Sparky's Walk

Always make sure your dog is excited to go on a walk before taking him on one. :)

The Love Nest

Ross and I have an apartment now! We've begun moving things in, and Ross will move himself in the week of the wedding. I won't live there until after we get back from the honeymoon. Woo hoo! It is a nice little place that used to be a garage. It is just right for two, I think. :)

This first picture is the view when you walk in the door. The kitchen and living room are connected, as you can see.
This is a view from the corner of the kitchen.
This one is the bedroom from one corner.
And here is the bedroom from the other corner.
Here's Ross in the hallway.This is the bathroom.
This is me and Ross in the shower!
We sure love our little place!

My School is Better Than Yours

This is Pepper on the left and Toby on the right. Pepper is the teacher, Susan's dog. Pepper is a wonderful labrador/heeler mix. She is the most obedient dog I have ever met. She always holds still so she's a pretty good practice dog. Because of this, she gets lots of shots and blood drawn on the days we do that. Poor, Pepper, but amazingly she's ok with it. Toby is another story, he belongs to Kaitlyn, another student in the class. He loves to run around as fast as he can, but he slips a lot on the floor, so he doesn't get very far or very fast.
This lovely bird is Chloe. She is a cockatoo and is our class pet. She lives at the school, except for weekends where she goes home with Susan. She was adopted by Susan when her family couldn't keep her, she has been through 7 different families. She gets pretty loud sometimes, but you get used to it. She would bite a lot when we first got her, but she's been trained really well here at our school. Me and her are buds.
This is Ladybug, another of Susan's dogs. She is only 10 weeks old and is a very intelligent little border collie. Did you know that border collies are the smartest dogs in the world? Well, now you do. Bug is definitely a puppy, which you can tell as she books it around the classroom. She also tries to "herd" the cats, other dogs, or us students to entertain herself. She's gonna be a working dog on Susan's farm.
This macaw is awesome. I don't know his real name because everyone calls him Big Bird. I just know that that isn't his real name. He belongs to Susan. I felt pretty cool having him on my arm, it's kind of scary having something that big so close to you. He likes to laugh at people, but he doesn't talk much, which is too bad.
Farmer Susan had a farm and on that farm she had some emus and those emus had some fun and made baby emus and Susan brought them to class. These are the baby emus! They were really cute, but made a ton of noise. I guess that's just a baby thing though... ;) This picture was about a month ago and Susan says now they are the size of turkeys and still have their stripes.
This is me and my guinea pig, Chuck! My brothers have so kindly named him Chuck Norris. Lame. I adopted him from the Cache Humane Society, which is awesome. He was really people shy and quiet when I first got him a little over a month ago, but I've got him to come out if his little piggy shell. I love my piggy! He gets to come to class with me once a week and he loves all the attention he gets.
This is Natty, the cat that hates the world. She loves to be petted, but if any other animal comes close while she's being stroked, she attacks them. Sometimes this is another person. She's weird. Well, here she is in a cat back hanging from a grooming stand. Wow. It was pretty hilarious! The new kids were learning how to restrain a cat, including getting them into cat bags. Justin, a student that recently finished the program, put Natty in a bag real quick and hung her up. Sadly, no one felt sorry for the cat. She was there for at least 20 minutes.
So today in class I got injured. We were popping the anal glands of a miniature pincher in class, he was a really fat dog named Trucker. His claws had just been trimmed, but were still very long because his owners don't take good care of his nails. (the more often you trim a dog's nails, the shorter you can cut them without drawing blood.) But he really didn't like his anal sacs getting popped, they were really bad, and I was the unlucky one restraining him. My arm was scratched up really bad. Susan told me to go use the first aid kit in her office to take care of myself. I couldn't find any just normal big band-aids, so I improvised. I got made fun of a lot after that. And all this happened in the first half hour of class.
I love my school.

Computer Lameness

My computer has been being really ridiculous as of late, and I was going to do this post about my school with lots of pictures and things, but my computer won't let me add pictures to it. Pathetic. ya, it took me an hour to get my computer to turn on today. Lame on a lame stick. And thus, this will be all that I will post. :(

Miley Cyrus = Brittany Spears

Once upon a time, Disney came out with a show called Hannah Montana. It's about a girl named Miley, played by Miley Cyrus, who is secretly a rock star. Her rock star identity was Hannah Montana. This show was such a big hit (I have no idea why, it was pretty lame) that many girls began to greatly admire her. As Miley went on her own to become an independent singer, Wal Mart came out with an entire line of Miley clothing. Everything in Wal Mart for a while was plastered with Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus. "The fools," I thought, "Miley Cyrus is gonna just be a little fad. She's not a great role model for all of these girlies. She's not that great anyway, just another Teeny Bopper." Then she kept getting bigger and bigger. lThis past fall, Miss Cyrus came out with a new CD that has a few songs I actually enjoyed on it. She recently starred in a movie, Last Song, which I've heard is actually a fantastic movie.But this all would not last. I knew that eventually she would do something really stupid and it would all go downhill from there. It started when she performed a concert and danced around a pole. I guess you could say she was a pole-dancer at this concert. Lousy woman. Then she just barely wrote a new song, Can't Be Tamed. In this song she sings about how no matter how many men want her, she will never be tamed. I looked up the music video. Not gonna lie, the entire time I was thinking it looked just like something Brittany Spears had done in the past. It is a very dark music video, not much light in it. It wasn't really as skanky as Brittany's more recent music videos, but it definitely had its moments. This cute, innocent, role model (as she was, even if I didn't agree with it) quickly became a dirty, skanky, nincompoop. Pathetic. She went from the picture at the top, to this picture:And to this:And this:All of which are pictures from her new music video. Loser. I am ashamed of her. Pa-thet-ick. If you want to watch her music video, here's the link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjSG6z_13-Q

Patches

On Friday I went to do clinics at the Humane Society and we had a scary experience while spaying a dog. She was pregnant, and about two thirds of the way through the pregnancy. The puppies were pretty big, the mother was a heeler by the name of Patches. So I was prepping a labrador puppy for a spay when I heard the vet, Dr. Manning, say "S***!" I turned around to see Patches, hooked up to the anesthesia machine, waking up. I ran over and held her front legs down, the tracheal tube was getting pushed out of her throat, so I held it in. Another volunteer turned the machine up to 5, which is the highest, and the dog calmed down.
The he vet started cussing again because blood started to pour out of the incision. The six different "lumps" of the uterus were out, the puppies not-so-safely inside, and the uterus began to turn purple. We knew this meant the mother wasn't getting enough oxygen. We checked the machine and all looked well. Dr. Manning was placing clamps all over where he had made a cut into the uterine horn, the blood kept coming and he soon ran out of clamps. After shouting a naughty word, the doc yelled for someone to grab another sterile kit because he needed more clamps. A woman there who is preparing for vet school grabbed the items and put on a pair of sterile gloves to help out.
Dr. Manning put more clamps in place, he re-situated the uterus to find why the blood hadn't stopped yet. As soon as he moved the uterus, blood squirted strait out of the dog's body and all over the wall. It was now that the dog decided to start waking up again. No bueno. Clamps, clamps, clamps; hold down the open dog; what's wrong with the anesthesia machine?
After a lot of stress, Dr. Manning was able to get the bleeding to stop. He sutured up the insides and then the three layers of skin. We took out the trachea tube and put Patches on a towel on the floor and cleaned her up. Kendyll, another girl from my class, and I got to clean up all the blood on the table and floor. I have never seen so much blood in my life, nor had I heard so much swearing in such a short span of time. It was then that I realized how amazing it would be to be a veterinarian and be able to save a life like that.
So now I'm all sorts of confused with what I want to do with my life. I have always dreamed of being a stay-at-home mom. But now I have another dream. I talked to Susan, the instructor for my Vet Tech program, about the education required to be a vet. I would have to get a Bachelor degree in Pre-Vet science, which is offered at USU, then get accepted into a vet school. This would all take about seven years to accomplish. And I don't know how possible that is, especially with Ross going to school. If he can be a pilot, he's gonna be one, and flying school is not cheap at all. I have decided, for the moment anyway, to just continue with my program and see how I feel later.
(The picture at the top is the kind of dog that Patches is.)

FINALLY!!!

After looking for a job and applying for one or two jobs every week day for the past four months, I have finally achieved getting a job interview!!!!!! HOORAY!! I am pretty ecstatic. In case you couldn't tell.
Yesterday I got online and applied at Pizza Hut. Woot. I love their pizza! It is spectacular. Anyway, today the Pizza Hut in Smithfield called me and I have an interview on Thursday!!! Yipee! I hope I get the job. I just really need money. And I just want a job because I feel useless having no job. I'm not making a difference in the world. Well, maybe I am. I'm sure I'm making a difference in Ross's world. Tee hee! :)
So basically my life is going pretty great right now. I'm loving school. On Friday I get to go to my second day of clinicals. Those are super duper fun. I am learning so much and am doing amazing in the classwork. I got at 88% on the test I took yesterday. Woot!

Plasma

Yesterday I donated plasma. Basically, that's how desperate I am for money. I went in, filled out some paperwork because I was new, and then they did a quick check of my blood pressure, temperature, and weight. Ya, my weight keeps going up! I'm getting heavier and heavier every time I get weighed. Pathetic. I should work out. But I'm too lazy to, which is probably why I'm getting fat in the first place.
Anyway, since it was my first time I had to have a little physical then they took me to the donating room. Woot. They poked me in the left arm with a 16 G needle and unlike donating blood, they didn't cover it up so I could see the thing stabbing into me. It actually wasn't that bad. It is probably good for me as I have a little bit of a blood drawing problem. I was doing pretty good until about half way though my donating when everything started going black over my eyes and I thought I was gonna pass out. A few of the workers came over and gave me water and kept me talking and put an ice pack behind my neck. Wow. After about 10 minutes I was ok and then continued to finish my plasma donating. I got paid 25 bucks. Hooray! It's all gone now because I had to go grocery shopping. Oh, well. I think I'll go again on Saturday though. Party.The picture shows what parts are in the blood. The plasma is the watery stuff that everything else floats in. That's what they took out of me. Gross.

Easter

So yesterday was Easter, as well as General Conference. Woot! It was quite a spectacular day. Ross and I came down do Kaysville which was super fun. I'm still here because I've got Spring Break! Party! Anyway.... The Easter Bunny hides our baskets during the night, so when we wake up we have to find them. This year, I found mine faster than I ever have before!!! Usually I find everybody's baskets before I find my own, this year I found mine second! Woot! It was awesome sauce.
Me and Ross also got to play Easter bunny with the eggs. We hid them out in the back yard for everyone to find. It was fun. But me, being clumsy, dropped three eggs so they were a little cracked. Oh, well. :) It was still fun. Poor Leslie, her egg was totally crunched.
Ross and I cuddled during conference, and cuddling is the best!!! I fell asleep. I woke up early, like we're talking 6:30. I just woke up then and couldn't get back to sleep so I got up. Then I was really tired for the afternoon session. Anyway, I have decided that the best feeling in the world is waking up in the arms of your best friend. :) It was fantastical mucho much. Gah! I'm so in love!

Discecting a Snake

If you had a hard time with the picture on my previous post, then you may not want to read this one. The first picture(s) are ok. But I wouldn't recommend any more than that if you have a hard time with blood or innards of any sort. Just a heads up.
So in class yesterday, these policemen brought in a dog that they had recently adopted and were going to train for duty. It was a freaking huge German Shepherd mix. And I got to bathe it. That was quite messy. It wouldn't fit in the bathing bin, so another student and I had to do it in the horse cleaning area, which is basically one big empty room with hose. Oh, and a drain in the middle. Woot. Anyway, after that exciting ordeal, I was pretty much soaked from the knees down. And I have provided a picture of my wetness. I didn't get one of the dog though, darn.
After that I decided that little dogs are fan-freaking-tastic! This one girl that comes to class has a teeny little puppy. It has been dehydrated for a while and it gets hydrating shots every time it comes, poor thing. It's about as big as my foot, which is a size 5 and a half. Here is a picture of me and that little puppy. It is super cute. If I'm remembering correctly it is a Yorkshire terrier/poodle mix.
So as with dogs, snakes come in all sorts of sizes. Another girl in my class, who is very pregnant and her belly button is poking out a ton, caught a little snake in St. George this past weekend. It is kind of like a worm in size, but it isn't slimy like a worm. I haven't held it, but I kind of want to. It is weird, and definitely not an anaconda.
Today in class we had a snake that was about a bazillion times bigger than the little snake. It was a 25 year old Boa. Yikes. The poor girl was in the process of dying and was pregnant. The owner breeds snakes. He wasn't sure how far developed the babies were, so he brought in the snake so we could kill it and see if it was possible to save the baby snakes. ya, that was a gruesome ordeal. I asked my teacher if it would hurt the snake when we killed it, her reply was, "It will hurt a little, but she's already dying and death would be a relief to her." So ya, Susan, my teacher, took a tool and stabbed right into the back of the snakes skull and into the bran. And that is how it died. Poor thing.
So after that we had to cut it open. I would advise never cutting open a snake because it is completely disgustingly stinky inside. Bleck. I was breathing through my mouth a lot. This picture is of another student cutting open the snake.
This is the snake's awesome vein that went all the way down it's body. That was pretty cool to see.
When we got to the place the baby snakes would be, we found them to be hardly developed at all. There were tons of eggs though. Boas give live births to their babies, but they develop inside of these little gooey egg things. In the picture you can tell which eggs are fertilized and which aren't. The white ones are the ones that are fertilized, the yellow ones are not. We even cut one open and found the little fetus, it would probably fit on half of my pinky fingernail. It was really small.
In this picture you can see the trachea of the snake. That's the part that the food goes down. It was really cool, it went all the way down until you got to all the other crazy insides. It was awesome!
We then proceeded to take apart the snake. The owner wanted us to skin it so that he could hang the skin on his wall. Gross. I did quite a bit of skinning, it was nasty. I did think it was cool to see the ribs though, and that's what's shown in this picture. And most of the innards are taken out here. Gross.
This picture is of all the insides of a snake in one big pile. Gross.
I am really enjoying my class. Although we don't have exciting things come in every day, it is nice that there's randomness to it. I like that you never know what's going to happen in a day. It's great!