Spring in Saskatoon and other inchoherent nonsense

It's spring in Saskatoon and it's a balmy -14oC. Don't get me wrong, I love getting my car stuck in massive snow drifts as much as the next girl. Really, I think the icy sleet and snow whipping into my face this morning is Saskatchewan's version of a facial microdermabrasion spa treatment. Either way, buffed and exfoliated and snowed in as I am, I am having a good time of it here.

The WCVSA student elections are going on this week and I am officially the new "Animal Care Representative"!!!!!!!!!!!!! (Why I put all the exclamation in, I don't know, cus I only got the position by default cus no one else was running against me. I like to tell myself that it's cus I'm so intimidating that no one dared to run against me or something like that.) This means that I have to sit on the meetings where they decide whether the methods used to handle animals in research projects are too inhumane. My plan is to go to the meetings and disrupt them. Example:
"The rats don't need toys. If they get bored, they'll just attack each other. It'll be fine. We can clip their teeth and then they can only gum at each other. Harmless stuff. "
Or,
"Why bother using the anaesthetic before removing half the mouse's brain? I mean, the needle prick will probably hurt just as much as the bone saw. I don't know. . . I mean, think about how that needle looks from the mouse's point of view. It's like sticking a flagpole up your arm."
Or,
"I don't understand why we need to use the CO2 to gas the little mice. Frankly, I think it's a waste of resources as we could just stomp on them with our steel toed boots."
etc. etc. etc.

I'm looking forward to it. I think I'm gonna do great.

In other news, the CSI marathon has been on Spike TV this week and I must say that I am total wuss when it comes to watching CSI by myself. I essentially have to turn on all my lights and lock and chain my door and call someone to talk to until I fall asleep at night now. Pathetic. But I just can't stop watching it!

Who knows? Perhaps my paranoid fears are all true! you can never be too certain in this day and age. I mean, maybe my neighbor IS a psycho serial rapist or the guy in the apartment across from me IS a peeping tom/kidnapper/cannibal.

If you all don't hear from me in a while, you'll know what happened.

In the meantime, take care everybody. I realise this blog was about absolutely nothing. Most of my blogs are. I could tell you strange and wonderful tales about how some dog in the vet clinics pooped all over the hallways leading to our lecture theatre, or about how I got to drive a Shaw cable van, or about how I managed to survive two weeks without fresh groceries (Ranger and I both managed to survive and by the end, all I had left in my fridge and freezer was a frozen pita, an expired pack of tofu, Carl Budding's smoked ham (1 pack), and half a jar of mint jelly. Near the end, I was adding my RealLemon juice to my water so I wouldn't get scurvy. ), but I wont.

I also had to give a class presentation about artificial insemination in Killer whales. Someone asked me afterwards how they collected semen from the killer whales. i really didn't know, even though they had a great picture of some guy "manually stimulating" a male orca's manhood. Apparently they gave the male "manual stimulation" and "positive reinforcement", whatever that means ("oh good! you're ejaculating! here, have some fish"?!). Perhaps we'll never know. I guess it's between the killer whale the 125 mL plastic container. . .

(125 mL, by the way, was an insufficient container size to collect all the semen. one wonders why they never used a larger container but that's marine biologists for you. To be fair, I never had to collect semen from my sea pens, but let's not get off topic here.)

Well, that's it folks. Hope your first days of spring are lovelier than mine wherever you are. Take your multivitamins and for goodness sakes, don't try the killer whale thing at home.