So what would you say...ya do here?

Sorry for not posting in a while, I have been pretty busy with studying and work and such that not only have I not had much time for writing on the blog, but I also haven't had too much time for adventures.  Moreover, the few adventures I have had haven't been documented by photos, and I want to make these posts interesting somehow.

Given the lack of photos of adventures, and the unexpected demand for more blog posts, I thought I would write about what I do at work, which actually is a fun adventure in itself.  It might also help a lot of you actually know what it is I do, although I promise not to go into too many boring details.

I actually love my job.  It is awesome.  I work for the College of Veterinary Medicine at Washington State University in the department of Veterinary Clinical Sciences.  My official title is Research Technologist 3, but my working title is Shared Lab Coordinator.  The main premise of my job is that many of the faculty in the Department either have very small research labs or none at all, so the Department provides a shared laboratory for those faculty members to have access to commonly used equipment in order to do a minimal amount of research.  I am also leased out to any faculty in the department that needs me and split my time among many different faculty.  The greatest part about this is that I get to have a very nice variety in the work that I do.  For some of the faculty, I just do regular science-y stuff like running gels or doing PCR, but for others, I actually get to interact with live animal subjects or patients.

Want to know the coolest part about getting to work with live animal subjects?  I'll let the pictures do the talking.  (I get to work with grizzly bears).

This girl is actually taking an ECG with her IPhone (yeah, there's an app for that)

Liver biopsy

Big hands

Just hanging out in between blood draws.  I get to put a very long catheter into their jugular in their neck.

After the tests for the day, before they woke back up.

This fella weighs about 600 lbs.

Big teeth

The drugs hadn't completely set in yet and he was a little twitchy, so I had to wait until I could intubate him.  I didn't want to stick my hands in a bears mouth before he was completely out...call me crazy.

Intubating the bear...it is so much easier on a bear than on a human.

Lots of bear spray...just in case.

So...yeah, my job is pretty cool.  Working with the bears only actually happens every few months, but it is pretty cool when I get to go out there.  Besides that, work never really ever gets to be routine, since I am working on so many different projects and maintaining a lab.  I actually don't really have any pictures of my lab, but I did take a picture of one of the buildings I work in back in the fall:

Besides working lately, I have been doing some work in my garden.  Since the last time I posted about it, I hadn't done too much to the bigger plot because I was so busy.  When I went to plant last week, the ground was rock hard.  So I found some free horse manure on craigslist and got a couple truckloads, and after rototilling it, the soil is soft as a pillow.  I got my all my seeds in...two rows of corn, one row of peppers, one row of cucumbers, one row of onions, one row of potatoes, one row of tomatoes, and some sunflowers in the front.

Well, anyway, I hope you enjoyed the post.  I'll try to get some more pictures of my adventures.  I will probably be doing a fair bit of mountain biking, horseback riding, and camping in the upcoming month.  

And I will leave you with something that gave me quite a laugh...here is someone in the fields behind the vet school that just got a bad haircut...