I got to go home….!

2006-10-09

Hello everyone,

So this will not be a very long letter – I am sitting in the Calgary airport waiting to go back to Saskatoon. I came home for a grand total of 60 hours… if you calculate that out, I paid about $4 per hour (so cheap! I got a seat sale… 🙂 ) and it was worth every minute. Though I spent an awful lot of those hours with my nose buried in my books, at least my feet were in my husband’s lap 😉

We did the Thanksgiving thing with both sides of the family – and while out at the farm, I got to spend some time with the horses. Funny thing – now my opinion counts!

The week leading up to my flight was harsh and disheartening… so much so that I contemplated taking a plane to nowhereland and not coming back. That whole ‘what the hell am I doing here – I don’t deserve to be here‘ had definitely settled in. 3 tests and a midterm exam later I was even more depressed – I had a session with the associate dean of academics (one of my professors sent me) to deal with my learning disabilities and what they could do to help me. Now I have to go to the learning centre and take some more tests… :{

Not only that but I had two very frustrating sessions with the juvenile Swainson’s hawk Rufus my team is supposed to be feeding. He has started to imprint on us and so will only eat from the tweezers – almost a force feeding. And it becomes almost like a game to him! Sometime soon he’s going to manage to take my hand off thinking that it’s his dinner. Not to mention I end up wandering around with hands smelling like dead chicks and mice all the time – no wonder the cats have changed their behaviour and they actually lick me these days! 🙂

I had an awesome exotic animals session – birds and reptiles. I spent 45 minutes with a 5 foot constrictor wrapped around my arm because everyone else was freaking it out and trying to strangle it. Our prof for that lab happens to be the supervisor of one of the special interest groups I’m in (incidentally Wild and Exotic Animals Management) so she’s seen my work with the above mentioned Rufus. Maybe she took pity or something but she requested that I hold on to him till he calmed down. I must have been good because he went to sleep. 🙂

My other hands on lab involved steering cattle down the chutes (which I did without any help from the rest of the group because they were all flailing around like headless chickens – man were the guys impressed with l’il ole me…) and then taking blood samples. The prof got to do some learning too as he tried to teach me how to do it left-handed! As it was, I did it 4 times (2 times each hand) and I think I could do it right-handed if needed. One of the guys came out smelling like “roses”, when he went to herd an ornery heifer in and ended up slipping in a cow patty. He did the pinwheeling thing for about a full 30s and I thought he’d caught himself but then he went down. To top it off? The cow ambled over and drooled on his face… ;P

Anyway… I feel replete, so am moving more slowly – the flight was just called and I should probably visit the loo first – these window seats are great, except when you have to use the washroom!

More next week – hope you all had a happy Thanksgiving!!!

love j ox