As a vet tech I get to work with all the different animals at the zoo, but usually only during medical procedures where they are sedated for everyone's safety. I don't get the chance to have the day to day interaction of the routine feeding and cleaning that the keepers have. Sometimes when we are shorthanded on keeper staff we get to fill in.

Today was one of those days. I was assigned to care for the Giant Anteater who has become the hospital mascot. She's elderly, has heart disease and chronic foot problems, so she's been a hospital resident for over a year. Gussy is quite a character. She is very much a diva, very set in her ways, and you can see her become peeved if she isn't fed on _her_ schedule. Unfortunately we can't exactly replicate the diet she would eat in the wild, termite and ant mounds are hard to come by in a zoo setting. So instead, she gets a ground up mixture of dry cat food, insectivore pellets, mealworms, canned cat food, protein powder and fruit-flavored baby food. This gets mixed with water and blended until smooth. She also gets a can of cat food with her meds, and a banana or avocado as a novelty food. Gussy likes to sleep late, she only gets up from her hay bed when you open her stall door with food bowl in hand. Then she has a good stretch, chows down on her canned cat food and waits until you get out the hose to clean and refill her water bowl. One of her favorite things is to drink straight from the hose.

I also assisted with Pet the Spider Monkey who is recovering from surgery. She is on intravenous fluids and antibiotics, so she has to be kept in a smaller enclosure than she would normally have, so that we can maintain her catheter. Monkeys are messy, so she needs to have her blankets changed several times a day. Pet is very food motivated, which makes it easy to handle her, as she can be easily distracted with treats.

I really enjoyed hand feeding Pet, and getting a chance to work with Gussy, there are some days that I barely even get to see an animal, just their various blood and fecal samples.

Went out to dinner and drinks last night at the Old Monk with most of the vet department and several of the guys from the reptile department. The Old Monk has about a million kinds of beer on tap and in bottles, it was hard to choose. I tried a Black Velvet, which was pear cider and Guinness. Very tasty. The food was pretty good for "bar food", and the company was excellent.

Today I'm home impatiently waiting for UPS to drop off my Daylight Lamp. I've wanted a nice magnifying lamp for a long time, and Shirley from Country Cottage said she'd pick one up for me at the Nashville Trade Show so I could save a few bucks.

I realized I haven't mentioned anything to do with work lately, which is probably a good thing, since it means nothing out of the ordinary has been happening.

Today was a pretty typical day, in the morning we did a dental exam on one of our aged mandrill baboons. He was chewing funny and acting like he had a toothache. Of course you can't just walk up to a baboon and ask him to open his mouth so you can check out his fangs.

First you have to administer a sedative by dart, then rush back to the hospital to get him onto gas anesthesia before he wakes up enough to object. Our veterinary dentist took a look and it was determined that he had a tooth root abscess of one of his premolars. After further discussion, the vets decided that it would be better to remove the tooth, since Roger is pretty old (28) and it might bother him more to try to do a endodontic procedure. That might or might not save the tooth, but which certainly would require him to be anesthetized several more times, which at his age probably wouldn't be entirely safe.

In the afternoon, one of the rhinos needed a blood sample. She's been feeling a little bit under the weather, and the vet wanted to check her electrolyte balance and iron levels. You might think it would be hard to get a blood sample from a 2500 pound animal and it would be if she didn't feel like cooperating. Fortunately all our rhinos have been conditioned to allow us to do simple medical procedures with target training and food rewards. So with enough carrots and scratching Chula stood quite still and didn't even flinch when I inserted the needle.


Other than that I spent the rest of the day in the lab packing up samples that had been collected over the weekend to go out to various reference laboratories. At lunch I finished up the last inch of my Guild sweater and worked on a pair of socks on two circs. Unfortunately I'm running out of yarn and am going to have to go buy another ball. Fortunately it's variegated, so if the dye lot doesn't match exactly it's probably not going to matter all that much.

Current Read:

Have any of you seen the Spring issue of Knitter's magazine? What the fuck is up with this?


I really hope this is someone's idea of a joke. That is about the ugliest, most tacky thing I have ever seen. Nobody, but nobody would look good in that. I've seen $2 whores in classier outfits. What a waste of linen.

That's the very first pattern after all the editorial stuff. I'm really glad I wasn't drinking a cup of coffee while leafing through the mag. There's a white tank top and a coral sweater that are getting post-it note reminders for later possibles, but I'm seriously considering gluing pages 40 - 44 together so I never have to look at this abomination again.

Only four inches to go on part one of the Guild sweater I need to have it finished by the next meeting on 3/2, so I can do the drop stitch false seam thing. I've completely stopped working on Heather until I get the Guild sweater done. I just have the sleeves and finishing to do on Heather and then I can start on Dale Hawaii. I'm really looking forward to doing colorwork.



I still hear the siren song of the X-Box, we are still playing most evenings, pretty close to the ending of Baldur's Gate 2. I really like this game, and want to play it again with one of the other character choices.

I did finish Chatelaine Mystery 6 Part II:


with a little time to spare before part III is released on 3/1. I've also finished the outer border of Common Ground and started work on the inner border and motifs:

I would have posted sooner but we bought an X-Box for Valentine's Day, and have done nothing but play video games, go to work, eat and sleep for the past three days. Baldur's Gate II is awesome. Two player, cooperative play can keep me and Dave occupied for hours.

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles for the Game Cube isn't as good in multi-player mode. One of you has to carry this stupid bucket, and you can't do anything else while holding it, but if you put it down bad things can happen. So basically, you end up with one character doing all the work and one holding a bucket. Not so much fun for the bucket holder. Yeah, you can switch off, but still I think it is kinda stupid and pointless. In single player mode, they give you a moogle to carry the bucket. I like it better as a single player game.

Absolutely nothing to show for myself on the crafting front. Probably won't have anything for at least another week until the new wears off the X-Box or we finish Baldur's Gate.

Yoga class tomorrow night if I'm feeling up to it. I'm still feeling under the weather, and am beginning to wonder if it's more than just a simple cold. Day Knitter's group on Thursday, I might actually get something worked on since I can't take the video games out with me.

Last night Dave and I did another cooking class. This one was on Foolproof Cheesecakes, and he picked up a lot of tips and hints to make his cheesecakes come out better. I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I don't cook, it's not that I can't I just don't really enjoy it at all and Dave does, so he does all the cooking.

I must admit I was a little bored during class. This class wasn't a hands-on, so there wasn't anything to do besides watch the instructor put stuff in a mixer and then pour it in a pan. I go to the classes for the food, and because it's something Dave and I can do together. She showed us a savory crab cheesecake, which would be used as an appetizer. It was delicious, I've already requested it be made at home.

Next week I'm thinking of heading over to the local parks department yoga class. I've never done yoga before, but I've heard good things, and I really need to get into a low impact exercise routine. I liked the description of the class as non-competitive and suitable for beginners. The price is right, twelve bucks, and I don't have to sign a contract. Works for me!

Someone on one of my knitting lists made an offhand comment about people feeling the need to "manufacture knitting crises" for their blogs, just to have something to talk about. Well, I don't know about you, but I have more than enough crises without having to manufacture anything.

The thing is, I'm not that experienced as a knitter, I learned when I was seven, made a few things during my childhood and young adult years and then stopped completely until last year* when I decided I wanted to make socks. I had no idea that knitting had become the new yoga**, or the new black. I had no idea that companies had come up with self patterning sock yarns. All I wanted to do was have something small and portable that I could carry around and do with my hands. It just snowballed from there, now I have closets full of yarns, and patterns and ideas coming out of my ears.

I don't sit still well with nothing to do, and I don't follow directions blindly. Even when working from a pattern, I change things, be it short rowing the underarm area, or three needle bind off the shoulders or just plain tweaking. That means that there are plenty of times I have to rip back or redo something that hasn't come out as planned.


*I turned 36 last September if that helps with the timeline.
**I hate that I decided to pick up knitting again in the middle of a knitting revival that I knew nothing about, and I hate that I'm finally deciding to pick up a yoga class in the middle of a period where everything is being called the "new yoga". I'm hoping that the fact that I am so incredibly untrendy is going to make both yoga and knitting uncool again.

I've been so sick the past week, it must be the flu or something like it. Needless to say I haven't felt like doing much of anything, and everything I've touched has been a disaster. I threw the cable socks in the trash. My first attempt* ended up being a little too small, which was ok, I hadn't put all that much work into it. So I ripped back, and decided to try the two socks on two circs thing again. It worked great, until I realized that I had started doing a k1b, p1 rib instead of a k2b, p2 rib, which was making the top of the sock way huge. Sleeves, they looked like sleeves not something that would go comfortably on a foot. So I went to rip that out, and ended up with a huge tangled mess. I'm still not sure exactly what I did, but I felt that I'd rather just toss the whole mess rather than worry about trying to straighten it out. I have a whole closet full of sock yarn calling my name and I wasn't all that crazy about that color anyway.

So I dug around in my closet until I came across a couple of skeins of a funky, variagated yarn (also without a label) which I'm going to make into the cable socks. When I'm feeling better. Right now I can manage a passable imitation of stockinette so I'm working on the mate to the unknown yarn blue sock.

I've got a few inches of Sweater 101 done, and am up to the armhole shaping on Heather. I like the knitting in the round thing, this is the first time I've done that. I'm pretty sweater challenged, I've only made a few mostly years ago, and never one in the round. It makes for great mindless knitting, which is nice in the mornings at work when I have a few quiet moments before the day starts and I can knit and read.

Current Read:

*I don't swatch for socks. Plain ones I use a tried and true formula that fits me perfectly. Patterned, I just go with the large woman's size (if there is one) and knit until I figure out if it's going to fit or not. Usually works out just fine, sometimes I have to frog. That's life.

Friday there was a Fedex notice on the door. Sorry we missed you, blah, blah, blah. I couldn't think of what the package could be, so I kinda forgot about it. They don't deliver on weekends or Monday, and Tuesday again, I missed the delivery. Today is my day off, so I stayed home and waited. Good thing, because this is what I was missing:



It's the GSRP Fair Isle box I've been waiting for. It never made the connection in my head that the box might be coming FedEx, I was expecting postal mail for some reason. I'll be mailing the box tomorrow to Barb E, who is next on the list. It will go USPS since her address is a PO box.

There is a bunch of great stuff in the box, and some not so great stuff too. I won't list the entire contents but here's what I took out:

2 skeins of Regia Cotton sock yarn (like I need more sock yarn) and 8 skeins of Patons Fresco and a tank top pattern to go with them. I put in a sock kit, some Brittany DPN's (which I break if I try to use them), and some other stuff. Hope someone can use it.

Last night was the Guild meeting, and we started our Sweater 101 project. I'm using Emu Superwash yarn in a medium blue. I've got about three rows of ribbing done, and am supposed to have up to the armholes done by next meeting. Looks like Heather is going to be put on the back burner for a while.

I also got a delivery from UPS today, which contained my belated Christmas gift of a Game Boy Advance player in onyx, the new style flip top version and Sex and the City Fifth Season on DVD.

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