Piping Society

I joined the Dick Vet Piping Society today! Every Tuesday evening, Jessica and I will be learning to play the bagpipes! Jessica is borrowing a practice chanter from the school, and she has named it McGregor. I will be purchasing a cheap-ish chanter tomorrow during my break between classes, since the society doesn't own enough chanters for everyone (or have not gotten them back from past members), and it will be named McKracken.

In our first lesson today, we met the other new and old members of the club, and learned how to play a scale! We're not actually playing with real bagpipes yet, because (a) it's way too loud to play inside, much less with 6 people playing at once, and (b) there's no point until you know fingering and have the breath control and whatnot. It's a bit different playing on the practice chanters, which are something like if a recorder and a clarinet had offspring, it would look and sound something like this:

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It comes in two pieces, plus a reed, and you fit the reed in between the two pieces, and blow through the skinny end. Your fingers go over the holes, but must be kept straight, which is slightly awkward and makes my hand hurt after a little while, but I think I'll get the hang of it.

Other than that, I apologize for not updating as often, I'm trying to balance being social with studying, but I'll try and go over a few highlights.

Today we had a urinalysis practical, also known as the "playing with pee" lab. We had lots of different urine to choose from: cat or dog with chronic renal insufficiency (CRI), dog or cat with diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA), horse, rabbit, cat with urinary crystals. I never realized pee could come in so many different colors or have so many varieties of smell. So what we did during this practical is we looked at pee under the microscope, and read urine dipsticks, which tell whether urine has things like red or white blood cells, glucose, pH, presence of ketones or proteins. We also learned how to use a refractometer to read specific gravities (which is a measure of the concentration of urine). Things like this are important to know because you can tell if an animal might have CRI (can't concentrate its urine), or perhaps is diabetic (so will have glucose and potentially ketones in there as well).

Now, granted, I already knew how to do both of these things, having worked in a vet hospital since I was 16, but it was cool to do it wearing a white lab coat and in vet school. We also learned about how if you do have an animal with glucose in the urine, it can mess up the specific gravity measurement, which I had not known before.

We also last week had a bunch of lectures on "professional and personal development," which are sort of common sense. I guess it's good to cover all the bases just in case, but it seems like we should already know this stuff already. I will say that it has led to some hilarious lectures, where we get little interactive websites that go through scenarios with horrible actors, and when you click on something that is clearly wrong, like saying to a client: "Well, maybe you shouldn't have gotten the horse if you can't afford to take care of it!" you get to see the fake actress storm offscreen in a huff. We also saw a raunchy advert for men's workwear that featured a woman (who has since become famous because of this), Sara Green, who then decided she wanted to be a teacher, and almost got fired because a video of it surfaced while she was teaching. It was pretty funny (the advert, not her situation).

What else.. We went out to the farm one afternoon to learn the different types of feeds for livestock and horses. I never realized there were so many different things you could feed an animal! You've got your standard maize, oats, barley, wheat, and grass pellets, but then you've also got rolled oats, bruised barley, citrus pulp (byproduct of juice business), sugar beet (coming in either pulp, flakes, or nuts form), dark grains (byproduct of whiskey business), bran (byproduct of flower business), linseed (byproduct of linseed oil), soya meal (byproduct of soy beans), maize gluten (byproduct of cornflour), rapeseed meal (from rapeseed oil), wholecrop wheat silage, and grass silage. Then there's wheat straw, barley straw, and grass hay.

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Some shots of different feeds follow so you know what I'm up against here..
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barley
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wheat
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oats
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bran
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rapeseed meal
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soyabean meal
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grass silage
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wholecrop wheat silage
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THEN we attempted to learn the breeds of sheep and cattle. I'm hoping that by some miracle I develop a photographic memory between now and when I need to know this stuff, because they all look the same to me. A sheep is a sheep is a sheep is a sheep, and the only cows I can differentiate are the Holstein-Fresian (typical black/white dairy cow), and the Highland 'Coo' which is big and hairy and awesome.

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Highland Coo!
(not my picture)
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Holstein-Friesian Cow
(also not my picture)
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Other than classes we've all pretty much been hanging out on the weekends. Dominic and I went walking on the Salisbury Crags last Sunday, which was pretty awesome. Here are some pictures from that.

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And of course, one gratuitous (and awful) tourist shot of me at the top of the crags.
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Well, that's about all I have for my updates. I'll try to be better about uploading more often so I don't have to write novels like this in the future :)