Drugs, Drugs, and More Drugs

It's a long weekend of pharmacology! But rather than bore you with the mundane details of pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics, I will instead describe my trip to the campus beach today, which is far more exciting AND has pictures. : D

Vet roomie who has no tests this week really wanted to get some tanning time in this weekend, but since she didn't feel like dealing with the bus system, we opted to go hang out on campus for a bit instead. I happen to be pretty terrible at the whole lying out in the sun and not getting bored thing, so I played explorer the whole time. This ended with me getting loads of sand in my swimsuit because in addition to being composed of the normal sandy substrate, ours also contains glue. I swear.

I found several pretty shells and some sea glass. I managed to find some conch shells (roomie is quite enthralled with them currently, like I was last semester. Now that I have 2 at home, it's kind of what ever haha) both big and small too. The water is still pretty muddied from the increased turbulence (curse the wind!), but I stumbled across a few sea eggs which I simply just had to pluck out of the water and play with. What's a sea egg? Well you might remember me mentioning them before:

They're typically purple, generally large, and not nearly as prickly as they appear. In other words, if you're brave, you can pick them up and play with them! I've also seen one white one (the whole thing was white not just the spines) and then today I found a green one. The spines generally don't feel sharp, and as long as you're got it out of the water, it's pretty much helpless (sorry urchins!). They "wiggle" in your hand(s) and feel funny in general. The purple one made a big show of dumping as much slime on us as possible (you can see it dripping from my roomie's hand!), but the green one was pretty quiet.

Upon finding these guys (found the green one first and immediately wanted pictures!), we dragged them kicking and screaming back to shore (okay just kidding, they were very compliant hostages) for a photo shoot. Yes, I really like taking pictures haha, and since I can't bring my camera in the water, I'm bring them to the camera. We dipped them in the pater periodically for a bit of reoxygenation until we had a million pictures of and with our new friends. When we were finished playing with them, we took them back to a nice grassy area under water and let them go.

We also played with some tiny snails on rocks. Plucked them off and let them crawl all over our hands. They tickled! They also have very "cute" faces and eyes. When we were done with them, we held our hands next to bumps on the rocks and they climbed right back onto the rock and began enduring the pounding waves once again. Very cool.

Next up for me was taking some nice, artsy photos with shells and coral. I think they turned out nicely, don't you?

Lastly, this is something I've wanted to do for awhile. Catch a crab. The kind people eat, not hermit crabs. This is definitely easier said than done considering that they have nice claws and happen to be quite fast. Any time I run across one, it either instantly scurries back down a hole, or becomes annoyingly invisible underwater. I am also not looking to get pinched in the process, which really presents a unique challenge.

Today I stumbled upon a crab racing along the grass line on shore. I immediately took up pursuit assuming he was going to head for the grass immediately and I'd lose him. Wrong! He actually headed for the waves! His strategy appeared to be to wait out my fascination while riding the waves until I gave up. Unfortunately for him, I am very persistent. I spent a good 10 minutes chasing this crab in and out of the water, losing and regaining site of him over and over and over again! I initially thought perhaps I could grab him from behind, but those menacing claws told me otherwise! After a moment of pondering, I came up with an excellent solution-get him to attack a piece of grass! Sounded simple enough, right? Wrong! This guy really wasn't interested in confrontation, thought he had the upper hand by being in the water and didn't need to defend himself, or was smarter than I was giving him credit. Or perhaps all three! Anyhow, it took a very long time to get him to finally pinch down on that grass, and when he finally did, I squealed with joy and took of running down the stretch of sand to show my roommate. Poor crab. He squeezed his eyes shut and hung on for dear life, probably assuming his days were over. At least on that account he was wrong! We of course proceeded to have another photo shoot while he patiently held on for dear life, and then let him go. He was VERY grateful and shocked. I could tell by the way he went skittering off over the rocks.