Business club reboot

Sugar is my drug of choice. Mmmm, candy corn...

I'm learning lots of interesting things while trying to reboot the business club for the vet school. First off, it's harder to reboot an organization than you'd think. The deadlines for normal paperwork all passed over summer, so I have to basically do everything from scratch. The students who were in charge last year are now fourth years, and thus, totally inaccessible. Yet at the same time, there's this huge backlog of e-mails and contacts and bank statements that are helping me feel like I'm doing something moderately useful.

The thing about business clubs is that lots of people are willing to help sponsor, but no one wants to run it. Fortunately I had the lesson in undergrad that you can achieve a lot just by walking into the main office and requesting things. So I have managed to put off some of the paperwork, but now it's starting to loom.

Probably even more fortunately, there's lots of people in the industry who want to see the club working, and there's nothing more motivating than actual adults/veterinarians taking an interest in what I'm doing.

So I write lots of e-mails and eat candy corn and try to remember I have to study too.

Immunology, you're not my friend*

*to the tune of Rubber Ducky

I came to the conclusion half way through the immuno exam that the only way I was going to survive the post-exam anxiety was to not think about it. Actually, I have this nice rationalization about how the professors gave us absolutely no direction for studying, and the exam was written a bit erratically and may have completely missed important points (that I knew) while focusing on silly little things (that I may not have known) like whether the membrane attack complex uses C5b, C6, C7, C8, or if it uses C4a, C6, C7, C8. The latter incidentally, and I got it wrong. Same thing with convertases of the classical and alternative pathways.

So I made chocolate cake.

Then I came back to it, and now I see: How could I have been so foolish? The right answer was so easy to arrive at, and so completely necessary to a sound understanding of immunology!

After all, the pathway goes along the lines of:

C1 cleaves itself. C1s cleaves C2 and C4. C4 is now C4b. C4b and C2b make C3.

Meanwhile, C4b2b cleaves C3!

C3b joins C4b2b to be C4b2b3b...did we mention C5 yet? Well, OBVIOUSLY C4b2b3b cleaves C5, and now we have C5b, which clearly shows why the answer to the other question was C5b, C6, C7, C8, and C9. And since this was the classical pathway, that's why you were wrong. The alternative pathway uses C3bBb. That's a B, not a 2. (sheesh, get it right)

But I was a silly student and didn't realize that we were supposed to know the alphabet in this new, convoluted form. I just had it summarized in my notes as "Legos."

Probably it would help if our prof used something other than the detailed diagrams from our textbooks. Lecture becomes exponentially harder to follow when you don't know which part of the twenty-piece jigsaw you're on.

(In case you were wondering what this was all about, the C#letters are tiny molecules in your bloodstream that eventually assemble themselves into the molecular equivalent of an awl, and then they go punch holes in bacteria. It's wonderful.)

Called In

I got done at the clinic around midnight. The clean-up was easier once I found the second autoclave was full of freshly sterilized instruments, meaning I didn't have to run a load myself. On the other hand, the drill defeated me. I wiped all the blood off it, but the mysterious combination of pulling and twisting necessary to disassemble it eluded me.

Around eight o'clock a newly spayed dog had dehisced, and I had gotten a call, "Can you come in?" Seeing as I had been still standing in the surgery ward, I guess technically the answer was "no". Anyway, it was a 4th year's surgery dog from earlier in the day. The resident was delighted to get to do a surgery. It wasn't a huge undertaking, though. She was worried, in fact, that maybe she'd mistakenly called for surgery on a dog that was fine. But to her relief (if not the 4th year's), the student had sutured a layer of fat instead of the linea alba. So yay, there was something to fix!

I don't usually meet the dogs before they're anesthetized. This one was a very thin Rottweiler, from the rescue group. She seemed very sweet--granted, she had just woken up a few hours ago and was sedated again already.

So that was last night! I tormented the other student techs by telling them about it today. No one really likes to hear that someone got called in--it implies there might be a trend!
However, aside from huge amount of cleaning I ended up doing, it was a pretty decent experience.

Not that I want to repeat it every time I'm on call.

Tapir necropsy

So a tapir died last week and I saw the necropsy! It was exciting, although after three hours of standing in a necropsy lab the excitement is maybe a little blunted. It was a really big tapir, about the size of a small cow, and its ribcage was just cavernous. It had an assortment of problems that I can rattle off pretty fast now, since the pathologists have been presenting the case to afternoon necropsy rounds for a week, and to my pathology class for lab. Nephritis, lung adhesions, acute pneumonia, and lesions on the tongue. Not to mention atherosclerosis. How an herbivore gets atherosclerosis is a really fun question that the pathologists haven't found a sure answer to yet.

The other thing with tapirs is that they're hindgut fermenters, very similar to horses. This one had a whole bunch of enteroliths in its colon. They ranged from bean size to big marble size, and look just like rocks (until you accidently drop one on the floor and are greeted by the redolent smell of manure).

A difference between year 1 and year 2

First year, I was so delighted to be in vet school that it took until second semester for me to have the days where you say, "I hate vet school."

I'm not having those days yet, two weeks into second year, but the quality of joy when I think "I'm in vet school" is definitely tinged by near-panic. When sitting in lecture, the thought hangs over me: "They expect us to know this stuff." Worse, I expect myself to know it. Not for the test, because the test is just the tool to see if I know it. No, I expect the facts and outlines to magically transmute themselves into usable knowledge sometime between now and fourth year.

Actually, that was last year. Last year I got to be a clueless first year, and all the mysteries would unveil themselves at the proper time. Now it looks like the mysteries like it right where they are, thank you very much, and shouldn't I be studying the five billion ways a carcinoma can occur? And spending afternoons in the clinic, so that I see how real medicine makes use of that knowledge? And practicing people skills, because it's not all scientific jargon that makes a vet?

Excuse me, I have to go panic. I mean, study.

Why I just paid for wool

*Loooong pause*

It was soft?

I went to the Sheep and Wool Festival. Two big barns were full of vendors selling yarn, spinning supplies, and innumerable balls of batting. And lots of stuff with sheep on it. And some alpaca stuff. Even some angora rabbit stuff.

It was with some baffllement I realized I was carrying a skein of alpaca-merino blend. I had made it all of three booths from the point of purchase before the thought rose unbidden: "I just spent most of my money on this. Why??"

It didn't help that at the time I was passing some really shiny, pretty bamboo yarn. It was cheaper than what I had just bought! The yarn across the aisle was cheaper than what I had just bought! Why on earth had I sprung for this reddish grayish twist of fiber, when there were so many other gleaming options?

I think it was because it was soft. Alpaca wool and really fine merino doesn't feel like scratchy wool, it's just sort of kushy and almost silky.

That and the woman who sold me the stuff was very nice, and suggested that it was good yarn for weaving. I hadn't told her I was looking for weaving stuff. It took me by surprise. I hadn't caught on yet that the heddle I had just bought and was carrying under one arm was an obvious giveaway. I might as well have carried a sign: I'm a weaver! I am a sucker for weaveable yarn!

While knitters just shell out for the yarn, and maybe the occasional knitting needle, weavers require a whole lot more equipment, bigger batches of yarn, and more accessories in general. Ergo, weavers have the potential to spend way more money, which may explain why salespeople were suddenly very nice to me.

Unfortunately the fact I only bought one skein meant I needed more yarn, to go with it. I couldn't afford more alpaca wool, so I went with cotton. It's not nearly as soft, but at least I am clear in my mind of why I bought it. To go with the first skein!

Why wool pays (but not to you)

(School has started, yet I continue to go on about fiber arts)

I'm looking forward to the festival next week, which is essentially an opportunity to spend huge amounts of money on yarn. Since I have very limited amounts of money, I went to some of the vendors' websites to see what sort of budget I've got. For instance, I like the look of the wool-bamboo blends that are out there.

35 dollars a skein. That's about one small scarf.

I made a really interesting sound when I found that.

Still, that's a fancy bamboo blend. I checked the price on more normal yarn, and even that is listed around 28 dollars.

So, let's say you don't feel like spending a ton of money on pretty yarn, but you fortuitously own sheep (or llamas. Or camels! I'm not picky). Getting your own wool processed is cheaper, right? Well, as long as you give them an impeccably clean fleece (20$ an hour for skirting it, otherwise), it only costs 5$ a pound to wash it. And a further 7$ a pound to card it.

So we're at 12$ a pound, still a steal by comparison. Except it's not actually spun into anything usable yet, and it's still the same color as the sheep. Or camel.

Did I mention there's a 50 pound suggested minimum?

Then, to spin it, that's positively cheap, just 2$ a pound, but getting it dyed pretty colors more than makes up for it, around 12 $ a pound.

So, let's see:

washing: 5

carding: 7

spinning: 2

dyeing: 12

Total is 26 dollars a pound, a skein is typically half a pound. So congratulations, you've gotten your yarn at half price (a total of about $1250, not including any sundry processing fees).

And what's more, you now have forty pounds of it.

*I don't actually mind the price of good yarn, though I am of course regretful I can't afford much of it. I suspect there's a healthy profit margin, seeing as raw wool prices have been tanked for the last decade, but letting someone else deal with the steps is fine with me. For weaving I actually need much better yarn than I could possibly handspin.

**prices obtained from Briar Rose Fibers and Blackberry Ridge Woolen Mill, both very good suppliers and supporters of wool industry. There's huge variation in prices, though. While these are pretty representative, they are not the final word.

Yep, I'm makin' a scarf!