A skittery, erratic attempt at a weblog. Rambles will be indulged and depths will be plumbed. Who knows what I'll come up with?
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| Fragments A skittery, erratic attempt at a weblog. Rambles will be indulged and depths will be plumbed. Who knows what I'll come up with? |
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Saturday, July 24, 2004 Weather: quite lovely, kind of breezy Listening to: Aqua, "Heat of the Night"...yes, I have a soft spot in my heart for Aqua, mock me all you'd like.... Taking a break from: everything!!! ahhhhhh...chillin'.... My life is complete... ...I got asked if I'd like to model today. Well, not quite; I'm on the street between the Bahen centre (mock MCAT central) and the Eaton Centre, engaged in deep and intense conversation with Tiff and Jeannette about the writing sample prompts, and these two women stop me to ask I live in the area. At first I thought they were asking for directions so I was like "um, yes, but I don't really know this area very well..." and they kind of laughed at me and were all like "No no, we were just wondering if you'd ever considered doing any modelling before". Um, well the answer to that is no and no thank you, but they did give me their card. And they also asked me how old I was and, when I said 21, they replied with "No waaaay, we thought you were about 15". Yeah, thanks.... I just think the timing is kind of funny; here I am, having just written a 6.5-hour exam, wearing jeans I've had since grade 10, hair in a random frizzball at the back of my head, and...yeah, 'ever modelled before'? What a joke.... Or maybe not, maybe tomorrow I'll give them a call, dish out $50000 for an agent and some portfolio photos, and forget this whole med-school thing. No more physics for me. It'd be worth the 50 grand. ~SQ posted by susan | 8:16 PM Wednesday, July 14, 2004 tried to post this yesterday, but blogger didn't like it much... Weather: muggy, humid, damp Listening to: random tabla solo...I miss bellydancing.... Taking a break from: the general hecticness of my life One other thing Man. What an eye-opener today. One of my supervisers, Dolores, decided to show me around today a bit more in-depth than I've been shown around before. I've seen all the different parts of the lab, but when Carol showed it to me she did it so quickly I didn't really absorb very much. So today Dolores explained all the different tests they do and why they do which ones when, and gave me all the instructions that come with the test kits so I could read up about them if I was interested, which I AM, just lacking in time.... (Actually, most of them would have come in handy for my cell biology PBL last term, but...whatever.) Anyway, none of this is what really got to me today. I was learning about the viral load testing area, which is where they test samples from HIV+ people to determine just how MUCH of the HIV virus is in their blood. Dolores showed me the test kits, and then announced.... ...each kit costs $4000. I nearly dropped my clipboard. From what I'm figuring, if each kit costs $4000, the fridge that they're in contains a half a million dollars. Gee, I guess they'd really better have backup generators.... I asked her a bit more about how much the tests cost, and it turns out that once you add in all the labour, operational costs of the machines, the supplemental materials, etc. etc. it works out to about twice that. PER KIT. I have no idea what the other test kits cost, but if it's anything like this one, that place goes through more money each and every day -- maybe each and every hour -- than I have to my name. Wow. No wonder health care's such a mess. ~SQ posted by susan | 10:41 PM Friday, July 09, 2004 Weather: warm but cloudy Listening to: Rent, "Happy New Year" Taking a break from: prep for tomorrow's mock Things learned during my first week at work (mark 2): ~You can use anything you'd like to balance a centrifuge -- caps, test tubes of water, elastic bands.... ~There is nothing that looks more dangerous, in a cool way, than zip-lock bags emblazoned with a huge black biohazard symbol on a red square. But they kind of lose their impact when there are huge cardboard boxes of them sitting around. ~I like lab supplies in bulk almost as much as I like school supplies in bulk. Boxes and boxes and boxes and BOXES of plastic test tubes and pipettes, whee!!! ~Nothing, repeat nothing, can take the smell of latex gloves off your hands. ~There are, however, about a thousand different kinds and sizes of latex gloves, so at least you have a CHOICE how to make yourself smell unpleasant. ~Almost a plane a minute comes into Pearson over the 401. ~No two samples of blood look alike. I'm not kidding! You'd think that blood is blood is blood, but it's not.... ~I enjoy repetitive tasks. ~Pocket protectors look exactly as geeky as their stereotypical connotation would suggest. ~Medical lab lingo: put (a sample/a rack of samples) up -- load them into the centrifuge. take down -- unload them again spin -- to put through a centrifugation cycle STAT -- right away, immediately...I knew that already, actually, but it's fun to hear and use it in a context OTHER than ER/Scrubs/Chicago Hope. It also refers to a sample with a STAT priority for testing. pull samples -- take specific samples and arrange them in a sample rack according to the order in which they are going to be tested layout -- that order hood -- fumehood run, n. -- a group of samples ~8 am isn't THAT bad an hour to start work. ~A LOT of work/manpower goes into testing people for HIV. ~I don't mind 'lab work' as much as I thought I did. Not something I 'learned', really, but something that I realized today: the announcers on 97.3 (yes, the provincial HIV testing lab is EZ Rock friendly) have a tendency to announce songs as song title, artist without a pause or intervening words. This can make it kind of funny when the song title is an adjective. It's not too bad for "beautiful" Christina Aguillera, but "invisible" Clay Aiken and "stupid" Sarah McLachlan might want to rethink their naming strategies.... ~SQ posted by susan | 7:56 PM Thursday, July 08, 2004 Now if only I could ACTUALLY get a degree in this....
Blogging Degree From Go-Quiz.com posted by susan | 10:41 PM Sunday, July 04, 2004 Weather: thundering...the sky is going to open anytime now... Listening to: the thunder Taking a break from: getting ready for work tomorrow Random thoughts, eve-of-work edition -Wow, I very, very rarely see the 'internet' being anything other than tired. Calendar events seem to have the biggest impact on it -- legislated emotional change. Around American thanksgiving it was 'thankful' and today it's 'patriotic'. I guess some Canadians probably haven't changed it since July 1, and are contributing to that majority... -I don'wanna go to work tomorrow...but I guess it will be nice to be making SOME money, even if it's not very much. -This is the first time in a long time that the usual cottage weather rule has been broken -- beautiful weekend, come home to a thunderstorm. -The level of screwedness for the MCAT just keeps getting higher, and higher, and higher.... -Book Six is to be called "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince". I really, really, REALLY hope Ms. Rowling knows what she's doing. (Prince???) -I wonder when they'll send out information about residence for next year? -Soccer games seem to take up much less time than hockey games -- I was astounded at how quickly that final lasted. But that's weird, when you consider that a hockey game is 3 20-minute periods and a soccer game (unless I'm mistaken) is 2 45-minute halves...there's a lot of filler in your average Hockey Night In Canada I guess. -Little icons, little icons, pretty little icons. You will definitely be my downfall. -There's Christmas ribbon sitting on my desk, and I have the sneaking suspicion that it's still there from Christmas. -Sometimes I have spelling brain farts. Like 'suspicion' above -- I had to go check dictionary.com to see if it was right, even though I must have written that word a hundred times in my life and read it about a thousand more. -Who in hell thinks it's civilized to start work at 8 am?? -It looks a lot later than 5:45, I guess because of the impending storm. -I need retail therapy. -There's the downpour. ~SQ posted by susan | 5:31 PM |
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