Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Check out this video of
Mark Goffeney (and put your sound on). He's currently in a band called
Big Toe.
Thursday, September 14, 2006
I’m quitting vet school to become a starving musician
(OK, since I’m almost done, I guess I’ll wait until I graduate.)
So far, I love this town. Tuesday night I attended a local club for a humble
benefit concert for some Athens youth programs. Eight different bands played R.E.M. covers in light of the release of their new compilation album,
I Feel Fine: The Best of the IRS Years. The place was small, so the crowd was small, quieter and older than you'd normally expect in a college town (I guess the undergrads didn’t get wind of the event--better view for vertically challenged me!)
So, being the old fart that I am, since the doors opened at 7:30, I got there on time and didn’t plan on staying much past my bed time. Good thing I did--after the first band, R.E.M. themselves came out to play a few tunes. It was a nice surprise, and I’m glad I got there early and stood up front (some people who got there later didn’t get to see or hear them at all). The best twelve bucks I've ever spent--all the performances were great, and quite insipring.
I guess the band was in town recording in their studio right down the street. I’ve met a couple people who work for the band, which makes sense since this is not a huge town (not counting the student body, of course) and the band’s studio and offices are here.
Carol and Peter’s (the people I’m staying with here in Athens) son-in-law is the art director for the band, and one of their neighbors is a personal assistant to the band manager.
How do I know this? Segue in to the barbecue . . .
Carol and Peter hosted a great little shindig Saturday for some new neighbors, which I thought was a very unusually kind gesture, but this may be the way some neighborhoods do things. I guess this is part of the
Five Points neighborhood, and people all know each other and help each other out.
I think about 40 people came, and I stopped down to meet everyone. It’s the first time in decades I’ve been to a neighborhood party.
The spread was great. Peter and Carol provided the barbeque pork, chicken, and yes, tofu. Everyone else brought side dishes, salads, and desserts. I was in heaven--there were four kinds of pie, two kinds of chocolate cake (one with rum!) and lemon bundt cake, which made me reconsider whether chocolate is really my favorite kind of cake.
Thursday, September 07, 2006
All in a Day's. . . Work?
So these little bugs of the phylum
Myxozoa, class Myxosporea are a common parasite of fish that require an annelid intermediate host (usually an aquatic worm) but now there have been some identified in the guts of ducks. This is something never seen before in ducks, and a few incidents have popped up in California and I think the Carlinas or Virginia, and now a dead duck found in small lake here in Georgia had some in its gut.
What does that me for my educational experinces here at SCWDS? It means I get to go fishing and mucking for worms!
We drove an hour and a half from Athens to this small residetial development where the duck was found.
Dr. Kevin Keel, my widllife pathology mentor here at SCWDS, is shown skillfully casting a net to gather some fish.
Jason, a wildlife biologist and soon-to-be vet student, also knows how to throw a cast-net.
Laura, a third-year vet student (who probabaly skipped therio lab and an exciting two hours of getting her arm massaged by a cow rectum to go fishing with us) aerated the cooler full of fish so they can get plenty of oxygen. We want to keep them alive up until the moment they are fresh-frozen so that their tissues stay fresh and intact for
necropsy and
histopath.
In addition to collecting fish to look for signs of myxosporea, we also collected some worms (the parasites infect and multiply in the worms before they go on to infect other species) by mucking around the shores and collecting sediment, i.e. mud.
Kevin passed the muck through a sieve and picked out the worms.
The local residents, one of whom captained his boat for our little adventure, are very interested in what's infecting the local fish and possibly duck populations.
So, this is what widlife biologists do? If I had know this when I was four and mucking in the local ponds and even my backyard sanbox for bugs and worms, I could have had my PhD by the time I was nine.
Tuesday, September 05, 2006
First 24 hours in Athens
(Georgia, that is)
The trip
I got into town last night around 7:30 Eastern time. I left Saturday evening and spent the night at a Days Inn outside Nashville in a room that smelled like pee. The windows weren't the kind you can open, so I didn't sleep too well and got a late start yesterday morning.
The drive through Tennesse is great in the daytime, very hilly and green and there's a beautiful point along the Tenessee River off where there's a rest area off Interstate 24. Great place for a picnic lunch.
The temporary digs
I'm staying with Peter and Carol Goerig, a very nice retired couple who fed me gourmet pizza and Canadian beer when I got to town. They host vet students from all around (they had on from Denmark I think not too long a go) a few times a year. I think it's a pretty neat way to use some of your empty rooms when your kids are all grown up--rent them out to make a little extra cash and get to meet and help out some interesting students. Carol participates in some local drum circles, Peter seems to be pretty good with computers, and they have two grown daughters, one here in Athens and one in Spain.
I should have guessed these folks are parents--the pizza and beer, and when I got to my room I found that they bought me fruit, cereal and milk in case I didn't make it to the store by morning. I'm wondering if my folks shouldn't move to a college town and host transient students--the cereal thing is totally something my mom would do.
Anyway, the attic set-up I've got here is a million times nicer than most apartments I've lived in and definitely nicer than anything I've seen during vet school: quiet tree-lined street; a five-minute walk to campus; a huge bedroom; a sitting room with a fridge, lots of books, and a t.v.; and my own bathroom. They have it all set up like a hotel or bed and breakfast: perfectly tucked sheets, teddy bears and decorative pillows on the bed, fancy stationary at the bedside, and this morning I discovered they even left a bowl of candies in the sitting room. I probably won't be around much to enjoy the place since I'll be spending my nights out in the field during the week, but I will be able to enjoy the weekends and get work, studying and reading done. And I'll probably walk to town to check out the food and local music acts, both of which I hear are wonderful here.
The Vet School and Campus
The CVM is great. They have a great facilty and the classrooms are very well laid out; it looks as if they had some professional consultant help design the classrooms for efficiency. I walked into a radiology class in which there were actually light boxes for every 3 students and people were all looking at radiographs in small groups, and. . . get this. . . faculty were floating around to answer questions and help interpret the radiographs! Who knew that radiology labs could be facilitated this way? They also have a great library that is open until midnight on the weekends, and has microscope stations. I haven't visited the snack bar yet, but I will definitely find my way there eventually (we had a big lunch today at a local Cuban place).
Dr. Keel (the SCWDS coordinator) took me for a brief car tour of the area. The campus is beautiful, very green, very nice brick buildings that look older in design but newer in condition--either they are older and very well maintained or new but built with a timeless design. The campus is efficiently laid out so that everything is walkable, and some residential neighborhoods are right across the street from campus, making walking to school and work a feasible option (unlike the sprawled-out, auto-addicted midwest). I'm beginning to realize I'm not crazy to think that the midwest night not be the best place for me. . .
Oh yeah, the reason I'm here--
So I've already met (very briefly) about a dozen folks today whose names I have already forgotten, but I'm sure I'll be working with some of them very closely later this week. Some of these folks were working on avain flu back in the 80s before it was the flavor of the month, some are working on West Nile virus, some on chronic wasting disease, et cetera. There's also some entomologists involved in the tick- and moquito- borne dieseases, so I may get to do some serious bug-watching. (Did I mention that when I deceided to go back to school for a second career, I was condisering entomolgy as well as vet med?)
So I have an assignment to write a lit review blip on
Leptospirosis for a web site +/- a handbook on infectious (perhaps specifically zoonotic) disease. I'll also help perform some necropsies on deer and write pathology reports. And later this week I'll probably go out into the field to collect fish and worms for a study on
myxosporea in ducks. Now isn't it every tomboy's dream to land a job looking in riverbeds and under rocks, mucking for worms?
