Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy American Thanksgiving! Try not to kill anyone tonight/tomorrow (or any day really) while you're out shopping!

We had our "traditional" vet school dinner tonight - super thank you to Hill's and Novartis for donating turkeys and drinks for tonight. We really appreciate the ability to have a thanksgiving dinner even though we're thousands of miles from home and away from our families. It's a bitter sweet time for everyone.

The food was amazing! I didn't have a single dish tonight that I didn't like (although I was not particularly fond of the taste combination that resulted when I set something chocolate on top of mashed potatoes!). No other place will I have my pick of dozens of different side dishes - tonight alone I had 3 different kinds of mashed potatoes! I only stopped at 3 because I didn't want to get too many stares from my friends when I showed up with a ton of potatoes haha - I'm Irish, it's in my blood? I'm pretty sure I picked up at least 4 different turkey pieces too, because everyone has a different and unique way of cooking it! I squeezed a little bit of pumpkin pie in tonight, someone made a fantastic pumpkin pie dip (yum!!), as well as my pumpkin bars. I also had a rice krispie treat, some strawberry cheesecake and a couple of buckey balls. Please don't judge me too harshly! I swear I only had about 2 bites worth of the above mentioned foods! The key is to take just a tablespoon or so of everything so you get to try lots of dishes without getting too full to try everything! I love it! I guess it ended up being very convenient that I forgot to eat lunch today (yes, I seriously forgot! I was so busy checking tasks off my list this morning and then suddenly it was almost 1:30!). 

Less than 3 weeks left officially! 4 more days of class, 4 final exams, 1 presentation, and 1 more pesky pharmacology exam before it's time to pack up and go home. I really miss my family and friends right now, and most of all I miss Penny. I'm tired of getting up every morning and going to classes all day and then coming home just to study the rest of the night. It's draining, even if I do get plenty of sleep most nights. I'm worried about final exams because I want to do well and not fall short. December 12th just cannot come fast enough!

Kitten!!!

My roommate rescued an adorable little kitten today! It's so wonderful having such a cute and fuzzy little critter around! Her name is Pandora and she is just under 4 weeks old. She was rescued as a feral (and don't worry, we consulted with several doctors including boarded internists and a nutritionist as well as the director of the feral cat project here so she is in good hands getting everything she needs!) but she is so stinking cute and has the most opinionated voice ever! I'm sure you will be inundated with pictures over the next few weeks as she grows up!

And in case you're wondering, no we don't get Thanksgiving off tomorrow. We have classes, but we do have a yummy school-wide dinner tomorrow night!

..."Houston, we have a problem!!!" I tried to upload pictures tonight and Google told me that I've uploaded my 1GB quota!! Huh?? So sorry to leave you hanging - I'm going to have to wait until this weekend to figure this out :( 

Pumpkin Bars

I finally got around to making pumpkin bars tonight! They turned out so nicely - I am very pleased. I managed to track down the right ingredients for my mother's recipe, mix everything up well, bake it nicely, and then frost it to the ultimate deliciousness! Sometimes things do turn out even when you're on a Caribbean island with expensive ingredients, limited supplies, and just a toaster oven : D.

Recipe:

Bars

4 eggs

1c. oil

2c pumpkin

2c sugar

1/2 t salt

2t cinnamon

2c flour

2t baking powder

1t baking soda

Beat eggs and add oil, pumpkin, sugar. Add dry ingredients and beat mixture well.

Place in jelly roll pan and bake at 350 for 30 minutes.

 

Frosting

1 stick butter

3oz cream cheese

1 t water

1 t vanilla

11/2 c confectioners sugar

Cream together and spread on cool pumpkin bars.

Keep bars refrigerated

Sand Dollars

I went to Grand Anse beach today for the first time since early last term. It's such a pretty beach but not so great for snorkeling (at least not compared to everywhere else) and getting there and back on the weekend bus schedule is a huge pain, so I just really haven't been. But a friend wanted to go today, so a few of us trekked over and enjoyed a lovely afternoon in the sun.

For the first little bit, we just hung out in the water. It felt "cold" getting in initially, and then it just felt wonderful to float there. After the others decided to get out, I opted to snorkel for a few minutes and see if there was anything worth taking pictures of. The area with vegetation and stuff happens to be rather far out and at least 20ft deep. Angry congested sinuses are not a fan of doing anything more than looking from the surface, so I couldn't really dive down and see if anything deserved a better look. The water was crystal clear today, but it was still kind of difficult to distinguish all the darkly covered objects from one another so I decided to head back. On my swim back, I came across my first ever sand dollar!! I was super excited! I think I saw one or two with the help of one of my classmates where we used to swim by the cliff and he would then retrieve them, but this was just lying there on the bottom staring up at me! I of course had to get a picture of it - must document the find! Let's just say that diving for pictures and retrieval was rather painful. The amount of pain an pressure in my face while I was deep under made me wonder if I was going to hemorrhage out my nose and ears! Luckily that's a bit dramatic and was most certainly not the case haha.

After I collected my sand dollar, I excitedly continued my journey to shore to show my friends. Maybe 20-30 ft from the original spot, I found another!! No picture taking this time, just down and back. Two in one day after 1.5 years?? Crazy!!

I also saw an eel while I was swimming - wish I could have gotten better pictures because he was pretty cool looking, but oh well. All in all, an excellent swim and it ended in spotting a rainbow!

The Verdict Is...

More orange juice and cough syrup!! After 6 weeks, I caved and visited our university health services today. Waste of 80 minutes and $25 US. To recap the issues, I was lucky enough to have acute bronchitis the entire week of midterm exams. Lots of coughing, feeling miserable, and sleeping. At the end of all that, I started feeling better and the coughing just seemed to become a residual thing. Fast forward five weeks and the coughing began to pick up and get worse. Yuck. So after pointed stares from my roommates and friends, I finally made an appointment to see someone. The only advice the doctor could offer was get enough antioxidants, drink more orange juice, and try some cough syrup. Helpful. Really helpful. Grr.

Flights Resolved

Resolved my flight issues today! I called American Airlines again during my lunch break and asked for an explanation. When this person priced the flight change out for me, it came up $50 cheaper (so $210) which had me very confused. She said that basically the "class" of ticket I purchased back in March was no longer available on this flight so I was looking at a cost difference between "classes." So when the round trip previously was $837, the new total went up to $900 something. Okay, all makes sense to me, I tell her I'll think about it and get back to her. As soon as I hang up the phone, it occurs to me that no matter how you multiply $369, you can't get $900 on a round trip flight, so I am once again very confused. I decided to call my father to see what he thought and ended up leaving a long winded message.

Tonight when we're talking, I am ranting on and on about how I just want to be home! I am so sick of being here, I am so sick of pathology, I am so sick of studying and going to class. He can't really offer any insight on the flight situation other than the airline companies like to make things secretive and extra-complicated in order to make extra money. I'd have to agree after all of my AA phone calls! At the end of the call, he sweetly offers that they'll pay half of whatever the total cost ends up being. Yay!!! I love my parents :).

I decided to call AA one more time and ask again about the $369 flight. The lady this evening was not as nice as the one this afternoon, but nicer than the lady last night. You can tell as you're talking to them that they deal with very rude and angry people all the time, because the second you pose a question to them, their tone of voice gets defensive. I enjoyed listening to tonight's woman, because she would weave in and out of the defensive tone as she realized I wasn't going to be mean and yell at her. Quite honestly, I don't think I'm capable of being mean to people like that. I have a tendency just to be submissive and non-confrontational. So this woman starts looking around at flights and the various airports in my home area, and finds a flight that will only cost me $30 extra. She tells me this is the best deal for that day, and I decided to take it! Is $180 an absurd amount of money to pay? Absolutely. But I want to go home!! I want to be with my family, I want to eat real food, I want to be with my Penny and my dogs, I want to have more time to shop, more time to dog hunt, more time to basically not be in Grenada. I love it here, but enough is enough! Island fever at this point haha.

When I talked to my mom after the switch, she was telling me that after I spoke to my dad earlier, he was very confused. He was surprised I wanted to come home so badly, he thought I loved it here! And I do, but I am so ready to be done with this semester! I am tired of Grenada and school, I just want a break :). So now I get to fly home on December 12 - less than one month from now!!! I am flying into a different airport at a later time at night, but that's okay, I get to be reunited with all the ones I love!

Pharmacology

It's pretty rare that things we talk about in class on a day to day basis are interesting enough to warrant a blog post (after all, you don't really want to learn about the intricate details of the liver or eyes, the exact mechanisms of action for a variety of chemotherapeutic agents, the parasites you might get doing seemingly innocuous things-like eating-or how to break down the boring details of clinical pathology), but occasionally a professor will add a little extra something to their presentations that just deserves a shout out.

Today's post is brought to you by pharmacology. The current topic of discussion is reproductive pharmacology, so I guess this at least sorta-maybe-kinda makes sense to have in a presentation, but I am a very conservative and rather shy person and I'm also pretty easily shocked. It's small and in black an white on our handouts, so we knew a cartoon was coming, but extra close inspection would be the only way you'd get to see all the..err...details. This pops up on the screen and there are some giggles of amusement and embarrassment as the professor launches into detail about oxytocin. I figured it would be the sort of thing that would get changed quickly as we moved onto a more suitable slide, but no, I had the pleasure of awkwardly averting my gaze as best I could for what felt like at least 5 minutes!

So if ever you were wondering if we ever do have some fun in veterinary school, I suppose this proves that the answer is yes!