My latest and greatest Adventures

So, to give a quick update on my life lately. Work, school, school, family, work, friends. I absolutely loved getting to go home last weekend to see all my family and a couple old friends. Even if it was only two days. We had a surprise birthday for dad's big 5-0 and boy was he surprised :D Sadly I don't have any pictures of the party, but we had a great turn out with lots of friends and family that came. These are some more pictures of my life lately. Most of them are of school stuff that I thought was particularly memorable, but not all of them. If you don't want to read everything that's fine, because this is a rather long post, but for those that find it entertaining, here they are :) And I have even added a couple fun videos at the end of one of the girls in my class, Molly, dehorning a giant cow with rather large horns. And just for you mom, I made the pictures larger like you requested.

Scrubbing in for surgery

We had a guy come to AI our goats that is an internationally known reproduction specialist. He gets hired by people in other countries to come and AI their animals, and we got lucky enough to have him come give us a demonstration. He gave a very good presentation about general reproduction, and how the AI works and everything. This is a picture of the laparoscope in place. He used a camera to look inside the abdomen and actually inject directly into the ovaries. I thought it was very fascinating....and I'm sure you all agree with me :) JK.

I love pictures of sleeping babies....especially when the baby is my nephew!

Haha, such dorks :)

This was at our large animal anesthesia lab, we got to put our pony Astro to sleep for a few minutes, and roll him around on the ground a little bit, and practice different positioning techniques. It was kind of nerve racking at first to be so close to his legs when he was on his back, because being around an awake horse like this would probably be death....or at least a few broken bones.

floating teeth...say "AAAHh"

Gretchen a little loopy from the sedative...I sure do love my classmates :)

Doing blood draws on a pig...just be glad you can't hear this picture.

So Dr. Rockett (standing on the table with a camera) and one of the other Ag teachers has a my-horse-is-bigger-than-your-horse competition going on at the moment, and Dr. Pate (the guy in the purple gloves) told Rockett that he could milk anything with teats. So she took him up on the challenge and brought our mice to class one day. He won.

This was a sign we passed at the caft fair...me and Richelle stopped told vendor what we thought about this sign. Haha, he said that he actually is a BSU fan, but signs like those sell like crazy, so he makes them. That guy needs to have a little more moral courage I think.

This is our new adventure at breeding mice. We are trying to raise them instead of buying them already dead to feed to our red-tailed hawk. We have about 14 babies at the moment and 3 adult females. They all like to spend most of their time in this little tube in the cage, and here is a picture of about 7 of them trying to all come out at once. One of the moms is on top of the tube. It actually is pretty cute, they're so small, I wouldn't mind them if they didn't stink so darn bad. To give you an idea of size, the babies are only about as long as my middle finger from nose to the tip of their tail, and the mom is only as big as my palm from tip to tip.

So the truth finally comes out....this is really what our program is all about....slavery. Haha, jk. We are trying to clean everything up because we have people from AVMA coming next week to renew our accredidation. So everything has to be cleaned up and ship-shape. This chariot needed moved and we didn't have anything to hook it up to a truck. So we pulled it :) AFter this picture, Allie got out and helped me pull while Kelsey got in and took more pictures.

We had to bring some buckets full of dirt to try and dry up the horse pen where there was standing water by the trough. I got to drive the tractor for a few loads and then I switched with Ally. This is where I rode on our way to the dirt pile. I love tractors :) And I do have to say that I'm a natural at driving those things.

So here are the videos I told you about, they were taken less than 1 min apart, and the horn came off about 3 sec. after the second video ends. Glad it was her and not me.

Behind the Waterfall

So...you should all feel extremely lucky because you are getting 2 posts from me in the same weekend! Haha, jk but I thought I should share this with you all before I forgot and didn't get around to it for another 3 months. So these are some pictures I had of my adventure to the waterfall with my friends Juliana and Cecil. I have spent the weekend with Juliana in Twin because of animal care this week, so I didn't have to drive back and forth between Twin and Rupert twice a day. So we decided to have an adventure because we were bored. We're going to come back sometime soon in swimsuits and play in the water below the waterfalll, but it was too late today to play, and a little chilly cuz there was a storm coming. There are a few other pictures that I liked better, but I'm having technical difficulties getting them from my camera to the computer.

This picture was taken right behind the waterfall.
Here's all of us hiding from the spray. It was pretty wet down there.

Directly above Cecil's head, there is a cave that I am going to explore some day.

A gorgeous view over looking the canyon from where we were.

Hiding from Cecil to try and scare him.....it didn't work. This was right before we discovered a patch of stinging nettle.

Great Fun at School!

So, it's been awhile since my last post...again. No surprise there. But it's time for some great pictures and an update on how school is going. I'm loving it as always. My classes are about 2x harder than they were last year, but I am feeling surprisingly competent. It probably helps that I am working part time at a clinic in Rupert, so I get to see a lot of things in the clinic and get an advantage in class.

These first three pics. are at one of my labs. We were learning how to prep cows for various abdominal surgeries. The third picture is the result of me trying to place an IV catheter...yes that's blood.

This is after our neuter lab. This is Dude, he was a sweet dog that looked a lot like Sam.

And this is Rufus, our holstein bull calf that we are bottle feeding. He is sooo cute, he gets so excited when we feed him, and will run and buck and jump around his pen. He will play tag too, it's super funny because he is still way awkward on his feet and always trips over himself.

And this is our Iguana. He's a pretty good boy...we haven't figured out yet why he is orange and not green.

This is what blood looks like at 100x magnification. All the small reddish dots are red blood cells, and the small purply thing is a white blood cell. Specifically a neutrophil, in case you were wondering.

Ok, this is Bobby our ball python. And this is whathappens when you turn your back on a snake for about 15 seconds. I took these pictures when I still thought it was funny that he had crawled through the paper towel roll. About 15 seconds later, I realized that he wasn't come out of that thing the way he went in...nor was he coming out the other end either. He actually got surpringly far by the time I was able to unwrap him. And let me tell you unwrapping those cardboard rolls is not exactly easy when you have a squirmy snake inside. He probably made it until about 6 inches from his back end, before he was just stuck.

So that's probably my most exciting events of this semester so far...although I could think of many more stories if you want to know. I'll keep you updated as the semester goes on. :)

PICTURES!!

Woohoo!! I finally have pictures! Thanks to my "new" camera I got for easter and the sweet deal I got on my SD card, I am now going to have a blog full of pictures instead of just me talking...which I'm certain that you are all going to miss. Here are some of the pictures from my past semester, though they are in a somewhat random order.

This is a picture of my fish tank that I took yesterday. I think I have finally gotten everything worked out. 4 of the fish in here have stayed alive for 3 weeks. I just got th Plecco yesterday (yes, you can see some algae growing on the glass) and one of the small fish have been there from the beginning. He's a trooper, let me tell ya.

I'm so excited to finally have my fish tank up and running.

These are some pictures of our baby goats that were born a couple weeks ago. They are so cute and just love to climb all over you when you go in the pen. The picture below gives you a vague idea of size, the green bucket is about the size of a five gallon bucket. They wouldn't hold still for me to get a picture of all 4 of them together, and it's kind of hard to take clear pictures on my phone anyway.

These are a couple pictures of the two baby pigs I got to bring home for a night to bottle feed. They are only about two weeks old in these pictures, and they are so darn cute. Feeding times took less than 5 min. It took me one or two to make the bottle, and they only ate for about 15 sec. each and then they were done. I could actually watch their belly bloating as it filled up with milk.

And this is Zebra, our resident mouse. His name is pronounced with a soft 'e' as in elephant.

These are pictures of the tail end of our biggest funderaiser we did this year. Sadly, I didn't get any pictures of when it was set up, but this is what was left over that we had to go store in our barn. I was one of the few who had a truck to haul things back and forth, I don't think the truck has been this loaded down in years. Haha, good 'ole truck.

And this is Squirt, (No, I didn't name her) the puppy who has stolen my heart this semester. She's a German Shepher mix, and is the cutest thing ever. How I wish I could take her home :(

This is Squirt all tired out after chasing a ball around our classroom for about three hours. They don't get out of their kennels much except for walks and to be poked and prodded in labs, so whenever we can we let them out to play.

I'm sure that I have many more pictures somewhere that I could put on here, but this is enough for now. I'm certain many more adventures await me.