,windows,and tar-papering of the roof were all completed by noon
Linea sledgehammers a bolt
I finish off the bolt with a ratchet
Digging up the dirt--talking about the blasto, histo, anthrax and listeria that may be hiding in the soil. . .
Monday, November 01, 2004
What I Don't Understand
and never will, in this lifetime- Hate-filled people can get into Heaven as long as they accept Christ as their Savior--because Christianity is all about selfishly saving one's own hide from the flames of Hell
- This was God's idea, and God is Good and Perfect
". .
blow them away in the name of the Lord."
"I really believe that the Pagans, and the abortionists and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America--I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this (9/11) happen.'"
--Reverend Jerry Falwell
