Fireworks!

So tonight marked the official end of the Fringe Festival, which is rather sad. On the one hand it's nice to have the masses of tourists leaving, but the festival was also really fun. I loved walking down the street and seeing jugglers and street performers (and Braveheart!) and people in crazy costumes, and contemplating which shows to go to. I'm glad I got to go to two shows with Dominic, and under different circumstances I'm sure I would have gone to more of them, but being home was more important.

Things here so far have been good. Jessica and Allen (a.k.a. "Pookish") gave me a bouquet of flowers, which was extremely nice of them. Tomorrow I need to find a vase of some sort to put them in. I also got a lovely card from Lydia, which was very nice. Most people I guess know the reason why I was gone for a week, so they're all being wonderfully nice.

Flowers from Jessica and Pookish
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After dinner tonight we headed to watch the fireworks over on North Bridge. They were pretty good, although we couldn't hear the music very well from where we were, so the synchronization was a bit lost on us. Hopefully next year we can plan earlier and get tickets to get into the gardens, which is nearer to the music.

Fireworks!

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One of my cooler firework shots
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Anik & Jessica
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Jessica & I, stolen from Anik
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Tomorrow it's back to class, then there's a week and 2 days left before we have to start studying for our first exam. Fortunately it doesn't count, especially given my circumstances, but I'd still like to do well, so I'll be studying lots in the next week. At least we have all of Wednesday and Thursday off next week to study for it, and this week seems pretty low key in terms of classes.

Anyway, I think I need to go to bed early to avoid horrendous jet lag problems tomorrow during class, so goodnight!

Mommy...

Yesterday morning around 1am my mother passed away. I will miss her so terribly. She was the most wonderful, caring, loving, patient and beautiful person I know, and I can't even imagine how I'm going to live without her. I'm glad it ended quickly and she was spared more of the pain she was going through, and I'm glad I was able to come home to be with her and tell her how much she means to me.

My beautiful mother
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My mom with my older brother
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My first moments with my mommy
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My first moments with my mommy!
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Mom with me
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Mom with me again
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Both of my amazing parents
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Possibly my favorite picture of my parents ever. <3>

I am the luckiest person in the world to have been adopted by my parents, and my life is so blessed with them.

Thanks to everyone who's been sending emails and calling. It helps to know I have such amazing friends and family to help us through this.

I'm taking a quick break from vet blogging, as many of you know.

My mother was diagnosed with cancer back in April, and in the last week or so has gone way downhill. I flew home this last weekend to be with her, and other than keeping her comfortable and telling her how much we love her, that's all we can do right now.

I'd appreciate anyone who reads this to include my mother in your thoughts, or in your prayers if you do that sort of thing. She really needs a miracle.

Thanks.

Cows!

So! Today I learned how to milk a cow! Unfortunately it wasn't quite as cool as what I originally thought milking cows would be (i.e. sitting on a bucket beside the cow and manually squirting milk into a bucket, but it was still pretty neat.

What we actually did was learn to use a milking parlour, which is this room where you have (in this case) two rows of cows that file into two chutes on either side, and go up to the individual feeding troughs, with their back ends towards the middle of the room. They're electronically identified by their collars, and are fed a certain amount of food.

A Picture of the Milking Parlour, taken from the R(D)SVS website
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So once the cows are up in position, you, the milker, are below them in the sort of pit-ish area you can see above. There are machines that you fit on the cows udder, and it milks them, and then comes off when it detects the milk flow has stopped. It's pretty much all automated, and the machines report to a database where each cow's milk is measured and the machines can also tell if the cow has mastitis (udder infection) or if it's on antibiotics and can't have its milk thrown in with the rest.

All the while, while this is happening, the cows are pooing and urinating whenever they so desire, and woe betide you if you happen to be trying to fit a milking apparatus on the cow as it desides it needs to go, because you're basically standing right in the danger zone when you're puting the milker on.

Anyway, so after an hour of this, I have a whole different perspective of where milk comes from. I know it's pasteurized and everything, but even so, it's a pretty disgusting and unclean process.

So other than that, this week has been filled with mainly lectures and dissections, and also practical "clean" classes where we look at radiographs and bones and things. I like these clean classes the best, and I think one of the things I'm very interested in specializing in would be radiography, because I just think it's so cool.

I also like "clean" labs because I get to play.
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Me checking out a radiograph of a dog skull
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The other cool thing we did, which I didn't take any pictures of, was our small animal handling practical. We went out to Oatridge College, which is sort of in the middle of nowhere, and played with rabbits, rats, mice, gerbils, hamsters, and chinchillas in order to get familiar with handling them and picking them up properly.

In other news, I think I'm getting a cold, which distresses me a bit, but fortunately it's almost the weekend, and I can relax a bit.

First Fringe!

I saw my first Fringe show today! It was called the Caesar Twins, and apparently they're a pretty big deal. They were actually really good, albeit slightly weird because they're twins, and almost slightly homo-erotic. BUT, despite this, they were quite good, and actually quite funny at times. It was almost like Cirque-de-Soleil in the types of things they did, but a little smaller scale. They did lots of balancing acts, and trampoline tricks, and some funny twin jokes, and lots of flips and twists and things.

Here are some pictures of them. I, obviously, was not allowed a camera inside, so these are stolen from various places around the internet, but just to give you a small glimpse of what they were like, here ya go.

Pablo & Pierre, the twins
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This is more what they look like now, with the hair,
and that sort of balancing thing is a lot of the type of thing they did.
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This is one of the adverts for the show we saw tonight.
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So anyway, as I said, the show was really great, and then we went out for dinner and drinks afterwards, first at an American restaurant called "The Filling Station," which served very yummy cheeseburgers and chips, and then moved to a pub off Princes Street that I can't remember the name of, but they had a fun folk-ish sort of band playing. It was quite crowded, and so I didn't take any pictures, because I was trying to not be extremely touristy, but suffice it to say that it was a good restaurant, and a good bar, and I had a good time. :)

I will definitely have to take a picture of the venue of the Caesar Twins next time I go near it, though, because it is a purple cow. And when I say a purple cow, I really mean it; a great, big, inflatable, purple cow is sitting in a square in Edinburgh, and it contains a stage. The venue we were at was called the "Udderbelly" and then there's also a venue further into the city on the lower level of streets called the "Underbelly," and then there's also another venue called the "Baby Belly" and they're all purple cow themed.

Anyway, tomorrow classes start up in full, and I am somewhat sad to have finished my last weekend of freedom and have to begin studying for real (because I decided to fully enjoy my last weekend of freedom and did very little studying), but I'm sure lectures will be interesting, and we've got two dissections tomorrow. Yay!

Dissection!

So I should probably preface this entry with a warning:

If you have a weak stomach, don't like seeing pictures of dead things, or things with their skin cut off, you probably should avoid the pictures I'm going to show you in this one. I'll put them all at the end of the entry so you can choose not to scroll down that far.

Also, along the same lines, if you don't want to hear graphic details about the dissection.. you might just avoid this entry altogether. :)

Anyway. On to more exciting things. Today started off with two lectures on anatomy which occur just like any other lecture I suppose, except that it's different because it's stuff that you actually want to learn. So while I was tired and just tired of sitting for hours and hours, it was a good lecture, and I learned a lot.

After lectures we trooped across the hall into the dissection room, where we were teamed up into groups of three. My group members were Adam and Jess (not to be confused with Jessica). Both of them were very nice, and after talking to other classmates at the end, it seems we were the most successful at figuring out what was what, and being the first people done.

Our task was to dissect the left forelimb of the dog and discover the extrinsic muscles. So I made the first incision, and promptly made the first mistake, which was not to cut too deep. Oops! But that's alright, it wasn't a big deal, and we moved on. We peeled back the skin from the mid-line of the chest (the ventral medial plane) all the way around the elbow and to the midline of the back (dorsal medial plane). This was a fun task because not only is the outside of the dog particularly gross with formaldehyde and whatnot, but our dog had clearly not been preserved properly, and was growing lovely specimens of green furry mould.

This probably took the longest, so after about an hour of cutting and peeling and cutting and peeling we finally were able to see the muscles. It was actually really neat seeing them like this. In previous classes in high school and college we dissected silly things like frogs and earthworms and sharks and minks, the sort of things that you really wont ever need to know the insides of, so why bother learning, kind of thing, and also everyone besides me is really grossed out by it.

This dissection, though, was amazing because it's a dog, but even more so because I'm FINALLY with a group of people that think that dissecting a dog is the coolest thing in the world!

After the dissection we trooped back into the lecture theatre for a lecture on Agricultural Industry, which was somewhat interesting, but economy and statistics and what have you aren't really my thing, and plus it followed about the coolest class I've ever had, so it couldn't really compare. Bits of it were interesting, I don't want to make it seem like I didn't enjoy it at all, like we learned a bit about trends in agriculture and what causes the trends, but again, it's just not my thing.

So then after that quick lecture we had lunch. So a group of us (Nick, Kyle, Alan, David, Jessica, Anik and I) all went to the little sandwich shop around the corner and discussed our dissections while chowing down on lunch. Only vet students, right?

Anyway, so after lunch we headed up to the Greenfield Suite (GFS), which is a computer lab further up into the city, to look at some histology slides. This part was fun, but a bit confusing, because histology is probably the thing I find hardest, and looking at slides just makes me frustrated and angry. But it was only the first day, and this session was made slightly better by the fact that we were looking at these things on the computer rather than the microscope, which is easier on the eyes.

On the way back from the GFS I stopped into Concom, the certified Apple re-saler, and got a printer and some paper, and then got it home and set it up and realized that the damn thing didn't come with black ink. Who puts these packages together and thinks that people would rather have colored ink than black ink if they're forced to have only one? BLACK! BLACK is what I need and what any other reasonable person would need!

Ahem. Sorry. So tonight we're meeting our "mummies and daddies" who I think are in 3rd year of the 5-year program (or 2nd year GEPs). I have two "mummies" as most people do just because men are a real comodity around here, and they are both from Connecticut! Carin is from Ridgefield and Liz is from Trumbull. I don't think Liz will actually be here until September, but I'll probably meet Carin tonight, which should be fun.

Anyway time for dinner, but here are the pictures I promised! I did warn you!

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Our somewhat-mouldy dog
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Me, making the first incision!
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Me, showing off the window into the Trapezius that
I cut, displaying the Serratus ventralis
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Nothing too exciting today..

Today was a day mainly full of people talking at us about things relating to the services the school provides for us, such as computing and counseling and things like that.

We were set free at lunchtime, when I had my second go at matriculation, and was finally successful. So I am now OFFICIALLY a student at Dick Vet. Brilliant! After matriculating Jessica and I found a cute little cafe off the main road called Elephants and Bagels. I didn't take a picture (stupid!) but I will inevitably be returning there. I did collect this photo off the web, so you can get an idea at least what the outside looks like.

Elephants and Bagels

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The inside was very cute, on the wall were all drawings (presumably done by customers) of elephants doing various things (usually having to do with bagels), and there were little elephant figurines and things all over the place. The food was also quite enjoyable. I had a cup of Tomato & Basil soup and a buttered bagel, along with a delicious mug of cappuccino. Jessica had a bagel with hummus (spelled hoummus in the UK oddly enough), and a chocolate muffin. I'll try and snap a picture of the inside of it next time I go.

Also, it is interesting to note that this is NOT the same place as "The Elephant House" which is the birthplace of Harry Potter. However, I have passed The Elephant House a few times, and will be going in one of these days, if only to take a picture of the place J.K.Rowling sat while writing HP, because I am obsessed. Although it is reputable as having the best coffee in Edinburgh. :)

I also passed a little statue of Greyfriar's Bobby, which I snapped a shot of. "Bobby" was a dog owned by John Gray, an Edinburghian policeman in the early 1800s. John Gray died in 1858 of tuberculosis, and was buried in Greyfriar's kirkyard. Bobby, who outlived his master by 14 years, was often to be found sitting on his master's grave. In 1867 when a proclamation was made that ownerless dogs be captured and euthanized, Sir William Chambers (a director of the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals), paid for Bobby's license, thus making him the responsibility of the city council. Bobby died in 1872, and is buried just inside the gate of the Greyfriar's kirkyard, and his epitaph reads: "Greyfriars Bobby — died 14th January 1872 — aged 16 years — Let his loyalty and devotion be a lesson to us all."

Greyfriar's Bobby
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Being the future vet that I am, I of course find this amazing, and I love how a dog has so much recognition and respect. Go Bobby! It is also hilarious to point out that the dog's statue used to face the opposite direction, looking towards his master's gravesite, however at some point the owner of the Greyfriar's Bobby Pub had him turned around so that the pub would be in the background of tourists pictures. (Thanks to Wikipedia for all this information!)

So after lunch we returned for a tour of the Summerhall building. We had already been around much of Summerhall, but I did snap one cool picture of the oldest lecture hall in Europe, I think it was.

Anik and Jessica in the Old Lecture Theatre
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We returned then for more introductions to school organizations, and there's not a whole lot to say about it here, but suffice it to say that it felt like forever. We did have one very interesting lecture at the end about the History of Dick Vet, and got to see some pictures of what the school looked like back in the day. I should point out that this is the oldest vet school in Scotland, second in the UK only to London, which beat it by about 20 years.

Anyway, so then we returned to Pollock Halls for some much needed rest before dinner in about 30 minutes, and tonight I'll probably spend finishing my EMS forms and typing up my notes from yesterday. Fun stuff! I'm already excited for the weekend!

Tomorrow I believe the real lectures begin. We've got lectures on the Animal Body for a good 4 hours tomorrow, and then Friday we have our first dissection (So excited!!).