La La

On Saturday my brother and I ran from Champoeg Park to the Butteville Store. It was part of my continued training for Hood to Coast, which I am somewhat insanely planning to run in.

Yesterday was a crazy day -- eight, almost nine hours working in the large animal hospital. The morning was quiet but three emergencies came after 2 pm. I desperately wanted to leave in time to sing with my youth group at Hopewell MC, but I didn't want to be a slacker on the case I took in.

I sped out of the parking lot shortly before 5 pm, went home, changed, and made it to church almost exactly when the youth group stood up for the first song. Whew! I snuck into the auditorium through the nursery, and placed myself within the soprano section. It was a good program.

I received a new patient this morning -- a young horse with rectal edema, etc. He's a bugger, tries to bite me through his no-feed muzzle while I'm working on him. I made the mistake of staying at the vet school later than I had to, and he broke his catheter set up. I must leave before he does something else and I get suckered into staying....

Laptop for Every Child?

I was listening to NPR on my way to school this morning, as is my wont on occasion. They were talking about a goal some people have to give every child (?) in developing countries a laptop. Work has been in progress to produce a $100 laptop that would serve this purpose.

Well, well. A laptop for every child. What a great, fantabulous idea. I mean, every child should have the opportunity to play Bugdom. To spend their afternoons blissfully painting with a track-pad. To type stories and then scramble them with the drag and drop function. Without these aspects to life, a child is severely deprived -- it would be almost the same as if they did not exist. To not own a computer at the age of 10 is to negate all opportunities for employment in later life. To ascribe oneself to a state of social incompetence. To set oneself on the fast track to poverty.

Humph. To the contrary, I say. I mean, sure, learning to type and navigate around a computer is great -- but they can learn that in school. To give a 10 yr old a $100 computer that will likely fail within 4 years or less is superbly, well, er, foolish. A child's development is much better if his leisurely hours involve people -- connecting with them face to face, learning to work through relationship issues. Give him a computer and he will spend fruitless hours by himself, performing activities which may improve hand-eye coordination (computer games) but which do not provide him with tools to really succeed in life. Children, IMNSHO, develop much better and become more intelligent and better suited to living if they are in a non-artificial environment.

A laptop for every child? Where are the priorities? Give them a piece of rather worthless electronics when people are starving? Give them one of the most collossal time wasters in the world when they need to be learning life-skills?

Just doesn't make sense.

Blogger-slacker

The worst blogger-slacker in the world, that's me...

Can't say I haven't been busy, though.

I started large animal surgery two weeks ago, and was immediately slammed with four cases to monitor. Not that they were individually labor-intensive, but the parts added up and I was left shell-shocked for the first bit. Students on the other surgery service had perhaps one or two patients to start out. Now I'm on "the other" surgery service, and have but zero cases this evening -- I'll make the comment that it would have been a better way to start clinics -- more time to get into the groove of things so I hopefully wouldn't have seemed as disorganized.

But it was as it was, and I very much think it was God's will. It was very hard at times, I was almost overwhelmed at times, I realized at times that I had never experienced a week as stressful, that I had perhaps never tried so hard and yet remained imperfect in my performance, I realized that running 7 miles would require less discipline than striving on in large animal surgery clinics. I felt at times that the minutes of my days were beyond maximal capacity -- I would have been thrilled to have done more reading about my cases, but there seriously was not the time.

I know I learned from the experience, I know I have been challenged to increase my efficiency and performance to higher levels, and there is basically no way that I should have started out on the slower service.

But that said, I am now enjoying the slower service. It's great to have time to research exuberant granulation tissue and pot-bellied pigs, to let my brain operate sanely, et cetera.

Quoting from a potbellied pig brochure:
"The days of their more active youth tend to fade away and they begin to move into a more sedimentary life style." (Italics added for emphasis) Sedimentary lifestyle. Grin.
No, I don't want a pot-bellied pig -- it's just that they are interesting and I had a PBP case this week.

Choice or Child?

This morning I performed a bit of shopping.

Pocket-sized calculator for drug dosage calculations.
Embroidery thread to make the veterinary caduceus on my green overall-skirts.
Small notebook for writing important info about cases.
ID badge reel (makes me feel more official, as well as being safer and handier than the cord around neck technique).

***
I saw a bumper sticker on my way back to school:
"If you can't trust me with a choice, how can you trust me with a child?"

The question is beside the point in a pro-choice vs. pro-life debate. Is it wrong to kill a human, or not? If it is wrong, it is wrong, and whether or not the parent should be trusted to raise a child (which most parents can't be anyway except for the grace of God) it is still wrong to kill a human. If the bumper sticker owners are worried about an incompetent or unresponsible person raising a human, then they should think of another solution aside from killing the child.

In an attempt to be catchy, writer(s) of the statement end up displaying faulty reasoning. Their statement retains a thread of sense only when considered at a superficial level -- at a superficial level, well, obviously a choice is less important than a child, right? But delving deeper, realizing what the Choice is, we see that the Choice is the child's life in a balance. Will it be life, or death? That is not a choice that any human should be given, whether competent to raise a child or not. At its basis, to be pro-life is not a matter of lack of trust in an individual human -- it is a realization that the Choice by right is God's alone.

Henline Mountain

The biggest recent news for the Oregon Varneys is that the long-departed hermano returned home from his "lengthy" existence on the east coast.
He returned last Friday, and we immediately took advantage of said arrival by going for a hike. When he is gone, there is no one very handy for me to go hiking with. When he is in Pennsylvania he has only short mountains to climb if he would so desire. The highest point in PA is 1400 feet lower than the short "mountain" we climbed on Saturday.

The hike was in the Opal Creek Wilderness east of Salem, a lovely grueling assault on Henline Mountain. Just before we set out, a young guy drove by and stopped to offer information about the hike -- said it climbed a long way in a short amount of distance. He'd done the hike twice, and said it was definitely worth it. I think perhaps he wondered if we knew what we were in for. On the way up, after 1-1.5 miles, we came upon a lady coming down -- she said it was still a ways to the top, and it was steep...

Somewhat interestingly, I unknowingly fabricated information about the trail and thought there was a false summit at 1.6 miles or something, and that we were to continue on to the real summit at 2.7 miles. Well, there was a false summit but it was at the end of the trail the hiking book talked about. We were blissfully unaware and after seeing the trail branch that led to the false summit's lookout, we turned left down a rarely-traversed and delightfully overgrown path. We reached the real summit, about which time the trail disappeared. Pink tape on the opposite side of the summit suggested that a trail went that way, but the trail was not visible and we did not see any higher summits so we turned around. It was a sort of anticlimactic trail end -- really no view at the trail end (which was a grove of trees and dead wood). It seemed as if the book would have made a comment about where the trail ended, since it was so indistinct. And perhaps it would have, if it had intended for us to go to the real summit.

Take a look at these webpages at summitpost.com for pictures, etc.
Henline Mountain Trail 3352
Henline Mountain Information

It was worth the climb -- views of Mt. Jefferson and Mt. Hood, delightful valleys, clear skies.

More Preceptorship Info

This is getting stupid, talking about 3 week old news... ;)

During my preceptorship...
My first Saturday in town I went with one of the vets to this cob house compound "way off" in the boonies. Cob houses... they're made of clay, straw, etc, sometimes with straw bales incorporated into the walls. Apparently there has been a recent revival in the use of that building style.

There was a crew of people there for a cob house building seminar, and when we arrived they were off up a mountain collecting branches for the rafters of a kitchen building. Linda (who heads the compound with her husband Ianto) gave us a tour. I may post pictures later, but for now take a look at their website, www.cobcottage.com.
I could see living in something neat and tidy and symmetrical like these older cob houses:

http://www.cobcottage.com/taxonomy_menu/13/16/29/17
Some of the newer round-style houses would be great for a cute and funny garden house... but they are too haphazard to conceive of living in as a serious matter. For me, that is -- for someone else... more power to them. Take a look at the rocket stove and oven idea.

***
While in Myrtle Point I did a bit of sleuthing for information about Varney ancestors that lived in the area in the early 1900s. I found a picture of a Varney in the Coos County Logging Museum -- interesting... probably related some how.

On my way home I stopped in Lincoln City to visit my friend Abigail Spinks, who was at that time renting a condominium for the month of June. It was good to catch up with her. She has a couple foster children, and appears to be doing a very good job with them.

Okay, the end of the preceptorship trip.

Blessed Abundantly

From the land of Vet School in the village of Computer Lab...

the verbose vet student embarks on more belated details about her crazy life.

I'm still carrying on about the preceptorship.
I wasn't surrounded by veterinary activities the entire time. I stayed with the main vet and his wife -- both very hospitable, very interesting, and very intelligent people. They and their daughters expanded my horizons in positive ways -- use of Yiddish in everyday conversation, gourmet cooking (Thai, Greek, etc), technical logging information, transportation in the early days of the county, organic dairying, etc. It was a rather stimulating atmosphere.

I enjoyed conversing about the Christian walk with the main vet. He related the following powerful story with reference to our calling to act, to obey God without necessarily knowing of any positive results from our efforts.
Some time ago, there was a guy who strongly felt called to go to a particular logging camp and preach. He went, and discovered the camp had been abandoned. He saw no one, but still knew that God had called him to preach there so he stood on a stump in the middle of the camp and preached. Then he went home and years later he was walking through a city and "ran into" a guy (we'll call him Bob). "Bob" looked at him, and asked if he was the fellow who preached to an empty logging camp many years before. It turns out that "Bob" had forgotten his knife or something and returned to the camp to get it. He saw this weird guy preaching in the middle of the camp, and hid behind a tree or something to listen. What he heard changed his life, and the reason he was in the city that day was because of some God-related work. Pretty neat, if you ask me.