Neuter Your Dog

Have you ever had one of those days?  A day where you wake up and things immediately start going wrong?  Of course you have.  I have them quite frequently.  Here's a brief summary of the start of one of mine.

I woke up one morning a little later than I had wanted to.  "Not too bad," I told myself.  "I still have enough time to get ready."  Then I realized I really needed to shower.  Like, really.  Now, I had time to do normal readying, but not to do shower readying.

"Do I smell?" 
Possibly. Perfume.

I examined my hair in the mirror. 
Yep.  Greasy.
Oh well.  No time. Pull it back.

So my stinky self headed off to school to take care of my group's surgery dog.  Now, let me give you a little background info.  All four members of my group had done surgery, so everyone was starting on the next cycle of dogs.  Well, for the first cycle, we had mostly female dogs so we did spays.  That also seemed to be the case for a lot of the other students.  That meant that this time, there were a lot of male dogs that needed neutering.  What's the problem with unneutered male dogs?  They pee.  Everywhere.  So, as if I didn't feel dirty enough, my sweet little Archie felt the need to lift his leg on me.  Yes indeed. 

And it wasn't just my dog.  Oh, no.  Everyone had a male dog that morning, and every male dog had apparently held in his pee all night long. Or perhaps it was a chain reaction.  One dog just had to mark "his" territory.  Then the next dog was like, "WTF, Mate?  That's my door frame!!"  When the next dog comes along, he's all like, "Dude!  Not cool!"  Of course, all of us poor surgery students are responsible for cleaning up after our dogs.  Let me just say that the mop water did not stay clear for long. 

Of course I was late to class too.  So anyway, that was how my day started.  

In fact, today went quite the same way.  I brought out my dog this morning (Duke now.  Archie went back.) and the first thing he did was pee on the scale.  And under the scale.  And all around the scale.  I grabbed the mop bucket and started cleaning.  Now, Duke is blind in one eye, and he was pretty excited by all of this.  Naturally that meant that he ran into the mop bucket, knocked it over, and spilled nasty soapy, yellow mop/pee water all over the floor.  I was left having to mop up half of the exam room.  But was that enough?  No.  I took him to another room, where he proceeded to pee on the corner of the counter.  I guess I shouldn't be complaining.  These are just  normal days at vet school.

Fox

Well, I wanted to add something to Merp, but I really couldn't come up with anything amusing or entertaining.  Then I drew a fox. 

That's all I've got.  Maybe creativity will strike me tomorrow.  Although I suppose I should study to be anesthetist.  Stupid animals needing to breathe.

Turtles

I was tired of studying cancer, so I took a break to StumbleUpon things, and I found these pictures, and I thought they were great, so I decided to share them, because I'm tired of studying cancer...and I like turtles. In fact, I have a turtle-ish tattoo! Yes I do!  Both my sisters have one too! Vincristine stops your dog from going poo!

 

By the way, I really don't know about internet legal stuff, so just so you know, I did not take these pictures.  I found them through Google Image and StumbleUpon.  

When I draw a turtle it looks like this:

Or it may look like this....

 But probably not.

Pet Portraits

Once again I'm at the library, and, once again, I'm failing to concentrate on school.  My roommate told me, "Blog and get out all the crazies, then focus!!!"  I think I will take that advice.  However, it takes me a million years to draw pictures, and tonight I don't have time, so instead I'll post some older pictures.  Hope you enjoy them.  Sorry to disappoint the people who have already seen these and were hoping for something new.  


Shawnee

Danger

Twitch

Tipsy

Suki (the guinea pig, not the dragon)

Rain

I like to do pet portraits sometimes. :)  All pets deserve rainbows!  

Just for fun, I'll throw in my seadog and seapig.

Alright, I promise I'm going back to studying now.  


Steenvaldez signing off.

South Park Avatar

Recently, (10 minutes ago) I was challenged to create a South Park character of myself.  An unnamed second party did likewise.  I'm asking you, my small, but faithful band of blog followers to vote on which you think looks most like me.  And......GO!!

 

The Cluster That Is Junior Year

So, we had an extra Clinical Skills lab this past Friday.  Sheep, that's what I signed up for.  I can't say that I was super excited.  I would have rather gone home and taken a nap.  But, hey, sheep are cute and fluffy right?  Except for the poop in their butt-wool, yes, so I was willing to deal.

We all squished into K-State's vans and head 10 feet down the road to the sheep farm.  As we waited for the rest of the group, and the professors to show up, we stood around ogling the cute lambs.  After awhile this guy comes out.  I don't know what his actual job at the sheep farm is, but that day, he had the misfortune of being assigned to help us generally incompetent vet students.  (My apologies to my classmates who know what they're doing around large animals, and, in particular, to Ms. Elizabeth Prigge who actually raises sheep.)  The next few minutes went something like this:

Sheep Farm Man: "Who's in charge?"

Uninformed Vet Students:  "The professors."

Sheep Farm Man: "Where are they?"

Uninformed Vet Students: silence

Sheep Farm Man: "Well what skills are on your list to accomplish today?"

Uninformed Vet Students:  "We don't have a list."

Sheep Farm Man: "I heard you were supposed to learn how to trim hooves?"

Uninformed Vet Students: shrugging  "Sure."

Sheep Farm Man: looking extremely put-out "Just follow me."

We followed Sheep Farm Man down the barn aisle then waited while he rounded us up some practice sheep.

Sheep Farm Man:  "Do you know how to throw down sheep?"

Uninformed Vet Students:  "What?"

Sheep Farm Man:  "What do you guys do all day?!"

Uninformed Vet Students:  "Sit in class."

He rolled his eyes at us, like we had all flown in from the city in our stilettos. Then he very patiently explained how to "throw down" a sheep.

1. Grab a sheep out of the flock.

2. The head is the "brakes".

3. The tail dock is the "go button".

4. Pull the head around to knock her off balance.

5. Grab the flank.

6. Flip her over.

7. Pull her up by her front legs so she's in a sitting position on your feet.

Sound simple enough?  Here's how it looked when we tried.

Eventually a couple food animal residents showed up and showed us how to check for pregnancy via ultrasound.

Not a successful lab.

I hope you have better luck the next time you go play with sheep.

Typical Saturday

Actually, today was worse than usual.  It's pretty typical for me to not get much done on a Saturday.  But, most of the time I can get at least do enough to not feel too badly about myself.  Usually I manage to stay on top of things...somewhat.  In fact, last Saturday, I was downright productive!  Not the case today, unfortunately. 

I knew I was tired, so instead of setting my alarm, I let myself sleep in. This "morning" it was a little excessive though.

                                                                          1:30 pm



"Oh well", I thought.  "I can still study for almost eleven hours!!" 
That plan quickly fell through.

                                                                            4:00 pm



Apparently, 12 hours of sleep the night before wasn't quite enough.

"It's ok, I've still got all evening to study."

So I headed to the living room.  After another couple hours of non-productivity, I hit the frustrated and rebellious stage. 

"I hate school!  I hate studying!  I'm gonna watch tv while I study!  Screw vet school!!"

I mean, come on, The Reaping was on the SciFi channel.  How could I turn that down?

                                                                                  8:00 pm



Finally I went back to my room, and did actually manage to read through a couple Zoo Animal lectures.  But of course I had to talk to the boyfriend, surf the web, and take another nap.

                                                                                1:00 am



In short, my day was very relaxing, but entirely unproductive.  I think I might have actually gotten a little stupider.  And yes, I did stay in my pajamas the entire day.  Hey, at least I don't have to change before I go back to bed!


FML

Too Dumb To Blog

Is it possible to be too dumb to blog?  I wouldn't have thought so, but maybe it is.  I think that maybe I don't understand this whole template/web design thing.  Plus, if you know me, you know I'm extremely indecisive and get easily overwhelmed if too many options are presented to me.  Thus, I have found myself in my current conundrum.  What page layout do I want?  Do I want a picture for a background, or do I want a pre-made background?  I don't really like any of the pictures they offer, but none of my own pictures are good enough.  If I go with pre-made, I'll have to decide what color theme I want.  Do you ever pick colors for things based on how you feel?  Normally, I like blues and greens and purples, but at the moment I'm cold, so oranges and browns sound really appealing.  Sometimes I'm happy so I don't mind picking a darker color because it won't bring me down.  Other times I'm already sad, but I want to stay sad, so I'll pick a sad color.  Or maybe I'm sad but want to be happy, and then I'll go with yellow (a color I usually strongly avoid).  I suppose I could change my blog every day causing my few readers to be concerned that they typed in the wrong web address because they think, "This doesn't look right."  And I haven't quite figured out how to put in appropriately sized drawings yet.  It probably doesn't help that the only drawing program I know how to use is good old Paint.  Alas, I guess it doesn't really matter anyway.

End of rambling.

How Vet School Has Changed Me

Here I am before vet school:

And then...

and...

but at least there's this...

Let It Begin

Right-o,  here it goes! 

Why a blog you ask?  Because in my little head I have a false notion that I could write something that other people may enjoy reading.  Or perhaps it's because since I've gotten myself stuck in this soul-sucking institution we call vet school, I feel the need to create some sort of emotional outlet for myself.  Or really probably because I'm procrastinating.  Yes, that's certainly it. 

At the moment you can find me holed up in the library, listening to Eric Church, forcing myself to drink coffee that I don't particularly enjoy and wondering why I'm writing this ridiculous blog when I have 10 more surgery lectures to go through before 7:50 tomorrow morning.  My only response to myself is that I must have a death wish.  Yes indeed, why else would I have come to vet school in the first place. 

I'll come back later and make my blog all fancy and whatnot.  For now I guess I should pretend that I have a chance at passing tomorrow if I make myself get back to studying. 

Oh, and sorry for the run-ons.  This is gonna be a stream of consciousness sort of thing. 

Hammersteen out.