It's a jolly holiday!

So, yeah, I'm not doing too well with this. But, we will focus on the positive point that I am updating! That means that not all hope is lost for this blog. Those of you who have been nagging me to update it...keep doing that! There is really no better reason for me to update than knowing that people are actually interested.

I'm currently in the tail end of Thanksgiving break, and I think I'll focus this post on what I've been doing over break, since it has been quite wonderful.

We finished up classes last Thursday, after having our anatomy final on Wednesday. It feels so weird (but wonderful!) to be done with anatomy for this semester. We may be taking a lot of classes, but anatomy has always seemed to predominate. It feels marvelous to have survived. Anyway, I skipped out on Histology lab Thursday (yes, I'm a bad person, but is Histology lab really necessary?) and got myself out of Blacksburg as soon as I had everything packed up. This was to first time I had driven from Blacksburg to Fredericksburg by myself, and managed to get lost a couple times (which wasn't helped when I called my dad and he told me to go South instead of North...), which was frustrating, but I made it home safe regardless. I was only home for a couple hours before heading up to Alex's house so that we could catch the bus to New York City on Friday morning. I won't detail the New York trip here, because I would probably go on forever. I'll just say that the trip was wonderful, and it packed in everything that I could have hoped for my first trip to the city. I have pictures up on Facebook that cover everything we did pretty well, in case you're interested! Now I can't wait to go back again (although I have no idea when that will happen).

Coming home this time has been a little strange. I think it has to do with the fact that I've been gone since mid-August, whereas in undergrad I never went much longer than a month away before at least coming home for the weekend. Some of the most striking changes were in our two cats. Topaz has managed to gain a significant amount of weight since August, which was very obvious to me to me since I hadn't seen him for 3 months. I tried to point this out to my mom, but she maintains that he is just "pleasantly plump." Oh well. Tuffy looked normal (except that I'm pretty sure that his eyes have gotten just a teeny bit hazier, which is normal for an almost 15 year old cat) but he wasn't as affectionate as usual. This didn't surprise me since I've been gone for so long, but it still hurt a little bit. But, he's gotten much better as the week has gone on. In fact, he's curled up on the love seat next to me now, so all is well with the world.

Anyway, I've spent most of the week just relaxing and trying to avoid studying for the final that I have on Monday. Monday I went into the animal hospital to observe an leg amputation on a cat and to help out at the front desk a little bit. Tuesday I spent most of the day finally reading the second Twilight book (reading for fun? what!?). I really didn't want to like the Twilight books when I started reading them (especially since people were saying that they're better than the Harry Potter books...you all know where my loyalties lie...). After reading the first two books, I still don't think they're all that good from a literary standpoint, but, what can I say, they play to my emotions and I can't put them down. Mom and I went to the movie yesterday, and I absolutely loved it, so I'll just call them my guilty pleasure and leave it at that.

Wednesday evening, I met up with some high school friends at a new bar downtown. It was really good to see them, especially since I hadn't seen some of them since last Thanksgiving. Best of all, Jill had come home with her husband all the way from California, so it was especially great to see her. There were a few awkward moments, since we're all in such wildly different places right now, but it's also nice to see how we can quickly come back together and enjoy ourselves after so long.

Yesterday was spent doing normal Thanksgiving activities (parade watching, mashed potato making, eating, movie theatering), and now here I am with a Large Animal Husbandry final to study for. Blah. But that's ok, I have no regrets! I plan to spend the next 2-ish days with a healthy combination of studying and Christmas decorating, so it should all be good.

See you back in Blacksburg!

Connie's starting a blog! We'll see if it lasts...

So, there have been several times throughout my life when I have attempted to keep a journal or a diary of some sort. These attempts went very well...for about a week. I think one of the main problems had to do with my slight perfectionist tendencies, which caused me to feel like a failure at journaling if I didn't write in it every single day or if I didn't include every little detail of what was going on in my life. Therefore, I quickly became overwhelmed and gave up. However, this is different! This is a blog! Which is nothing like a journal whatsoever... Anyway, my hope is that the fact that someone might actually read this will keep my entries from being unmanageably verbose and will force me to update it, at least occasionally.

Now that I think about it, I'm a little sad that I didn't start this at the beginning of the semester. It may have been interesting to chronicle the adventure that is the beginning of veterinary school before all the weird stuff that we do started to become a little more routine. However, we continue to do weird stuff, so perhaps it will still seem so to anyone who reads this.

What I don't want is for this to become is a place where I complain about my many hours spent at school, studying, tests, professors, formaldehyde, or anything else that might warrant complaining. If you know me, I probably already subject you to enough of this, and I'm really sorry. I really don't want to, but sometimes I just get overwhelmed and it's all I'm thinking about the majority of the time, so it unfortunately slips over onto people who definitely don't deserve to have to listen to me complain. But, hopefully this blog will stay relatively stress and complaining free. If I stray off course, feel free to give me the internet equivalent of a slap in the face and tell me to focus!

What I do want is to share with people some of the interesting little occurrences going on in my life. I've been able to do and learn so much in the past couple months, so if I can save a little piece of the coming months for myself and others, I think this will definitely be worth it.

So, to start, my interesting observation for today. Today, I believe, was our very first lecture in vet school that did not involve a powerpoint, overhead projector, or preprinted notes. The professor stood up in front of the classroom, talked about immunology, and drew the occasional schematic on the white board. I had to actually write out notes (gasp!), instead of filling in little additions to a set of preprinted notes, or on a powerpoint. It was amazing. The professor did not speed along, flipping through powerpoint slides like the survival of all domestic animals depends on it. He just talked, explained, summarized, reiterated important points, and drew out nice, simple diagrams. It's the most I've learned in an immunology class all semester. So, old school lecturing, when done correctly, can be a wonderful thing. I'm sure that the same can be said for more modern powerpoint lecturing, but it seems that so many professors use it so that we can get through as much material as quickly as possible. I suppose this is one of the points of vet school, but I still think it's kind of a shame.

So ends my first blog post. Hopefully there will be more!