Hello, Summer Break!

Tonight: Pirates 3 and Italian dinner! Woot!

Next week: Playing with buffalo

Week after next: L.A., baby!

Hey, is anyone gonna be in/near/in flying distance of L.A. on the 24th of June? Mom and Sam and such are throwing the Nessie a baby shower! Come one, come all! Coed! Games! Free beer!

The Nessie is 25 weeks along today. Here's what my Babycenter email has to say:
" Your baby is responsive to touch now. You can have fun with him by trying to tickle his foot when he kicks you or by lying on your back and rolling from side to side, to see how he reacts. His eyelids open around now and his heart is beating so strongly, it may be heard with a stethoscope...The baby now weighs nearly 1.5 pounds / 660 grams and is approximately 13.5 inches/ 35 centimetres long from crown to heel. He makes breathing movements..."

Cool, huh? We find out in just a couple of weeks if we're having a girl or boy (my gut says boy, but my family says girl, and I would be so pumped either way!), and then the naming party can begin!

Alright, alright, I'll go back to studying now.

So, this week I took my three IPID finals. This stands for Introduction to Pathology and Infectious Disease, and covers immunology, parasitology, bacteriology, and virology. On Wednesday, I had an "answer 3 of 5" long essay, on Thursday I had an "answer 10 of 10" short essay, and today I had a "spot practical" by which I mean that we went around to stations and answered questions about the specimens.

I did okay on the long essay, I think. I'm pretty sure I passed the short answer, since only one of the 10 questions I completely blanked on. I was worried about the spot exam, though. All of the review material was as follows:
(Picture of worm)
"This worm was taken from a sheep abomasum. What is it? What is its life cycle?"
And so on.

In order to prepare, I (and by "I" I mean "Matt") printed off a bunch of pictures of various parasites and we spent the afternoon yesterday drilling them until I was pretty solid on parasite identification. "Dicrocoelium! Ixodes! Culex! Psoroptes!" I shouted as I became more and more confident. Even Matt was impressed at how quickly I seemed to pick it up, since I was at the end of a long week.

This morning, I ran through them again, and still felt good about the identifications. Yes! Maybe I would rock this exam!

Our final was 23 stations with about 3 questions at each station. We had 3 minutes per station and 2 rest periods, for a total of 75 minutes. I got, almost undoubtedly, every parasite identification correct. Yes!

Too bad that was only 3 of the 23 stations. Oops. Apparently, they decided it would be an "interesting twist" (in the words of the examiner) to focus on immunolohistology (3 stations) and bacteriology (at least 15 stations). Bacteriology?!?!? Of the review materials we were given, there was approximately 1 slide of bacterio stuff and 30 parasites. And no immunohisto stuff; that lab was LAST AUGUST.

I do not think I have ever failed an exam as spectacularly as I failed today's.

Does anyone have some chocolate I can eat?

I'm surfacing from enterobacteria just long enough to bring you this picture- Me at 23 weeks!

Is it completely incongruous that I simultaneously want to be done with school for the rest of my life and want to become the third board-cetrified large animal neurologist?


It would seem as though those two goals were somewhat at odds, no?

So I am seriously so ready for finals to be over. I have taken 6 and I have 4 more to go: 3 for my combined immunology/pathology/parasitology/bacteriology/virology course and 1 for my Body Systems 2 course (neuro, repro). I have passed 5 of the 6 finals I have thus taken and have yet to find out about the 6th.

In short, I am exhausted and burnt out and grouchy. I've been in a bad mood for a couple of days; pretty depressed and just ready to give up. Matt took note of this tonight and asked if he could do something to make my life easier.

"Make chai lattes 'cause they're too bloody expensive," I replied churlishly, "and I don't feel like leaving the house again tonight."

Matt looked up chai recipes online, but to no avail. You apparently need steamed milk for them, and we had neither the will nor the £18 to buy an espresso maker simply for the steamer. I was grouchier than ever, and Matt kept throwing out options for me. "What about hot chocolate?" he queried.

I grimaced. Since getting pregnant, I love eating chocolate and drinking chocolate milk, but I have had bad feelings about hot chocolate. Too sweet, not chocolatey enough, not creamy enough, etc.

"In short, what I want is that Williams-Sonoma hot chocolate." I declared. We had gotten a tin of that on uber-clearance our first winter in Spokane (normally like $25 per 8-serving tin), and it was, essentially, chocolate shavings that you stirred into hot milk. A lot of them.

Matt left the house, walked to Tesco, bought some whole milk and two bars of dark chocolate, and shaved the chocolate into the hot milk. At 8:30 p.m.

It's delicious.

Here's the promised video tour:






Our New Flat from guitarmatt

Umm, sorry for dropping the ball on the month of April there, guys. I just looked back and saw that I posted only once, and it was a pathetic post at that. I don't know how much better today's post will be, but at least you'll all know that I'm still here and not just a figment of Jeni's imagination.

The last month has been a whirlwind. It's really hard to believe that AJ and Rachelle's vist was a month ago now. It's also hard to beliee tht it's May. Well, it's hard for Jeni to believe it; for some reason I've been really aware of every passing moment recently. I'm really looking forward to our month long visit back to the states from June 11 to July 11. After that we're back here for two months of summer before the Nessie is born.

I'm really, really looking forward to Nessie's entrance to into the world. I've been feeling down recently about the lack of direction in my life as I see the other spouses of students here get settled into routines and jobs and such. I've decided that my occupation for our time here in Edinburgh will be as a stay at home dad for our new child. As I covered in this previous post, I feel very confident in this as a legitimate calling for this point in my life, and perhaps for even beyond this point in my life. Of course, the Nessie isn't here yet, which makes it hard for me to identify myself as a stay at home dad. Every now and then I go through moments of feeling purposeless, even though I am helping out Jeni a lot. I'm looking forward to what the baby will add to our life together.

Well, there's a post for you. It's sort of lacking in raw information, but I'll try to feed your desire for that tomorrow with a video tour of our new flat. See you then!