It seems much worse when I write it out.

I've slowly come to realize that I have a pretty regular weekly progression for effort put into my appearance. That weekly progression, unfortunately, takes the form of a downward spiral.

It goes as follows.

Monday

It's a new week! I'm going to shower and put product in my hair and put makeup on my face! Isn't life wonderful?!

Tuesday:

I suppose I'll take a shower and I guess I'll do my hair. I wear glasses, so nobody can really tell if I'm wearing eye makeup or not, right?

Wednesday:

I showered for the past two days, so I think I've earned myself a miss. Hey, sleeping in is important! I'll do something about my face so it looks like I put in effort.

Thursday:

Meh. I'll just pull my hair back. It's not that greasy...

Friday:

Fuck it. Everyone knows I'm a slob anyway.  

Saturday:

SWEATPANTS. SWEATPANTS AND SPORTS BRAS FOREVER. 

Sunday:

I have the best pillow head ever. 'twould be a shame to ruin it.


There's a shower somewhere in the later part of the week; I'm not quite that disgusting. Except during finals week. Standards do not apply at that time.

The Return of Excerpts from My Notes

It is midterms week, so my brain is too full of lethal doses and conditions of urolith formation to be able to tell me whether or not the "m" in "my" should be capitalized. Would anyone like to weigh in?

Without further ado...

Credit for the piranha plant goes to my classmate Molly.

Both types of clots were described as "shiny." Jayne approves.

Gross, yo.

There are things called lines of Zahn in arterial thrombi. This was where my mind went.

Facebook conversation between me and a classmate:

*Professor has just used the term "gouty nephritis.*

Me: Gaudi nephritis?

Classmate: or gaudy...although i guess to be gaudy it would need a little more sparkle

Me:

Classmate: That is more like it.

Classmate: Oh man this is too good.

Classmate: Forgot the walking stick though.

Me:

Classmate: MUCH BETTER.

It's been a no-focus kind of morning.

I was distracted by 60s Spider-Man memes in path lecture this morning. My favorite?

THIS ONE.

Then we had immunology lecture and I saw this figure on a slide:

My brain immediately went here...

...so I wrote this:

Spider-Antibody, Spider-Antibody

Does whatever a spider-Antibody can
Forms a complex of only five
Catches epitopes just like flies
Look out
Here comes the Spider-Antibody

Thank all that is holy that it is Friday.

EEEEEEW.

I have created the most unpleasant and unappetizing cupcakes on the planet. I was intrigued by the thought of chocolate and avocado, and there were plenty of comments below raving about how wonderful these cupcakes turned out.

Well, I bite my thumb at you, random food blog commenters. I have created a list.

Why These Cupcakes are Nasty and Shall be Tossed

1. LOOK AT THEM.

+

=

2. Even after beating the ever lovin' snot out of the avocados, I still ended up with lumps in the batter and icing. I left the avocados in a paper bag with a banana for a day and they felt ripe, so what the hell, recipe. I even put those suckers in a food processer after mashing them up with a fork. Then I beat them with a hand mixer. WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME AVOCADOS?!

3.  The batter tasted okay, but the texture of the baked cupcake is odd. It is very dense, but at the same time strangely dry. And somehow lumpy. It's possible that I overmixed the batter, but I have overmixed cupcakes before and they've NEVER turned out like this.

They look deceptively normal. Do not be fooled.

 
4. The frosting as made per recipe instructions was incredibly sweet. After the sweetness hit, THEN you got an aftertaste of avocado. It was not a pleasant melding of flavors.

Mmmm. Lumpy green shit.

Moral of the story: chocolate avocado cupcakes are gross. RUN AWAY.

Another blog post from work.

This is the second blog post I've written at work. Still not sure if it's kosher, but "shrug" is still my response.

I was recently asked to keep blogging because someone wanted to see the change from reasonable human being to raging egomaniac. The person who put in this request has not had a very good track record with vets; they tend not to give her the credit she's due for being an authority in her field or just think that they know all there is to know.

I am entirely confident that I am NEVER going to know everything there is to know about veterinary medicine, and I goof up on a regular basis.

For example, last week I handled a case involving an anticoagulant rodenticide. It wasn't really a significant dose, but the owner was pretty worked up and the vet I was speaking with said that it wouldn't hurt the dog if it went in and got some K1. I thought I did okay with this call and I sent it off to be closed. Nope! Turns out what I said to the owner was a K1 shot, not oral K1. There's an increased risk of anaphylaxis with the injected K1 that you don't have with the oral K1.

Who had no idea about that? This girl.

The situation ended up being not a big deal since the regular vet gave us a call to talk about which method of K1 we wanted, but I still messed up and had to discuss the situation with one of the senior staff.

The point of this little anecdote is that "comfort" and "ego" do not equal "skill" and "knowledge." I feel comfortable with my current job but there are situations that come up on a regular basis that I frankly have no idea how to handle. Even the things I think I'm handling might not be quite right. I think that there is some amount of ego necessary in any medical profession; you have to be confident enough in your knowledge and skills to be able to walk into a room and handle whatever the patient/client throws at you. That being said, there are limits to your knowledge and expertise. Acknowledge that others know things that you don't.

Moral of the story: you will never know everything and there is always someone better, so stop being a dick about it, cheese whiz. If I ever claim to know all the things, you, dear readers, have my full permission to give me a swift kick in the rear. I can't even get mad at you since I put it in writing.

All-text blog posts are boring, so I put in a clip of Amy getting a tiara.

I'm writing this while at work. Is it kosher use of my work computer? I figure I haven't gotten in trouble for being on Facebook or for doing online crosswords, so my response is a shrug.

"Shrug" is one of those words that just looks and sounds wrong. It only gets worse the more you look at it/think about it, so I'm going to move on.

Y'know, I pride myself on my self-confidence and being sure in my decisions, whether they be large or small. Most of the time if my choice turned out to maybe not be the best one, I don't spend time worrying about it; instead I deal with whatever consequences there may be and move on with my life. It's pretty rare that I stew over something. For example, since making my decision to go to vet school and NOT reapply for nutrition graduate programs I've felt perfectly fine with my choice. I had come to the conclusion that I would not be as happy doing research as I would be in clinical practice.

Then I went to Omaha this weekend.

For those of you who don't know, I spent three summers interning in the nutrition department at the Omaha zoo. I loved it; the people I worked with were fabulous and I felt like the projects I worked on had practical applications. THAT was the reason I was so disappointed when I didn't get in to U of I's animal nutrition program. As I stated above, I have come to terms with that and moved on with my life. This weekend, a rumor I had heard was confirmed.

Insert three-little-pigs-huff-and-puff-blow-your-house-down sigh here.

Long story short, someone at the zoo is going to be teaching at Iowa State and doing some REALLY COOL SHIT in the animal sciences program AND had some ridiculously interesting ideas for research projects. This makes me almost wish that I wasn't committed to another three years of school because I would dearly love to work on some of the things that were mentioned. I'm hoping that I can maybe do at least some of the preliminary stuff at the zoo the next summer, provided that A) the zoo/nutrition department is okay with the study/studies and B) they let me come back... again.

In my head I know that I have plenty of time to do with my life what I will and that I would rather keep learning throughout my life than be stagnant and bored, but there's still a little niggle in the back of my brain saying, "you're going to be so OLD when you're done with school if you keep going" and "what happens when you get tired of this?"

Someone get me a tiara, stat.

The Guy's Guide to Dating Katy: Special Internet Dating Edition

So I've tried online dating since I moved to CU. These are some of my unofficial rules. It keeps the number of schmucks at minimum.

1. If you call me "hot," especially on first contact, you are done.
I do not think of myself as "hot." "Hot" to me has negative connotations which include "stupid" and "airhead." Regardless of what your intentions are when you use that word, to me it means that you care not one whit for the person I am and are just looking at the physical.

Go. Find a thesaurus. Use it.

2. If you use "LOL" in your profile, you are probably done.
Chatspeak drives me nuts even when used in IM or text settings. I will totally judge you on your use of "LOL." I will judge you even more if you use it multiple times.

3. Spell things correctly.
You are writing something and have time to proofread. If you don't care about spelling or punctuation, we might not really get along anyway.

4. If you tell me that you don't get along with your family, that's a no.
My family is awesome (love you guys). If you are gloom and doom about your own, I sure as hell am not going to want to introduce that into my own life.

5. If I am carrying the conversation on the first date, that's not a good sign.
If I am doing all of the talking, the date is not going well regardless of what you think. I don't like awkward silence and will talk constantly to fill it. Bottom line: if I wanted to talk to myself, I'd stay home. Keep up your end of the conversation, pal.

6. Do not try to one-up me in the "classes are hard" department.
Are you trying to annoy me? If you are, ignore this one.

An open letter to all who care to read it.

Dear everyone in the universe,

Remember that when you call a customer service number, you are talking to another person on the other end. It behooves you as a thinking, feeling person to be decent to them.

If you get frustrated, don't take it out on them.

Realize that they have to handle things in a certain way and it will be taken care of, even if it is not as handled as quickly as you would like.

Do not swear at them. Do not yell at them. It does not help, and will probably fluster the person on the other end so that they are not as efficient as they normally would be. And you will be flagged as an asshole (using a more professional term, of course).

If they apologize, CALM THE FUCK DOWN.

This is their job. You probably wouldn't like it if someone came into your place of business and screamed at you. Remember the golden rule.

Thank you, and by remembering this you will be making the customer service rep's day not suck, keeping your blood pressure low, and will prove yourself a better person than a lot of your fellow callers.

Thanks in advance for not being a douchenozzle!

Katy

Phone calls are scary.

I had my first real half day of work today. I say "half day" because the morning was filled with my training group doing two things: 1) completing our phone training, and 2) frantically asking questions and taking notes.

It was moderately terrifying.

For those of you who don't know, I was hired as summer help at the ASPCA Animal Poison Control Center. It's an animal poison control call-in center for the entire U.S. and Canada. My job will eventually be to answer the hotline and take histories before passing the call on to someone else. This means that, after the last nine months of spending eight hours a day, five days a week staring at a computer screen while sitting in a semi-dark room, I will be spending eight hours a day, five days a week staring at a computer screen while sitting in a semi-dark room. The difference, you ask? I GET PAID.

Last week was my first week of work, which was pretty much all training. Let me sum up what we learned by the day:

MONDAY: This is a phone. This is how you answer the phone. This is a computer. This is how you sign into the computer.

TUESDAY: This is how we look things up on the computer.

WEDNESDAY: This is how we ask people on the phone what they're calling about.

THURSDAY: HOLY MOTHER OF GOD LEARN ALL THE THINGS! ENTER ALL OF THE THINGS! HAVE YOU GOTTEN DOWN ALL THE THINGS? WHY HAVEN'T YOU WRITTEN DOWN ALL OF THE THINGS?! TYPE FASTER, PEON!

FRIDAY: These are the things you'll be doing on your own on Monday, but there's no one available to actually tell you how to do those things right now.

The no-trainer situation is what caused the group panic this morning; we were basically calling people back to ask if their pets were doing OK, if they took their animal into the vet, if they did something completely nonsensical like feed their dog rice and yogurt for the last five days, etc. After lunch, they showed us to some open stations and turned us loose.

As I said before, it was terrifying.

I'm pretty sure the person on the other end of my first call could hear my heart beating. I sure as hell could feel it in my throat (bounding pulse - check). I stammered a lot, said a whole bunch of "ums" and fucked up saying ASPCA about three times, but I got through it! After about the third call, I stopped being semi-paralyzed whenever someone picked up at the other end of the line. It occurred to me that the staff goes through the newbie vet student hires being complete morons every summer. They're USED to having to clean up our messes and wipe our noses for the first week.

I apologize to whoever has to waste a few hours fixing what I did today.

In other news, I have things! In pots!

Parsley!

Lettuce!

Wussy-looking chives!

I also have a small patch in the ground, with some other growing things. I did this over the weekend because SOMEONE keeps putting her fat feet where she shouldn't:

Her Stompy-ness is mourning the loss of her ability to play Godzilla in the peas.

And this, but that's because I want to make my own compost. The dirt in my garden is pretty clay-y (how are you supposed to spell that word?), so I want something to mix into in this fall/next spring to make it not suck quite as much.

I realize that my chicken wire fence is incredibly ugly and slapdash. Stop laughing. It was hot and I was cranky.

I have no cheese, and other tales of woe.

Hey folks. I haven't written anything in quite a while, mainly because I didn't have anything that could really be turned into a good post. I still don't have a good topic, but I wanted to let everyone know what things are going on in my life.

So I wrote some haikus. Enjoy.

A stuffed Hamlet mouse?
Inappropriate stories?
I gotta read this

Signed bookplate came in the mail yesterday. YESSSS.

Making a sandwich
Grocery shopped yesterday
Why is there no cheese?

I seriously spent ten minutes searching for that damned cheese. It was a sad sandwich.

Very sorry that

I went with the walk signal

Right of way bitches

Two-way stops mean to

“Hit brakes,” not continue through

Phone down, douche nugget

A short PSA: please be aware of bikers. I have almost been hit several times when I had the right-of-way. I would rather not end up street pizza, and I imagine that most other cyclists feel similarly.

Man who worked on car

saw paper - “BACON MOFOS!”

I swear I’m normal

My horse study guide was titled "Shoot it."

Horse penis is weird

Described as “telescoping”

Never again please

This, my worst score yet

I can’t bring myself to care

I’m done with repro

Compass scores are wrong?

Heck yes, clerical error

Ten more points for me

I peed myself some

because of my excitement

Lollapalooza!

And from a dog's perspective:

Love peanut butter

but I feel like Tantalus

my tongue won’t quite reach

Gratuitous Tess photo. You're welcome.

I realize that most of these were not tales of woe (or even tales, really; they were poetry), but "other tales of woe" is a silly phrase when preceded by a statement of one's lack of dairy products.

Pre-final epiphanies

1. I will most likely refer to the rear of an animal as "the butt" for the rest of my life. If I haven't switched by this point, the change is unlikely.

2. "Poopchute" is a really funny term.

3. I am scarily comfortable using words like "anus," "rectum," and "diarrhea" in public places.

4. I have begun self-administering the sniff test to determine whether showering if necessary. Standards: they vary with the situation, folks.

5. Large animal guts in a pile on the lab floor? Yawn. Sticking your arm into a fistulated cow to feel the inside of the rumen? Cake. Stepping in a pile of horse crap during palpation lab? That one, dear friends, earns a shriek of disgust.

Yeah. Blog post. I got nothin'.

Kids, this has not been a good self-esteem week for Katy.

Let us observe a moment of silence for your hopes that this would be a funny blog post.

So. I decided to make a list of things that I do well to shore up my flagging happy.

Item #1: I am really good at being amused.

"Katy," you say as you tap your pipe thoughtfully against your cheek whilst reclining in your wingback chair next to the fire, "I'm not so sure that the ability to be amused is a skill, per se." Well, friend-who-I'm-now-imagining-with-a-lush-mustache, I am a pro. When I find something that makes me laugh, it makes me laugh for DAYS, generally at inopportune moments like while sitting in the middle of lecture.

This gem tickled my humerus (humorous; funny bone; OH THE PUNS) last week and thinking about it still makes me giggle:

Y'know, you should really quit smoking that pipe. It's detrimental to your health and makes you smell like a re-hydrated squirrel mummy.

I also am prone to take something that I think it funny way too far. MOVING ON.

Item #2: I taught my dog to shake.

I've been trying off and on (mostly unsuccessfully) to teach Tess this for most of the semester. BOO YAH Y'ALL.

Okay, we're still working on it. But progress has been made!

Item #3: I'm super nerdy.

Dear friends, I have a confession. I am a nerd of brobdingnagian proportions. Example: I know the meaning of the word "brobdingnagian," where it comes from, and have used it in every day conversation. I am also excited for "The Secret World of Arietty" even though it is dubbed (boo times infinity) because I loved The Borrowers growing up and the movie is being released by Studio Ghibli.

Don't know what the frigamarole I'm talking about? Wikipedia is your friend. Also, reading Howl's Moving Castle was much better than watching the movie.

That wasn't really a confession; I wear my nerdiness on my sleeve for the most part. I'm proud of this one because, to paraphrase John Green, I am allowed to be uninhibitedly enthusiastic about stuff I like which is pretty much the best thing ever.

Item #4: I'm good at making up words.

Frigamarole: it's a mash-up of "frick" and "rigamarole." I'm not sure that that makes sense at all, but I'm easily amused, remember?

Item #5: I make delicious stews.

I was looking back on all of the things I've tried to make over the past year, and most of the things I've put into the "I'm-burning-my-mouth-but-don't-care-because-it's-so-damn-good" category are stews or stew-like things.

Also? Tomatillos are awesome. Who knew?

Item #6: I can read.

I'm stealing this one (thanks Mr. Green). I can read, and I enjoy reading. What's more, I enjoy talking about what I've read and listening to what other people think about those same books. The written word is an amazing thing; some stories have persisted in print form, essentially unchanged, for hundreds of years.

I'll just let the enormity of that sink in AND BLOW YOUR MIND.

The funny has been revived! Maybe? A little bit? If all efforts at resuscitating the humor failed, you should watch this. And then decide what size coffin humor needs. He was a rotund sort of fellow.

DABDA. See? I paid attention in psych lecture.

The Kubler-Ross model as applied to studying for pulmonary physiology:

1. Denial

"I'll study pulmonary later. The concepts aren't THAT difficult."

2. Anger

"I'M GOING TO KILL THIS PROBLEM SET WITH A RUSTY SPORK AND SET IT ON FIRE."

3. Bargaining

"Alright, after I get through this lecture I'm going to spend just five minutes on Pinterest."
*An hour passes*

"Well, shit."

4. Depression

"I am the worst. Vet student. Ever. If I don't learn these equations, I'm going to kill my patients. Probably as soon as they walk into the exam room. DOOOOOOOOM."

5. Acceptance (or more accurately, apathy)

"Whatever. I'm going to write a blog post."

Yes, master.

I would be limping around the room while hunched over with one eye squinched up if I weren't sitting in a large lecture hall full of people.

Bad news: I deleted the mummified squirrel picture at some point. Good news: the development of the lungs and subsequent indentation of the coelomic cavity in a developing mammal looks like Darth Vader's fighter from Star Wars.

Aaand dog lung.

Update: I thought that I remembered where I tossed the squirrel mummy; turns out I was right, but thanks to the amount of rain we've gotten since the time I tossed it out there it is no longer a mummy. It looks like dirty wet leather with bits of fur and some bones sticking out.

It was pretty gross. So I took a picture and set it on top of a fence post to dry out a bit and serve as a warning to all of the other squirrels.

YOU'RE WELCOME.

I'm freezing me bits off! Y'know, if I had bits.

Do you ever suddenly realize that you are a far stranger person than you originally thought? I certainly do. Quite often. I keep running across these funny little blips of post ideas that I've written down. None of them have come to fruition (obviously), but they make me tilt my head a bit.

"Things that make me feel old - flipping my mattress (haven't done it yet, but I've though about it and thinking about flipping a mattress... well I just don't know)"

"A lemming has taken up residence in my sinuses. When it rains the little bastard breaks out his hammer and chisel and starts working on my turbinates. I think he's probably recreated some of the greats - Michaelangelo's David, the Venus de Milo, the Thinker, etc. I bet he could make some pretty sweet nose hair topiaries too."

"Over break, I proved to myself that I could tell the difference between an ostrich and a goose as well as the differences between a walrus and a rhinocerous. I think I'm ready for my DVM now. (So close, Amy. You were so close.)"

I vote the middle as the strangest. To be fair, I was probably in pain and on large amounts of decongestants at the time.

Moving on.

Check this out.

What IS that, you say? Well, friends and neighbors, that would be my thermometer ma-jigger that lets me know what the ambient temperature is both outside and inside my house. Yep, it is 55 degrees inside. This is something that won't be fixed until tomorrow morning.

So I'm making cookies. Because the oven is basically a space heater that can produce tasty nommables. And baking is way more fun than studying pharmacology.

Procrastination is sweet. It tastes like chocolate-and-butterscotch chips.

My dog, in addition to being my fuzzy spaceheater, has taken it upon herself to be the finder of random sort-of-edible things in the backyard (for a dog, I mean; I wouldn't want to ingest anything she finds).

INSERT CUTE DOG PICTURE HERE. Oh wait, that's what I just did.

The first was a mummified squirrel earlier this year. I have a picture because I thought it was kind of neat, but I am trying to remember that not everyone is as thrilled with animal carcasses as I am. I also have a video of a fresh dog lung being inflated that I took last week which was TOTALLY WICKED but would also probably gross most people out.

But really, you should see it. Who needs a desert for natural mummification? Not squirrels, apparently.

Today Tess brought me two bones.

The first is what I think is part of a sacrum (yesssss, I am totally on my way to being a learned doctor). The second is a long bone from a bird since it is hollow, but I'm not sure which one. I'm thinking humerus and the attached bones are a rib and the coracoid.

I am a nerd.

Also, I don't know if you've noticed but this post, like so many others, really has no point and has gone on for far too long. The witty and somewhat humorous (humerus? PUNS) posts have gone bye bye for the time being. Sorry, kids. 


P.S. Steven Moffat, you are on my list. YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DID.

P.P.S. For context, Steven Moffat is the creator of Sherlock. "The Reichenbach Fall" simultaneously made me want to cheer and to stab someone with a rusty fork.

Excerpts from my Notes: Part II.

Occasionally I get bored in lecture. Or there is a picture that's strikes me as amusing. Or my brain decides that it will rebel and instead of actually incorporating the class material in some sort of meaningful way it's going to kick out something moderately silly and mostly unhelpful.

It was discovered in early 2009 that horse lymph nodes were, in fact, clusters of green grapes. Scientists are unsure of what function these sugary masses serve, but state that they "make great snacks."

Pig lymph nodes are on steroids, so they have leveled up from "node" to "center." I think they get some sweet new weapons or magical abilities or something.

Baskin-Robbins flavor of the day: Brain Stem. Now with more vomiting centers!

Someone get this man a Norelco, stat.

I blame you, brain.

Yup. Grammar Nazi.

I saw this:

I present to you, dear readers, my reaction in pictures.

First came the disbelief.

Then came the rage.