I started a new volunteer position today! I’m working as a medicator for Dane County Friends & Ferals every week. Friends & Ferals is an awesome organization that takes in foster cats and feral cats, rehabilitates them (ie: gives them meds and a home to live in) until they are adoptable. My job is to give the cats their medications, which may sound boring but I can’t wait to get started! I’m weird like that. I gave two cats (Ozzy and Oregano) 50mg of Doxycycline, which is apparently an antibiotic used for a variety of purposes in felines. It works by repressing the bacteria’s ability to reproduce, thus inhibiting bacterial infections such as Lyme disease and feline upper respiratory infections. From what I can tell, it seems like these kitties were getting this medication because they are just a little sick with some feline bacteria. I hope they feel better soon. The Doxycycline was administered orally to Ozzy and Oregano (by putting the pills in their food), but I’m pretty sure it can also be administered sub-cutaneously. Hopefully I get one of those some day! We’ll see. 

My Organismal Bio textbook came in the mail today!!!! It’s BEAUTIFUL. “Animal Physiology” is the title, and it has a gorgeous mountain lion on the cover. I may have been flipping through it and reading a few sections before I got way too excited about it and started doing some research based on what I read. Yes, this is how I spend my Friday nights. No shame. There was a little blurb in the book about how geckos can cling to ceilings. I had never really thought about how exactly this happened, but oh man it’s so cool!!! The geckos have millions and millions of tiny lamellae on the bottoms of their feet which create tons of Van der Waals forces between them and the surface to which they’re adhering, allowing the lamellae to stick to virtually anything!! Amazing. Crazy. Stupendous. I can’t wait to take this class. 

Right. Long story short, I’ve never been this jet lagged in my entire life. Ever. The time difference between home and iceland is 5 hours, but it seriously feels like I’m on a different planet or something. I don’t even know. It’s eleven pm and I’ve been asleep since freaking 8pm. And I feel like totally awake and have nothing to do for the next 6.5 hours. Fantastic. And oh yeah….it’s COMPLETELY LIGHT OUTSIDE ALL THE TIME. So it feels like I should be awake right now. And it will continue to feel like this all night because the sun will set in an hour and will rise again just 15 minutes after that happens. Makes complete sense right? WRONG. Not that I’m upset or sleep deprived or anything. No, no, I’m completely fine. All I want is to sleep for more than 3 hours at a time. Is that so wrong????

In other news, Iceland is pretty cool so far. Yesterday we just drove from Reykjavik to akureyi and once we got here I went on a fantastic run. I love love love running amidst mountains and oceans, and this place has plenty of both. Plus the temperature is perfect for running (50 degrees). Then we ate and I stupidly went to bed at eight pm, which is what brings me to tumblr, writing little rants about the sun is going to set in twenty minutes. Other than that, my biggest accomplishment so far has been having an epic debate with my dad about breast cancer and HPV. Yes, those do sound like impossible-to-debate topics, but we made it happen. It was kind of impressive. And we managed to find a decent tent, since certain people left ours at home. Okay, I’m going to try to sleep, inevitably fail, and probably wind up on facebook here in about thirty minutes, when the sun is about to rise. So good night…good mornng…whatever.

I feel like my life is at a standstill. I suddenly have a lot of time on my hands, and I really don’t know what to do with it. Relaxation bores me easily and leaves me with only one thing to do: think. This can lead to dangerous situations. Like restarting the same blog post 5 times because I had no idea what to talk about. I’ll have things to do this summer, starting this weekend, but until then I guess I’m just stuck thinking. There are worse things. 

Thoughts

• This time next year, I’ll be studying for the GRE (kill me now)
• Rainy summer days kind of suck
• I really hope this vet emails me back so that I can go meet her and hopefully volunteer (or work) for her
• Some people surprise me more than others
• I want blueberries, stat
• Part of me is ready to go back to school already
• The other part never wants to go back again
• I should go to Madagascar before it’s completely ruined by deforestation attempts (and successes)

Yay for summer boredom.

I was on my run this morning and started to think about how ridiculous my life has been so far. A lot of the things I’ve done don’t even seem real to me anymore, which is just depressing. When I was little, I dreamed (literally) of being in the Amazon rainforest. I read books and books about the amazing creatures that lived there and watched movies that featured landscapes and animals more beautiful than I could ever imagine. I remember wanting to walk among the giant trees and see fabled tree-frogs and toucans hiding amongst the dense canopies above me. Years later, those dreams came true for me when my dad and I ventured into the Peruvian Amazon for just over a week. Although I was really sick for most of the trip, it was still the most unforgettable experience that I have ever had. 

We were taken to a research center in the middle of the rainforest, after a 7 hour canoe ride down the Tambopata river. They gave us food wrapped up in banana leaves and as we traveled up the river, we saw capybara (the world’s largest rodent) and spoonbills (birds that have bills which look like wooden spoons), both of which I had wanted to see ever since I started reading about the Amazon when I was a little girl. When we finally reached the Tambopata Research Center, it was like a dream for me. We hiked up to the “lodge” (I use this term very loosely) and were taken to our room. This room was like none other that I have ever seen. It consisted of only 3 walls. No, the room wasn’t a triangle. The fourth wall was simply missing. It was like a giant open window from which I could step straight into the jungle, not to mention that things could crawl straight from the jungle into the room. The showers were located a walk away from our room and were complete with no warm water. Which didn’t really matter considering that the outside temperature was in the 90’s on a daily basis. There was a hammock in our room and mosquito nets covering the beds, to protect us from malaria-ridden pests. Every meal was served by a man named Pachanga (The Dancer), who was an absolutely hilarious looking man, who looked rather incapable of dancing. He served us delicious juices and rice (most of which I was too sick to partake in) and provided entertainment by being so awkward. All in all, the Tambopata Research Center was an amazing place to inhabit, and I think that I will revisit it one day when I go back to the Amazon (it WILL happen!!!). So that’s Part 1 of this Amazon tale! More at some point in the future about what I saw in the forest! 

This little guy was in our room!!

I know this is weird. Feel free to call me a nerd after reading this. Or crazy. Whatever floats your boat. I’m doing some research right now for my project on antibiotic resistance mechanisms and as I was sifting through some papers I had a bit of an awesome realization. I actually know what these papers are talking about. When did I learn what the 23S subunit of a ribosome does? Or how horizontal gene transfer works?! I think I’ve actually learned some things this year. Weird.