Something Fishy at Lynah Rink

On Jan 6th, 1973, a Harvard Crimson hockey fan made the terrible mistake of throwing a dead chicken at the Cornell Big Red's goalie after the Crimson lost, 5-2.

This unleashed the fury of the Lynah Faithful. And the Lynah Faithful are not to be messed with.

For those not familiar, Cornell is very, VERY attached to its Division I hockey program. Lynah Rink, our home ice, is known as the most hostile venue in all of college hockey, and with darned good reason. The Lynah Faithful (i.e. Big Red hockey fans) have a long, long memory to accompany our sheer obnoxiousness... mess with us, and we'll make sure your grandchildren know about it. (Literally.)

About that chicken.

The Faithful took this as an affront to our agricultural school heritage, which is a button you really don't want to push with Cornell students. While the school has risen in stature in recent years, we're still sometimes seen as the un-Ivy Ivy League... the kind of country bumpkin cousin that you smile politely to at fancy parties but don't actually consider part of the family. So, needless to say, the chicken was not well received. The next time Harvard came to play at Lynah, the Faithful unleashed some Old Testament-style wrath unto them... in the form of a volley of fish and squid. Throw chickens at us, will you? Take THIS, ya smarmy Argyle-wearing coast-dwelling smarty pants.

Also very Old Testament-style is the fact that the tradition continues on their children (er, successive teams), and their children's children, and on to the seventh generation (and probably past that). Tonight's Cornell v. Harvard game had its traditional fish-pelting after the National Anthems, despite coat checks and dire warnings from the administration about repealing season tickets and so on. And kudos to the guy who held on to the whole octopus until the end of the third period... made a beautiful silhouette as it arced gracefully over the boards and, um, almost hit our player. But still. The thought was there. (And we won! 2-1! Yay!!!)

You just can't do school all the time... and hockey is such a wonderful way to vent your frustrations onto total strangers in a completely socially accepted manner! (That, and Block II continues to be less than thrilling, so I have nothing else to write about.)

History factoids courtesy of eLynah.com... where you can read about the rest of Cornell hockey lore if you like (Harvard isn't our only ancient grudge, just the most persistent!)

Heather Gets to Stay In Vet School

And even passed Block I by a respectable margin, to boot.

*happy dance*

Aaaaand back to work!

Ithaca in Autumn

It's been a week since Block I finals ended (no, I do not have any grades yet... we're assuming that I get to stay in vet school) and we're just finishing up our first week of Block II, the next series of torture... errr... the next step in becoming a Cornell veterinarian. Not gonna lie, it's boring as heck. I'm fairly certain you don't want to hear about DNA transcription and mitosis and all that jazz (Lord knows I don't) so I'll probably refrain from mentioning it at all. You can thank me later. Block VIIb is shaping up to be a bit more interesting- it's a combination of husbandry, ethics, and nutrition (no, I do not know who decided that those topics went well together) and involves some time at the SPCA and a farrier lab (read: horse hoof care), among other things. So we'll see how that goes!

But since the pace has slowed down from Kentucky Derby to a basic workout around the track, we all get to stop and look around a bit, and enjoy this beautiful city in my favorite season. I live on the edge of town, which is a bit more "wild" than downtown in the sense that I have some interesting animal neighbors. I heard a pack of coyotes one night not long ago, and have been serenaded by a pair of great horned owls every night for the past week or so. I've also become addicted to Sapsucker Woods/Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which is a neat bird and wildlife sanctuary right up the road. I've started some semi-serious birdwatching as a result of hanging out there- it's an excuse to get outside! The Lab also run a neat website called eBird, where you can log your sightings of birds anywhere in the world. The data is useful not only for your own records, but for the scientists at the Lab as well, who use it in their studies. Plus it's kind of cool to watch your "life list" of bird species keep climbing!

The picture above was taken at Sapsucker Woods Pond, though I did kind of cheat- this was taken around mid-October, nearly all of our leaves are gone by now. Can't wait to get back out there today- sixty degrees!!! And... snow predicted for Sunday. Ahhh, western New York.

The End of Block I

Four days of testing later, it's over... let's hope I don't have to do it again :/

Currently we're all walking around a bit zombie-like, gathering up loose penguins, in shock that 12 weeks have actually gone by (when did it get cold out?). In those 12 weeks we've "solved" 11 cases, torn apart 28 dog cadavers, sheep eyes, horse larynxes, cow hearts and countless other animal bits, poked and prodded at 8 (living) horses, 12 beagles and 20-odd cows, smelled like formalin, barn, hay, and every species of domestic animal droppings, crammed 3 thick binders and countless textbook pages of information into our heads, spent days on end in the library, and likely killed a collective two hundred colored pencils and dry-erase markers in the process.

And (we think) we lived.

And now for the next 3.75 years.

Honestly though, after the big 8-hour monster test on Monday, the week wasn't all bad... the notable exception being the Block VIIa oral exams on Tuesday (our exam on how to do a physical exam). Not that they were difficult (quite the opposite, actually), but it was the little burst of bad omens that decided to occur just before them. I pulled my stethoscope out of my locker 15 minutes before the exam and watched the diaphragm flutter to the ground at my feet... seems the little chunk of plastic that a parakeet bit out of the rim a few weeks ago did more damage than I thought, and the ancient plastic finally cracked all the way through and let the diaphragm go. (For those who don't know, the stethoscope was my grandfather's and is probably at least as old, if not older, than I am.) For a moment, I felt a little like Harry Potter with his wand broken... the moments before a final exam (or fight with dark forces) is a poor time for the tools of your trade to disintegrate. Fortunately my lab partner had hers so I was not stethoscope-less for the exam, AND the damage is quite fixable.

Once that crisis was averted, all the test-takers had to go wait in the breezeway (large hallway to the large animal barns) for the professors to call us in. Down the breezeway, a few people led a horse out and walked him around a bit, which didn't get much of our attention... it's a working hospital, after all, horses and cows come through the breezeway all the time. What did alarm us somewhat was when the horse was suddenly not standing, then laid on his side. A down horse never, ever means anything good. We then learned that the "old breezeway" where we were waiting to take our test is where large animals are routinely euthanized, because the necropsy freezer is right there and they can fit a bulldozer in to move the body. This was not nice to discover moments before a final exam. Fortunately, I was taking a test when the body was moved... and turned out luckier than the girl who got stuck in another exam room because the body was in the way. Such are the perils of vet student life.

And also fortunately, I probably did the best on that part of the exam despite the omens of doom. Hopefully I did passably well on the rest... time will tell...

In the meantime... I'm sleeping in tomorrow then I'm outta here for two days, heading back to Geneseo and Rochester for a weekend of reunions :) Yeah for getting my life back (on loan) for 72 hours!!!!

Breaktime- The Penguin Suicides

In the spirit of the dreaded Block I Finals, I thought I would share the immortal analogy of Dr. Linda Mizer, about how the vet student's brain works. She said this sometime last year, and it has since been embraced by most of the students here at Cornell for its downright scary accuracy.

Your brain is an iceberg. All the information you put into your brain are penguins. In vet school, there is a penguin population explosion of epic proportions, and that iceberg gets pretty crowded in short order. So, penguins start jumping off... first little penguins like where you last put your pen down, or forgetting your lunch. Then bigger penguins get squeezed out... when was the last time I ate lunch, exactly?... and finally, in the hope of keeping the vet penguins squarely in the center of the iceberg, things like "what's my phone number?" and "how to talk" jump off into orca-infested waters. It's quite the frightening scene. Of course, post-final, I believe there is a penguin-kicking party where all of the vet penguins are unceremoniously shoved off, and a rescue attempt is made for some of the more important penguins. We'll see how that goes.

Anyway... that is how we think. That is why we may not appear "normal" during school time... we've just lost a few penguins. Or a lot of penguins. But hopefully you get the idea.

Back to penguin-cramming!!!