I came here to talk about missing having an oven. Our oven is broken. We were slowing telling our landlord and he's a bit slow about repairs. It hasn't been an issue before, due to the heat and the poor oven insulation. (Sidenote: our kitchen is old with old appliances. The oven and range are separate and made by AMC. That's right, the car company. I've driven an AMC Pacer before. Strangest stick shift ever: 3 speeds and the stick was on the column) But now, I want to make cookies and casseroles, big bubbling lasagnas and fruit pies. I want to bake sweet rolls and oatmeal bread. I want to do all this precisely because I can't. I am feeling stifled.
But then I realized I should tell you about Shannon and vet school (Shannon correct any wrong info please). I need to bring the camera and take some pictures of her in scrubs and her lab coat because she's so cute and professional-looking but until then I'll just describe.
On one corner of the big vet complex on the St. Paul campus is the Aninal Science Vet Med building. Here you'll find the central lecture halls for 1st and 2nd year students, the mail boxes, and the locker rooms. Plus it's got this big room for 1st years with carrells for each student. The carrells are like shared cubicals with two students in each. There are the old wooden ones and newer modular office furniture ones. Shannon got an old one, number 49, on the left. It's got a cabinet and some drawers for her use. She's got a microscope and shared slide sets. There are rows of carrells back to back and then long lab tables in between. The room has a lock on it that all the 1st years know so they can study in there after hours.
What else do I know? For anatomy, they do a combined structure of lecture, lab lecture and lab itself. The combination varies by day and breaks up the 4 hour blocks. They have to wear scrubs and long lab coats. The room for anatomy lab has 30 tables and big walk-in coolers for the cadavers. Shannon said it was super surreal to walk into the cooler and see horse cadavers hanging. They are working on connective tissue right now. The tables are 10 rows of 3 tables. The first row is male dog, second is female dog and third is cat. The students are broken up in groups of three with roles (dissector, captain and notes I think). The students move from male dog to female dog to cat each lab but do the same labs regardless. So like yesterday, they were working on removing a limb. Shannon and her team worked on a cat (day before was female dog) but other groups were working on dogs. Yesterday on said cat, Shannon was the dissector. She mentioned that she might never want to eat chicken legs again.
Another class uses that cheesy book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, which Shannon does not like. I think that's Professional Skills. There's an Introduction to Animal Populations class that meets about 7 times over the semester and involves fieldtrips. I think she said she is going to visit a goat farm. Ooh and she had her neonatology class yesterday. First class with lots of medical jargon and which kind of freaked her out. They call babies neonates. Most of them will be horses. She will be on call in the spring for births.
I think that's most of what she talked about from her two days of classes so far. It sounds weird reporting on her but it's so interesting and she doesn't have much time to update about it.
