Carly and Me

I did what I said I wouldn't do...got a puppy. We named her Carly. She's a Labernese (black lab/Bernese mountain dog).

Rocky's cousins, Darin and Janet rescued Paris, a female Bernese this summer. Unbeknownst to them, she was pregnant at the time. After Rocky told me no and I wavered back and forth on the idea I finally said I wanted one and we went to Redding, CA to pick her up this weekend.

When we got there she was one of the first puppies to come to me and when I picked her up she hugged me back like she already knew she belonged to me. She's the cutest little 14 pound fur ball. She's already learned to fetch, but now we are working very hard on potty training. I never realized how much work is involved in training a puppy the basics (the last time I had a house puppy I was still a young teenager and my mom did all the work). After more than 48 hours I am exhausted; but I do think we made progress today, she finally pooped outside. I can't tell you how giddy I was over that poop.

Here she is at her cutest. When she isn't playing she does this:

Here is a minute where we forced her to let Rocky pet her. (She's terrified of Rocky because she fell while jumping out of his lap Sunday night and hurt herself, but she thinks he did it to her.)
This was Sunday before we took her from her mom and litter mates:

Back in School

I started my second term at LCC the end of September and it has been interesting.

My Medical Terminology course is a telecourse. We don't have the cable required to watch the videos on so I check discs out of the school library. This poses as a little bit of a challenge since the CD's have 4 episodes on each, you can only have the discs for one week, and you can only check them out once during a school year. The other problem with this is that the class is taught in order of the book (chapters 1-6 and 7-12) and the episodes on the discs are 1-4, 5-8, etc. but the chapters and episodes do not run in the same order. For instance, I am on chapter 4 which goes with episode 8; so I've had to spend time watching episodes I'm not ready for and am trying to catch up on the reading.

The Anatomy and Physiology has been challenging in other ways. It is a hybrid class so I only have to go to campus on Fridays and the rest is online. This means that class time is mostly devoted to labs and not much lecture. If we have questions after reading and looking at the information on our website we post questions to the class forum. So far the teacher and I have been the only ones on the forum; I expected to be the only one in class to take our exam today, but I wasn't.

The first class day in A & P we dissected rats; these were real live, dead rats not rubber or plastic. (No we didn't have to kill them ourselves.) It was unnerving, but very interesting. It turns out that rats look very much like humans on the inside, just smaller. When we were done our poor little specimens were hollow as we pulled all their organs out one by one.

Today was our first exam, at 8:00 am sharp. It was a practical exam with 25 stations set up around the room. We each went to a station; had 90 seconds to look in microscopes, examine a body part model, and answer two questions. I thought it was pretty hard and was unsure about a handful of my answers, but I must have done a good job studying because I earned 100%. Yippee!

After the exam we had more lab time with bones and skin models. There were a couple of bones that had been soaked in vinegar for a week; you would have thought it was rubber. At the end of class I checked out a bag of bones to bring home. So I have almost half a human skeleton to lay out and examine for the next week (these are plastic bones, they don't let us check out the real ones, we can only study those at school. It turns out that real bones are more expensive than plastic bones, they get brittle over time, and students' dogs seem to like them.) Next week I'll be bringing home a skull. I can't wait for Rocky to come home from hunting tonight, I'm going to have the bones laid out on the bar before he gets here.