What I've discovered this week.

I haven't posted for ages again. There's been a flurry of exams (still 2 more to go this term), so I've resisted blogging.

I'm currently holed up in the Clare library. I've got an electric heater next to me, and a nice little cubbyhole in the laptop-room - very snug, unlike our house - which is freezing!

Things I've discovered this week:

1. Discovery from current revision: Dilated Cardiomyopathy is more common in dogs, while Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is more common in cats.
2. I much prefer espresso coffee from coffee shops than their horrible watered down mud. Particularly starbucks coffee which is strong, but in a horrible over-brewed way. Espressos taste good though. However, espressos are by definition, small, and so are not useful for stretching out for 2 hours for a work-fest. Hmm. Fortunately I have justified the caffiene content to myself by discovering that most bought coffee contains 2 shots of coffee, exactly the same amount as a double espresso. Huzzah!
3. People like drama - Short Fuse was a massive success (the room was completely crammed with people!). We had to turn people away at the door, and people were heard to remark that they want to come to the next one. So there probably will be another in Autumn. Huzzah!
   
4. You can hold a bed together with paperclips. I finally got hold of the bed for my room from my landlady, and unfortunately there were a few screw missing for the cross poles. Luckily, after some sword fighting with the loose poles, Reece, Bethmo and I came across some paperclips and twisted them around the poles to hold everything in place. Bodged beautifully.
5. Music made with dropping water is good, but only every now and then. Otherwise too much like water torture. The song I refer to is "Drop" by a Japanese chap, who goes by the name of "Cornelius" - very Japanese.
6. Gilbert and Sullivan can be quite good fun. After my previous trip to the Mikado which I promptly forgot a few days after seeing it, Alex and I went to see Iolanthe at the Cambridge Arts Theatre on Wednesday (our 4th anniversary), and it was very enjoyable. Nice and laid back, with some good tunes and an amazing set. The girl playing Iolanthe was particularly good. Plus the oboeist was, of course, a stand out genius (Mary).
7. While not strictly this week, Jamie Frost has a podcast. It rocks. Go to his website, or get it on iTunes. I'm listening to it while learning about myocardial disease, and it's very soothing when the fatty degeneration gets too much.
   

Tom

What Will it Take to Heat this House?

A little Maximo Park quote there ... a group of guys from the north who are probably loving the cold. It has been very cold in Cambridge, our house is struggling to reach above 14C inside. I recently resorted to nailing old curtains over the back door which has helped the temperature claw up to 16C. And no, the irony that I spent Sunday on my knees insulating someone else's loft has not been lost on me. I'm tempted to offer to do ours to the landlady. AND, everywhere in Cambridge has sold out of fan heaters! Even the disgustingly tacky bright pink Argos heaters had all gone. What will we do? What will it take to heat this house? Currently it's taking alot of gas and some chunky energy bills to... how shall we say... tempt it out of single figures?

On the other hand, it has meant my new dressing gown has been christened in exceptional style - getting hours of wear every day (pretty much from the moment I enter the house to the moment I go to bed). And my flat cap has had a little outing to vet-school. This brought a flurry of comments, possibly each one more sarcastic than the last (or less sarcastic... no... AS sarcastic?). Or not. I shall continue the wearing until everyone is used to the image of Tom as a posh farmer/landed gentry type-fellow. Excellent.

AND, we have an exam on Monday - Urology which is a LIST. LISTY LISTY LIST. A few tasty little concepts to get into, like the "nephrotic syndrome", and the big spider of renal failure, but apart from that, it's listylist. However, it did inspire Alex to give life to the beautiful song, #There's a hole in my glomerulus dear Liza, dear Liza#. Joy!

Tom

I've edited this post to remove my excessive use of the passive tense. Why do I think that writing in the passive makes me sound more capable of writing?

The Tale of the Dusty Loft

I spent much of today hidden away from the sunshine, under a thin layer of slate amidst dust and other people's things.

One of my friends has spent the last few years doing garden work for one of our old supervisors, and his latest (non-garden related) job was to insulate her loft - for it was done in a very slap-dash way by whomever did it before. And so, with a little assistance from me, the loft was insulated. Boards were pulled up, had squishy fibreglass lain beneath them, and then replaced. I was glad of the face-mask provided, for it was black with dust afterwards - nice to know that could have been coating my alveoli, and yet, was not!

So, now I know how to insulate a loft - a useful life skill no?

Tomorrow lectures begin again... once more unto the breach!

I went out yesterday to take advantage of the autumn sunlight in our garden and took some snaps. Some artsy (I especially like the one of the garden glove in the plant pot - it was like that when we arrived at the house, and none of us have moved it), some gruesomely green (our pond looks like the Amazon... crocodiles anyone?), and others just general garden snaps - you can see how gorgeous it is. All photos are on my flickr account, recognisetheview.

This morning, on the way to lectures, walking along the Storey's Way cycle path I was distracted by an engineer in a field. He was using a theodolite, presumably to do theodolitey things for a development of some sort (ok, I don't know what he was doing) right in the middle of the field of cows. The cows however, were not neatly distributed, or even in a random herd; they were crowded behind him, all carefully watching. If any of you, like Jen, are worried that cows are more intelligent than they look, this poor quality (UFO style) mobile phone photo will only add to your paranoia.

Yesterday I gave blood, and so did Alex. She came along for moral support (though I pointed out that this would make me seem like a scaredycat), and was so impressed by the whole affair ("I thought it would involve knives and buckets!") that she gave blood an hour later (after a trip to Sainsbury's). Worryingly, she also managed to predict her blood flow rate into the bag at exactly 43 ml/min... scary!

This evening we have had an uber-cleaning fest. The hall, landing and kitchen have been hoovered, and the hall and kitchen mopped, alex is frantically dusting and vacuuming her room. Two days ago we flash-mobbed the living room, and shifted furniture before leaping in with the hoover, and I dusted my room at the weekend. Slowly, we are freeing ourselves of the respiratory nightmare that is our house. Please, parents, if you're worried about your child developing asthma, bring them here for an hour and they'll be desensitised for a century.

In other news, my computer is breaking. It's been deciding again that 2 usb ports is one too many, and so I again have to chose between internet, printer, music or pen drives - turn off one, plug in the other etc. etc. Plus it's been crashing alot for some strange reason (I think it's confusion at an external hard drive), and for some reason Ubuntu has started crashing too). I've been eyeing macs up again... apparently there's a new macbook coming out soon, so I'm not sure whether to hold on and see what they're like, or jump in and get one of the current ones cos no doubt the price will go up. Or whether I should even get one at all. Oh well!
Edit: actually it seems the new macbooks are already out.

House!

We have a house! After months of searching, we've finally found and managed to stake our claim on a lovely little three bedroom house in a great location. Woop!

Relax

Dear Blog (blog)

A moment of peace has descended on the house. No-one is cooking, doing washing, running around or being loud. I am sat on the sofa blogging (obviously), and trying vainly to install some drivers for my soundcard. In a lame ass computer geek fashion I have installed linux on my computer (groan). This is mostly because windows hates my USB ports. Linux loves them - but hates my soundcard.

When I have done this I will begin working. But currently I am relaxed.

Alex is sat next to me turning up the hems of her jeans, a job she loves apparently - it's relaxing. "I'm doing major surgery," she says. "On my clothes". Being a vet, I suppose you can never be too sure when she'll be performing a laparotomy on the living room table...

Ah. All is well.

Has been a busy morning already! Alex and Andrew have gone off to rotations (Post-Mortem and Small Animal Studies respectively), and Mary and me have been left to our own devices, which in my case has involved making phone calls and writing this blog, whilst Mary is hunting for screws for her new pannier.

Phone call wise, I have phoned our letting agent as my room has started smelling of sewage every time Andrew flushes his toilet, which is a little worrying to say the least! "I'm upset you thought I could make a smell of raw sewage!" he said. Sorry Andrew! Hopefully they'll send out a plumber today to take a look at what's going on.
I have also rung an abattoir in Halifax, and have arranged to go there for a week in August. I now have 9 weeks of EMS organised (10 if the BSAVA congress is allowed to count), and can hopefully book another 2 weeks small animal in summer to get myself up to 11!

I also have new shoes (shock-shock-horror!) to replace the infamous "Davy Shoes" given to me by Davy in 1st year. Unfortunately they have walked a fair few 100 miles in their time, and are giving up the ghost so I got a replacement pair of loafers from M&S with my Xmas voucher. However, as they are slip on, insoles were required, and what better way to use the cut off insole bits than giving them to Alex with a pair of scissors. Meet 'Shoe Shrimp' who has taken up lodging on my clock.

PARTY!

We had a housewarming party, both to celebrate our moving into our funky new magnolia house of innuendo and also to warm it. We felt the number of bodies available would provide warmth for many weeks to come*. People began rolling in at about 8.30pm, and my room became cloakroom (as it's just by the front door) and also toilet (as it is ensuite and downstairs). Many people came, including Bethmo who adventured all the way down from Durham (on a train that took a million hours to get here) to see it, which was really great. Lots of Vicky's course peeps came, along with linguists, vets, friends of Mr Taylor and Mary and much hilarity was had by all.

Until it was gatecrashed that was. Some crayzeees came in off the street after giving some guests some cigarettes and proceeded to drink our wine, piss in my loo and generally get in the way until they left (Vicky pointed them in the direction of the door). Grr.


*Incidentally I wonder if there is an opening for using cows to heat houses? They could be connected up by pipes, and their methane (which would be at a decent average 38.5 degrees C) could be run through the house's central heating system. Just a thought. (Joke)

p.s. photo stolen from Becky VW's facebook page. My apologies. It is of the party.

Houses, Englings and Bronte

Hello!

Recent internet obsession - scrabulous.com and also its facebook ap. They're both great ways of playing scrabble online, and I've become a little obsessed. Best move so far, involved playing "RAPpERS" on the 1st go (70 ish points) and then making it "CRAPPERS" on the next move, getting a triple word and 54 points. Huzzah!

Last week was exciting. I went up to Cambridge for the day to see our new house. It looks about a million times better than it did when we went to look round before (and it still looked good then), probably because there was only me and my sister in there, as opposed to 13 people! It smells a little dusty, but apart from that should be amazing to live in! Me and Hannah had a good day in Cambridge carrying stuff to the house, finding out that the number 7 bus goes straight there, eating in a pub, hoovering (!), talking to lady about horses (?) and making videos on my camera. hehe Larks.

The following day I went to see Vicky (who is looking very well) in London. We went for cake and a drink in a pub around Leicester Square and nattered for an hour and a half before Vicky had to go and feed her family.

This week is Hannah's results week and, apart from that, not alot. I'm reading Jane Eyre (I read Jasper Fford's 'The Eyre Affair' last week, and feel like I should read the real thing) at the moment, and can't really put it down. It's an amazing book - I'm quite surprised really. I got a really old copy from Oxfam in Kingston (along with Wuthering Heights - they were the same print and I couldn't see them split up) - cost me £2.98 in total. Bargainusmaximus!

Tom

On Thursday

Want house? Get house.

We have a house! We spent this afternoon wandering around the Chesterton region sneaking around cute little terraces trying to find somewhere to live. We saw 3 houses in total, and paid a deposit on the first one we saw. It was really lovely - a great sitting room, big kitchen, side covered outside bit, off-street parking, and 6 bedrooms, 3 of which are en-suite. The rooms are small (presumably the house is made to only have 2 bedrooms!), but it'll do the job, and with the lounge we won't need much space in our rooms. The 2nd house was nice (bigger bedrooms) but the lounge was in the basement - felt like walking into a dungeon. The third house was newly revamped, but unfortunately was ALL corridors - the kitchen was a tight galley, and there was no living room (just a breakfast bar). All in all, a good choice was made. Now all we have to do is set about planning how to "make our mark". Get out the spray paints and skull-and-cross-bone stensils!