Take it to the limit...one more tiiiiiiime

The title has nothing to do with this post. I just have that song in my head, thanks, Don Henly.

Last night's biology lab was hard. Not because I didn't know what I was doing, but because I was supposed to be looking for a paramecium, and I couldn't find one. Then the professor came over, and he was looking for it, and he couldn't find it. And it turns out that I didn't have one on the slide.

So, I got a new slide and I found it. Then I dunked the slide in bleach water because I just looked at some spinning single-celled organism, and then I killed it. I am play gods!

The house is still a mess, but I finally managed to find our cable modem. And then it didn't work, so we're probably going to have to have some guy come down and fix it for us because that's what you do. I hate this. Can I never ever move again, please?

Parraje de amor

I should give a little shout-out to "my" (not really my) bird, who has been a trooper during the move. I don't really...I'm not...Oh, I don't know how to say this. I never wanted a bird, and it's not his fault that his daddy left him with me, promising to return for him, and then never did so. But I can't help that I never wanted the bird, and I have him, and I have to take care of him because I won't let myself not take care of him. Anyway, he's a dumb bird, but when it comes to moving, he's a trooper.

My cat sank into the Pit of Despair pretty much the second I put him into his carrier, but Rain was like, "Chirp! Chiiiirrrrrp!" I put them in my mom's car, and Mr. Chekhov started mewling like a hurt kitten, but Rain was like, "Chiiiiiiirp-chirp-cheep!"

I joke a lot about Rain's life expectancy (he's overlived it by four years so far, but my beloved guinea pigs just barely made it past theirs), and how I'll miss him when he dies, can he get on that soon? and then there's the whole, "Do you want to fly outside? Just for a few minutes?" routine that we go through...but the truth is that he's gained a toehold in my affections. He's grown on me. (Like a fungus...hey, I'm here all night!) I really do love that little nutball with feathers, and he's a real pain in the butt and he poops indiscriminately on everything, but I can't help it.

So, Rain, you'll never hear me say this again, but you've been a good bird.

Now pleeeeaaaaaase stop chirping so I can get some sleep already!


Oooh...edit...I wanted to add a little antecdote about one of our movers. He kept trying to say that what we own is expensive and stuff...like it was any of his business. He told me that Rain is really expensive and told me what his name would be in Spanish (he was under the impression that Rain is a parakeet...he's a love bird...), and was like, "He's an expensive bird." I said, "he wasn't for me." "Oh? How much did you pay for him?" "Nothing. He was my brother's, and my brother left him with me when he joined the army" thinking, "that's why he has such a stupid name. who names a bird Rain?" The guy was like, "They cost 150 at the swap meet!" and I'm like, "Anyone who pays that much for a dumb bird deserves to get taken for that much money!" Seriously? 150? I do think that my brother paid more for him than that, and I still think it was ridiculous. I ended by telling the guy that I don't buy animals, that "Yo adopto de un centro de rescate, es por que yo creo en adoption." I still don't think he believed me.

Up the down staircase

OMG I hate freakin' moving yargh!

So, yeah, it's annoying and horrid, and if you have a cat who was abanoned at a high school in his carrier, he'll probably take three days to even start talking to you again after it's all over, but it's done now. I'm starting to feel better about life. And my drive to work this morning was so completely drama-free as I took side streets from my house to my work, five miles away.

Oh. Yeah. Uh-huh.

I was totally planning on going to work yesterday, but I actually did not have the ability to either move or open my eyes. I called in about an hour and a half after I was supposed to have shown up, and then I went back to bed until about 11 in the afternoon.

Regret it, I don't.

My mom took me out yesterday for a mani-pedi, which I usually find really annoying because I hate people touching my feet, but it was nice to just relax and let someone else do the work. My toenails are all now uniform in size and shape, and painted a lovely midnight-blue, and my fingernails...well, they sort of look like the monster's head from Frankenstein comics, and the middle fingernail on my right hand looks like a rat's been chewing on it since it got stuck between two shelves while I was holding one and the other one came crashing down on it. But...they're good. The cuticles are clean and they're filed and I'm sort of feeling human again.

The inside of the house sort of looks like a hurricane hit it right now, but I'm hoping that I can get everything in order by this weekend. In a strange state of denial about how bad things were, I put the vacuum into the broom closet because that's where it goes, by gum. Sure I have about three hundred books just loitering about the living room and I haven't hung up my over-the-door-shoe-caddy yet, but that vacuum had better get into the broom closet!

Yeah, I'm crazy. But I'm all right with it.

This is the part where we dance (Bollywood style)

I wish I had my friend Cassandra's sense of humor so I could write about my life in a funny, interesting way. I swear, Cass took a Christmas pudding recipe and made it hilarious (French brandy: For export to England only! Ha!) (Cass, I still want your memoire!) (it wasn't the one that went around about drinking rum, either. In fact, Cass was very specific that you do not want to drink the wine that you bathe your pudding in because it is supposed to be too vile for consumption), but I'm not that way. Not being English doesn't help either. I'm just a dull, average American and this blog is slowly heading towards the "breathing in, breathing out" updates that I see on some other blogs.

Currently, I'm at work, not working as is my wont, and waiting to head off to college for another night of fun in biology. I'm praying with all my might that there will be another severed shark's head in the lab, but I can't expect to get lucky every night.

I like my lab partners. They're obviously just in this class to get biology out of the way so they can move onto something else (fashion? I don't know), but they're hard workers, and they're trying to understand what we're doing. I never thought I'd be in a position to help other people with math and sciences, especially after the C in algebra, but I feel really useful in terms of helping them out. And they have strengths as well. I'm dyslexic and tend to not read instructions as they give me a headache, and I almost always get stuff mixed up (when I bake, I do the unthinkable and just go with what looks, feels and tastes right because I just don't do recipes), so they're really good at helping me read the directions right. I wish I could bring them to university with me! (My baking is superb...I don't need no stinkin' recipes.) (I also never make the same thing twice.)

We are moving starting tomorrow morning, and I'm mostly just worried about the logistics of moving all the stuff, and then all the furniture, and then the cat. Poor Mr. Chekhov has been very clingy and suspicious lately. I wonder if his former owners dropped him off whilst moving? He seems to think something bad is going to happen, and it makes me wish even moreso that this was all over. The upside is being on the receiving end of kitty cuddles, and if you own a cat, then you know how few and far-between those things come.

My title came from me thinking all of this over, and realizing that on Saturday, after the old apartment has been cleaned and left behind, and we're firmly ensconced in our new apartment, it would be the point in the Bollywood movie where we would break into some fabulous dance whilst wearing harem pants and having fabulous hair. We'll probably just have to suffice with Netflixing the first season of Downton Abbey, though.

Moments of aggravation

Moving is very emotional. It's really hard to pack up everything and go. And inevitably, you start realizing that there are things you can live without so you have to figure out what to do with them. There's been a lot of shredding, and I've been culling my wardrobe quite a bit and now have a rather tidy pile of things I want to take to charity.

The biggest issue we have right now, though, is a stove. My mom bought a stove for her house back when she owned it, and by god she was going to take it with her when she moved. It would be really simplistic to chalk it up to her being a hoarder, which she is and she knows it, but I think it's more than just "hoarders gotta hoard." The stove was the one think from her house that she was holding onto, and she has to let it go. We have talked about it at length, and she admits that it must go, so I started looking into where we can take it. Unfortunately, Habitat for Humanity can't have it as it's more than five years old, but the Salvation Army could take it, and they also have shelters and whatnot where they can use it to benefit people. Win-win, right?

Well, I don't know what happened, but I had just checked with everything and was about to make the arrangements when she got really mad at me (watch an episode of "Hoarders" to understand the level of upset she fell to) and was like, "You know that's my stove, right?" I said, "Um...yeah, I know it's yours. Do you really think we can keep it?" "No, that's not what I'm saying. You just keep making these plans like it's yours, like you can do whatever you want with it, but it's not yours!" So, I naturally said, "Fine, do whatever you want with it. Get a storage facility for two hundred a month and pay 2400 a year just to keep your damn stove, but leave me out of it." I was just so upset. She started to relent and was like, "I'm sorry, you're right, I don't know...just make the arrangements." I told her that I wouldn't because in five years, I didn't want her coming back at me and yelling about how I got rid of her precious stove.

So, last night she said she knows where we're going to take it...hooray...

Anyway, I don't think badly of her or anything, it was just an aggravation that I needed to vent on because seriously, dealing with the elderly is difficult, and I have to start remembering that my mother, no matter how young I like to think of her, is now a member of the elderly.

Movin' on up (to the north-side)

I'm moving next week! OMGmyhouseissuchamessOMG!

The good news is that I'm moving much closer to work and the rent is several hundred a month lower. The bad news is that I'm moving farther away from my current college. I will be transfering to a CC a little closer to home. And that's okay.

I had a very clarifying situation happen that really helped me see that I am making a change that I will be happy with. I walked into bio lab and there was a severed shark's head in an aquarium (I'm assuming with preservative over it?). I posted to facebook later that I meant to take a picture of it to share (because I thought it was awesome like whoa). My friends' reactions were not along the lines of "Imagine waking up next to that! Haha!" One actually said, "Damn you!" in a sarcastic way while another was like, "uuhhhg..."

And then I realized that I'm exactly where I should be. This is what I want to do with my life. Not maybe look at severed shark's heads all the time, but dealing with animals either in a zoological setting or veterinary setting. It's what I want. It's who I am.

Why I don't want to be a veterinarian

My first college counselor was a very nice, albeit socially awkward woman who thought the best way to "encourage" me to be more was to go into an autistic rant about how "you can do anything, anything you want. You can do more. You don't have to be a vet tech, you can be a veterinarian."

I asked for a new counselor who was a little more sutble. "Is there a reason you don't wish to get a doctorate in veterinary medicine?" she asked. "I don't want to be a veterinarian," I answered. "If I get a doctorate, it will be in zoology." From there, we discussed Cal Poly Pomona and the University of Hawaii and UC Davis, and we were done. "You can do anything you put your mind to," she said. "You just have to believe in yourself. Not everyone wants to be a doctor."

I wonder...if a man says he wants to be a nurse, do people yell at him to be a doctor? Nurses and doctors are completely different, and that's why I want to be a tech, not a DVM. I can imagine that anyone chosing nursing would feel the same way. There's a different connection to nurses.

I love my veterinarian. When my bigger guinea pig was having a foot problem, he was a great person and obviously loved my little boy. It was the tech, however, that I saw the most of. She would hold Woody, pet him, clip his nails, feed him carrots, whatever. I was told that one time when the little one got a cold, the doctor was in the back talking to him in an absurdly high voice, but I didn't see that. The doctors deal with the medical side, and the nurses deal with the human side.

At shelters, the techs are the ones who walk, groom, feed, and care for the dogs. A vet will come in a few times a week, or on an emergency. At a zoo, the techs are the ones that feed and care for the animals. A vet comes in a few times a week or during an emergency.

I want that hands-on part of the equation. I want to be a tech, I want to be a zoologist.