All Thawed Out

That's right; even the pipes and their breaks are thawed. We have three breaks in the barn that we know about. One of them was in the wall of the fiber room which was completely flooded on Saturday. What a mess. It took us several hours to mop, shop vac, and move fiber out of the water. The cheap laminate flooring we put in there is curling up on the seems, but it isn't as bad as I had feared. I think a few throw rugs will be good enough.

This weekend has to be better. My sister is coming for a visit and I'm sure we'll have a good time with no flooding.

Merry Christmas

Baby it's cold outside

Brrrr! It is COLD here. Yesterday and today it was 8 degrees when I got up. Today the weather man said with wind chill it is -2 degrees. I don't know how much more of this I can take. I don't ever remember it being this cold before. Thankfully it is dry, which is unusual for December. There haven't been too many accidents and it is possible to put on enough layers to do outdoor chores without too much pain.

On the up side, I took my finals on Monday and managed to do well on both, earning A's in both classes. Next term doesn't start until after the new year when I'll be taking Anatomy and Physiology 2 and beginning Chemistry. In high school I took physics instead of chemistry so I'm looking forward to that class. I love math and science.

Giving Thanks

Carly wants to say, "Hello."This holiday weekend was pretty mundane. We just had dinner at Rocky's parents' house which is what we do every year. I had taken a turkey out of the freezer to thaw and cook and then on Wednesday Jack went out and bought us all a rotisserie turkey. Since I couldn't refreeze the turkey I took out I cooked it on Friday, boiled the bones on Saturday, and yesterday Rocky and I canned turkey vegetable soup.

The only excitement for the weekend came yesterday morning around 9:00; and this is where we're giving thanks. Rocky was still sleeping in and I was being lazy with the dog in front of the TV when I heard this loud noise outside. At first I thought the dog got her leash tangled in chairs on the patio, but then I realized the dog was in the house so I jumped up to see what it was. It was this:
See that huge oak tree lying on the ground? It landed on the goat shelter. Fortunately the goats were not in it. Also, Rocky mowed right along there Saturday afternoon. The worst thing that happed, other than the damage, is that the goats got out.

Here are some more Carly photos for your viewing pleasure:

We had to buy Carly some different food to remedy a gas problem

and it smells so good that Jill likes it too.

Jack is doing everything he can think of to make Carly love him.

Here is a photo of Carly trying to get Jill to play with her. I put this photo up to use as a size reference. So far, Carly has only had one big growth spurt since we got her home.Life with Carly is one big learning lesson. This weekend I took her out to the barn and pasture with me while scooping. She had a ball. She loves the alpacas and is very calm around them, even when Alexis tries to stomp her. For the most part everybody behaved themselves, but in the last pasture where two of our studs live Carly got chased. It didn't seem too serious and she was good about staying far enough away. I was really glad that she wasn't the one chasing and she didn't seem traumatized over it, just curious.

Even though she behaved appropriately around the animals it will be a while before Carly goes out to scoop with me again. I did not know this, but it turns out that alpaca poop is quite tasty. As hard as I tried I could not keep her from eating it. She had diarrhea the entire next day.

Jill and Carly are getting along quite well. Carly has come to learn that Jill is just to look at. Even though I haven't seen her get swat by Jill, she walks a wide path around her.

Here is a good photo of Jill's bad eye:
She still gets eye drops twice a day. I don't think it has gotten any worse and she doesn't seem to be in pain.

As for me, I'm halfway through my second term back in school now. I've taken two practical exams in Anatomy and Physiology with two written exams to follow; and in Medical Terminolgy I've taken an oral exam and one computer exam, and I only have the final left which is another computer exam. It has been a lot of hard work and a lot of hours studying, but earning good grades is so rewarding.

Fright Night at Autzen

Wow! If you missed the Duck game last night you really missed out. It was louder than ever and the game was better than ever. Watching the Ducks cream the Trojans was unforgettable. Except for the USC section the crowd was in black and yellow for Halloween, and many people came in costume. During tailgating before the game little kids went trick-or-treating tail gate party to tail gate party. Part of the marching band plays along Pre trail before each game, but last night instead of playing they had a boom box, were all dressed like zombies and performed to Michael Jackson's Thriller. The entire evening was quite an experience. If you'd like to read more about and see some photos here is a link to our local news paper, The Register Guard.

Carly was there. She was so scared of everybody before the game, but so curious at the same time. During the game we put her in her crate and locked her in the car. After the game she was more relaxed and let a few people pet her. I weighed her today and she has gained five pounds since we got her. Here are a couple more photos of her:

She loves watching the goats and alpacas:

Watching animals again:
Sleeping on her back:

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.