The grind…

2006-10-21

hey there peeps,

I want to start by thanking all of those people who have sent me cheery, uplifting messages over the last couple of weeks. 🙂 I haven’t had the time even to read many of them, so answering them is kind of hard – I try and do 1 or 2 a day – which means I’m still working on September’s backlog!!! But they definitely help. Especially when all I dream about lately is schoolwork (which isn’t really conducive to a good night’s rest when you’re quizzing yourself and panicking in your dreams because you don’t know the answers!), or else dying in my sleep and being found days/weeks later with my face eaten off because the cats got hungry and couldn’t help themselves. Gruesome eh?

So imagine sinking into a morass of failure, stress, caffeine overload, lack of sleep, lack of food, lack of exercise… that pretty much sums up the last 2 weeks. Midterms hit with a vengeance, leaving me feeling as though I’d been kicked in the teeth and stomped on by a wild bull. For those of you who have seen me on a little bit of caffeine… magnify that by a factor of about a billion. Add in the no exercise, and I’m probably a wee bit edgy… 🙂 um… put it mildly. 

Jenna (one of my classmates) told Tyra and I to go climb one of the trees in front of the school yesterday to work off some nervous energy (Tyra is probably the only other person in class as hyper as me – and weget each other a bit wound up). We thought it would be a good idea, but it was snow-raining (you know – where it wants to snow, isn
‘t sleet, but isn’t rain – yes we’ve had snow here for the last week and a half… stupid weather!) so we did burpees up and down the hall instead. Then I got all dizzy because I hadn’t eaten since 4:30am (it was 8:30am) so I had to sit down on the floor. The 2nd years came along and because they were heading into a parasitology exam decided to inform us all about the nasty diseases that I was in danger of acquiring. I’m sure they would have been horrified had they seen Tyra walking on her hands 2 minutes before that and then wiping the sweat off of her face before washing those same hands! 🙂

Anyway… midterms… not going well. I can’t imagine what things would be like if I was behind in my classes. But definitely increasing my stress exponentially, like by about a gazillion. So I have spent numerous hours wondering if I had somehow been a mistaken acceptance (apparently I’m not the only one!). Can they come up to me and say “whoops- that letter we sent you? It was meant for a DIFFERENT Jasmine Dhillon. We’re sorry. Please get out of our school before you embarrass us all!“?

We haven’t had labs for the last 1 1/2 weeks either, so nothing to feel good about doing well. And to make matters worse, Rufus (the juvenile Swainson’s hawk that I had been caring for), was doing well enough that he got moved outside for flight training – this was good. We were hoping he’d be strong enough to go south this fall instead of having to spend the winter cooped up inside. But… he got eaten. 😦 Somehow the predator became the prey… we think a fox or something got into the barn (which needs to be condemned). All that was left was a few feathers… you can picture it I’m sure – me with my bucket of water and bowl of cut up chicks and mice, opening the pen door… expecting a swoop of wings… silence.
 
‘Rufus?’

‘Rufus? Where are you hiding?’ (incidentally there is nowhere to hide. Each flight pen is a big open room with a chicken wire mesh ceiling, and wooden panelled walls. There’s a few perches, branches, and that’s about it).

‘Rufus? Oh… oh s&%t!’

Then, the icing on the cake… my ‘almost 3 years old’ nephew told me off (his birthday is next week) because I stood him up. Nathaniel (my cousin’s son) and I have a standing date at noon on Saturdays – after Kindermusic he comes and terrorizes my cats while I attempt to visit with his mother. It’s quite entertaining really. But last Saturday I got held up at the University waiting for a classmate who was supposed to be returning some notes that she had borrowed. I waited 2.5 hours for her to show up, which meant that I missed my ‘play date’. Talk about guilt! And reasoning with someone that age? He just patted me on the shoulder “It’s okay Auntie, just don’t let it happen again.” 🙂

So that’s been my amazing 2 weeks… lovely eh? And I have BChem on Tuesday… sigh…

At least my cats might start talking to me again. They have been quite upset and insulted lately. They even spent 2 days running away from me (except at night when they thought I was asleep and wouldn’t notice them sneaking in to bed to cuddle – almost like errant spouses!). I think they were feeling neglected and abused – I was spending so little time at home, and then cuddle time was ‘palpation practise’. (Can you tell Anatomy, Physiology and Histology have all been in the last 1.5 weeks?). So everytime I touched them I was checking something out… I always did some ‘forgive me’ pats after… but they let me know they were displeased. They vomited on my homework… literally… and both the same night! First Mirage did on my Behaviour paper – so I reprinted it and put it into my backpack. Thirty minutes later Echo puked in the backpack. hmmm choices…

a) strangle the cats and go to jail

b) laugh and clean up the mess

c) tell off the cats and reprint the assignment

d) give up and have a bath

I went for a run before I ended up drop kicking either of the cats. Luckily it was a ‘dry’ vomit, so not much mess when I got back. Needless to say I waited until I got to school before printing it again. Funny that it was probably the one class where I could have gotten away with the excuse ‘but my dog ate my homework’ (subbing in real events). I just would have had to write an appendix to my paper (with lit cited!) on why I thought it happened! Now the first thing I do when I get home is spend 5 minutes of quality ‘petting’ time with them, and the last thing I do is tell them where I’m going and how long I’ll be. Hopefully it will prevent any future issues… 🙂

So kiddos, I have a lot of BChem to learn in a very short timeframe, so must go. One last 
piece of information before I go though – Did you know that it now costs 89 cents to send a letter to the US? And $1.49 overseas? What is the world coming to???

Lots of love and hugs to everyone!

j ox