Good-bye, productive life

I signed up for Facebook last night.

I fear I will never do anything productive again.

Ever.

Hollywood Vets

This afternoon I went to a presentation at the VTH sponsored by one of the AVMA insurance groups.

The topic was "Hollywood Vets" and the speaker was a vet, who along with his wife (another vet), has spent several decades working with a huge variety of exotic and zoo animals, many of which "act" in movies and TV shows.

Best Part #1: Free dinner. (Qdoba taco bar, served at 4:15 pm, which I think is an absolutely perfect time to have dinner. Vet school makes me hungry.)

Best Part #2: Hilarious stories. The three most memorable anecdotes were: (a) administering an enema to an elephant, complete with an uber-digusting ending, of course; (b) an enormous, ferocious bear named "Killer" with a tire stuck around his torso; and (c) how this doctor because known as "The Leopard Surgeon."

It seems we are finally having an increase in the number of free meals offered to us poor, hungry vet students.

(I swear, by the 6th week of last fall semester, we had had a half-dozen free lunches by now. We just had our second of this semester today.)

The good news is, free lunch on Thursday (a lunch lecture by Intervet/Schering-Plough about their new canine influenza vaccine), free lunch next Tuesday (Royal Canin), and free lunch next Wednesday (Iams) - which everybody gets to attend except for us poor schmucks who will be sitting in Management over the lunch hour.

Hooray for Hollywood Vets and hooray for Free Food!

Flu-free so far (knock on wood)

My sick friend returned to school yesterday. She looked utterly miserable although she swore she had not been febrile since Saturday. And we all prayed she was no longer contagious.

I am sporting a freshly sore triceps muscle after yesterday's seasonal flu shot. Yes, almost all the current flu cases are H1N1, and no, yesterday's vaccine doesn't protect against that at all, but surely it must give me some sort of psychological protection? Besides, if I've not gotten the flu yet after sitting near a diseased classmate for days, I must already have some antibodies floating around.

I am a bit suspicious that I've been fighting off something subclinical. On Sunday night, I fell asleep on the couch at 7:30 pm while we were watching TV. CLH woke me up about 8:30 and sent me to bed, where I slept solidly till 6:30 am. I slept another 9 hours last night and even slept through both of my alarms this morning. I definitely chugged down some Airborne OJ this morning.

Big exams coming up in the next 7 days (our first Preventive Medicine exam, first Bioanalytical Path exam, first Tox exam, and third BoD exam). Not a good time to be ill!

Another good way to kill time

http://jacksonpollock.org/

I hate the autonomic nervous system

If anybody out there has a handy way of remembering the differences between adrenergic, cholinergic, M, B1, B2, A1, and A2 receptors, send tips my way because I'm dying in pharmacology! (But at least 90% of the class is right there with me.)

An electric surprise

I definitely like getting the email notification that we have a new online electric bill, and signing on to look at the bill before paying it, and discovering that this month we owe negative $118 due to the refund of the $200 or so in deposits that get returned to you after one year of service and paying your bill on time, which I totally forgot about. Hooray for "free" money! (And they even paid us interest(!) on the deposits.)

Don't abandon me now, immune system

Today, the chair two seats down from me, usually occupied by one of my friends, was empty.

She was allegedly home sick with a sudden onset of flu-like symptoms.

Hence tonight's bedtime beverage of Airborne-laced OJ, and plans for extra sleep tonight.

In related news, the university has implemented an online reporting system for people staying home with flu-like illness. So basically you can sit in the comfort of your living room and go on the school's website and call in sick. No need to go to the doctor or get proof of your illness or anything silly like that.

No, I see absolutely no potential for that system to be abused...

No case for me?

Tonight I attended the first Pet Hospice meeting of the school year.

Pet Hospice is a cool organization that is totally run by vet students and advised by a couple of VTH clinicians and a person from the teaching hospital's communications institute.

You can join as a freshman, and go through 4 or 5 monthly training sessions during the fall, before you can be an official volunteer starting in January.

Veterinarians within a 30 minute radius of the VTH refer clients to Pet Hospice. The client's pet must be a dog or a cat that has been diagnosed with a terminal disease and is not expected to live longer than 3 months.

Pet Hospice sends out a team of two vet students to help the client with whatever they need - nursing care like medication, giving fluids, changing bandages; emotional support like talking to the owners and their kids; pain assessments; quality-of-life assessments; etc. It's really a cool organization.

I and many of my classmates went through all the training last fall and because active volunteers last January.

Since then, as far as I can tell, every other student in my class except one other girl has been on at least 1 case, and some of the sophomores have already been on 2 or 3 cases.

I have been on none! What's wrong with me?? (Ok, I was gone all summer, but so were some of the other sophs.)

So it probably seems weird to you that I would want to be assigned to go work with a grieving family and a dying animal, but we vet students are a bit weird so you don't have to get it. :-)

I'm thinking that I am going to get called for the next case... cross your fingers!

Saturdays aren't for sleeping in, anyway

I hope I've enjoyed my last few lazy Saturdays when I got to sleep in pretty much as late as I wanted. (Ok, last Saturday I woke up at the reasonable hour of 9:30 am, but I did stay in bed reading until 11...)

Starting this Saturday, I have Things To Do on the weekend (all in the mornings!):

9/26: Trip to the Denver Zoo with the vet school Behavior Club. A behind-the-scenes tour and talk about some neat things about how they socialize and train the animals for handling, medical procedures, etc.

10/3: Volunteering for the 5K hosted by the One Health Club (which advocates health for humans, animals, and the environment). The issue for the day is going to be human and canine obesity, with blood pressure checks and BMI calculations for humans, and vet students (including me) performing brief physicals and body condition scores on the doggies.

10/10: This is going to be the killer early morning. I will be helping out with our new church's Blessing of the Animals / Festival of the Animals event. CLH will be proctoring the SAT at his school which means he needs to be there at 7:15 am. (And yes, it's down in Denver.)

I suppose I won't be sleeping in on Sunday instead of Saturdays, since we have to leave for church between 7:15 and 7:30 every Sunday morning....

Ah, well, this is why I picked the 10:40 lab instead of the 8:00 am lab on Friday mornings!

Come on, it's funny!

The other day at handbell rehearsal, the group's webmaster asked the newest member to email her a biography to put on the website.

The new member asked what the bio should include.

The webmaster suggested, "Oh, you know, a little background on you, where you're from, what you do in real life, how long you've been playing bells, whatever embellishments you want to add."

I started laughing and nobody else thought it was funny.

Come on, guys. Bell rehearsal? Embellishments?? Nobody?

(Almost) the end of another week

It's Thursday (nearly Friday) again, and again I am thrilled that the weekend is approaching.

This semester seems to be another one of those time paradoxes, where you find yourself simultaneously thinking, Wow, I can't believe we've been in class for 5 weeks already, and Good Lord, has it only been 5 weeks??!

Basically, the continuation of the semester has turned out to be pretty much like my initial impression. When people ask me how classes are going, I am hard-pressed to find a descriptor other than "boring."

Have things been going well? Yes. Is some of the material interesting? Yes. Am I learning things that I probably need to know for the future? Yes.

Am I finding myself in a daily struggle to stay awake and focused throughout the 80% of my classes that are dull? Yes.

One thing I know for sure is that whoever is in charge of planning the class schedule needs to seriously consider rearranging things. Why would you think that having Pharmacology (possibly the most boring class in the vet school curriculum) right after lunch 4 days a week would be a good idea? It's to the point now where the entire sophomore class pretty much has an unspoken agreement with each other that nobody asks the professor any questions about the material so he will zoom through it and we can finish early.

So clearly Pharmacology isn't my favorite course. Here are the others:

• Bioanalytical Pathology (a.k.a. Clinical Pathology at any normal vet school): I like it. It's gotten a little repetitive, since they are trying to drill some important information into us by doing case studies with hematology data over and over and over again. But overall it's pretty interesting, and every lecture and lab is directly applicable to something I'll be doing every day as a clinician.
• Biology of Disease (a.k.a. Pathology of Organ Systems at any normal vet school): The material is not always fascinating, but I really like the professor. She is funny and has realistic expectations for what kind of information we should be learning and retaining at this point in our veterinary careers.
• Toxicology: Has gotten better this week when we've gotten a new lecturer. However, although this lecturer is a step up from the last one, nobody knows quite what the main points are that he expects us to get out of his lectures.
• Ethics: Dramatically improved this week, again due to a different person leading the class discussion. People felt like they could actually speak up and participate without being told that their opinion didn't count because the instructor didn't share it. But I think every other class this semester is by the original lecturer... sigh.
• Preventive Medicine: Mixed feelings on this. We are nearly finished with an interminable statistics unit. (And actually, if I recall correctly, an undergrad statistics class was a prerequisite for applying to vet school.... do we really need to be learning mean, median and mode again? I think I remember that from like 3rd grade.) I've found that when I really try to pay attention during this class, the class is more interesting; however, the class also then seems to take about 3 times as long as if I'm doodling or doing the crossword or otherwise occupied.
• Management: Ah, I laugh at the irony. Our professor lectures us on good management techniques, yet there has not been a single class so far where he has showed up on time, much less had the PowerPoint slides up and ready to go by the time the clock hits noon. He makes promises nearly daily about when he will post slides for us to print, or exam grades to look at, and he has not yet lived up to one of those promises. We have just started a chapter on communication, and I have already noticed that he is communicating many things loud and clear about how much he values our time and our dedication to the class.

So, in sum, some good classes, some bad. I do know that there are only 51 days of class left this semester! I really cannot wait for next semester's awesome-sounding courses.

How to know you picked a good husband

A good way to know you married the right man:

You are downstairs in the kitchen making dinner. He has just finished exercising on the treadmill upstairs and comes down to get some water. When he sees you walking around barefoot through the 1/2 to 2/3 sack of flour you spilled all over the counters, cupboards, and floor, he laughs instead of getting mad and then cleans it up for you before heading back upstairs to take his shower.

(Really, it was pretty hilarious. I didn't know flour could stick to the wall.)

Welcome to autumn

Between yesterday (the last day of summer) and today (the first day of autumn), the weather has cooperated quite nicely by dropping 40 degrees and adding plenty of rain and wind. Welcome to awesome cold weather!

A cheerful reading assignment

I find myself mildly depressed tonight after slogging through my 30-page Ethics reading assignment, the "AVMA Guidelines on Euthanasia."

Next week's topic for Ethics class is euthanasia, so I wasn't anticipating a bunch of happy-happy-joy-joy readings, but I also didn't enjoy reading detailed descriptions, advantages, and disadvantages of a variety of euthanasia methods including:

• Inhalant anesthetics
• Carbon dioxide
• Nitrogen and argon
• Carbon monoxide
• Barbituric acid derivatives
• Pentobarbital combinations
• Chloral hydrate
• T-61
• Tricaine methane sulfonate
• Potassium chloride
• Penetrating captive bolt
• Blow to the head
• Gunshot
• Cervical dislocation
• Decapitation
• Electrocution
• Microwave irradiation
• Thoracic/cardiopulmonary/cardiac compression
• Kill trips
• Maceration
• Stunning
• Pithing
• Exsanguination

Where's the part of vet school where you get to pet kittens and get sweet puppy kisses all day long??

Glutton for punishment?

The other day, while contemplating this semester's extreme boringness, I decided to cheer myself up by looking at the curriculum schedule to see what new and exciting classes I can look forward to for next spring.

The required classes are:
-- Principles of Imaging Interpretation I (2 credits)
-- Principles of Surgery (2 credits)
-- Principles of Anesthesia (3 credits)
-- Biology of Disease III (3 credits)
-- Theriogenology (3 credits)
-- Clinical Sciences I (5 credits)
-- Clinical Sciences II (4 credits)

That's a total of 22 required credits, which is really pretty average for a vet student's courseload. Full-time undergrad status requires a minimum of 12 credits. At ASU, you had to do a special petition to take more than 18 credits as an undergrad.

First year fall semester was 21 required credits, and I took the elective accounting class for a total of 24 credits.

First year spring semester was 20 required credits, and I took the elective finance class for a total of 23 credits.

This semester is 22 required credits, and I'm taking the elective management class for a total of 25 credits.

So 22 required credits for next spring seems pretty typical.

But am I crazy in that I am considering taking not one but THREE electives in the spring?

I need to take the next elective in the business certificate program (which is "Legal and Ethical Issues in Business," a 3 credit course).

I also really want to take the shelter medicine elective (1 credit), and I'd like to take one section of problem-based learning (also 1 credit). Each of the 1 credit classes only meets 1 hour every week so those shouldn't be that bad. But the business class will be Mon/Wed/Fri during the lunch hour and problem-based learning would be either Tues or Thurs during the lunch hour so I'd only have 1 lunch a week, and otherwise have class straight from 8-3 four days a week.

Plus I'd be taking 27 credits, which seems a little excessive. But I think I'm going to go for it. If not now, then when??

Dream interpretation needed

If dreams are supposed to have hidden meanings, what do you think is the subliminal message in the dream I woke up from this morning? I was trying to listen to music on cassette tapes and I kept getting madder and madder because I couldn't find any music on the tapes because they were all full of somebody reading Russians novels (in Russian).

Thoughts???

It's good to be a sophomore

...because that means that I am not currently freaked out about tomorrow first freshman anatomy exam!

The poor little freshmen... they have been conspicuously absent from club meetings and student events this week, due to an onslaught of terrifying exams and the requisite panicked studying that must occur in the preceding days.

I remember the feeling of approaching your first exam, ever, in vet school, and being totally sure you were going to fail. To put it in perspective, I would rather take 5 capstone exams than be back in the current shoes of the freshmen and not know what I'm up against.

All of us sophomores know that the freshmen will be totally fine. They will almost all do really well on the exam. They will come out of it saying, "That wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be" and "Wow, they really did ask fair questions like they said they would." We can tell the freshmen these things, but they won't believe us till they see it for themselves.

It's tradition for the sophomore class to prepare a surprise for the freshmen on the day of their first anatomy exam. In recent years this has tended to include some sort of homemade silly video played immediately before the exam and intended to loosen up the poor stressed out freshmen.

I remember being SO nervous last year, certain it was only a matter of minutes before I found out that I really wasn't cut out for vet school.

They had us come about a half hour early for "pre-exam preparation." Once we had all sat down, the entire sophomore class filed into the room, clapping and cheering for us. It was such a cool thing to do that I actually teared up a little and felt like I finally knew what college is supposed to be like.

Then the sophomores played a funny video they had made, with parodies of various aspects of freshman life, anatomy class, etc. In retrospect, I don't remember many details and I'm guessing it wasn't actually all that hilarious, but we were all so tense that just about anything would have made us laugh.

This year, we're going to do the same thing for this year's freshmen - cheering and a video. Even as I write this, they are undoubtedly spending a few more frantic hours cramming for tomorrow's big exam. Some of them are probably sure they'll fail, certain that tomorrow will be the first step on their path toward getting out of vet school.

But they'll be fine!

It's great to have a year's worth of perspective to look back and see that things really weren't that bad. One of the coolest things you learn as a freshman is that all of the faculty here just want you to succeed. Vet school is pretty awesome.

Got SLUDGE? I hope not!

Yesterday in toxicology we learned a fun acronym: SLUDGE. You use SLUDGE to help you remember the clinical signs you'll see during Phase 1 poisoning with certain toxicants.

SLUDGE:
Salivation
Lacrimation (tear production)
Urination
Diaphoresis (excessive sweating)
Gastrointestinal effects (e.g. diarrhea)
Emesis (vomiting)

Sounds fun, yes? Well, now if you find yourself feeling SLUDGEy, you'll at least know what might be the matter!

Pharmacology is supposed to be hard

(Give me a couple more weeks and I'm sure I'll regret those words, but....)

Today's first pharmacology exam was a total breeze. I'm pretty sure I got 100%, or close to it.

It was one of those exams where you're studying beforehand, and you keep thinking to yourself, This seems so easy. It's self-explanatory, it's common sense. How could they make a difficult exam out of this?

But it's vet school, so you tell yourself that of course they could find a way to make things complicated and come up with applications and complex scenarios that you never thought of.

So even though you're 95% sure it will be an easy test, you worry anyway.

Then you sit down at the start of the exam, and the questions are a piece of cake - just as you expected.

You finish the whole test in 20 minutes and head out of the classroom. In the back of your mind is a little voice that says, No way was it actually that easy. If you thought it was easy, you really missed something!

But you're still sure it was a simple test.

So you commiserate with your classmates and put it out of your mind. And spend the remaining 40 minutes of the 1-hour exam period playing Bubble Spinner. :-)

Quote of the Day

Toxicology professor: "These guys have basically Swiss cheese for brains. That's never a good thing."

Learning about myself

Yesterday in my Fundamentals of Management class, we were talking about some cultural differences related to business and management, like a tendency toward individualism vs collectivism, etc.

Another difference that was discussed was monochronicity vs polychronicity.

A monochronic culture is one that adheres very strictly to a schedule or time in general. Like in Germany, if you say you are having a meeting at 2 pm, you'd darn well better be ready to start at 1:59:45 and if you get there at 2:01, you're in big trouble.

A polychronic culture is one that is more relaxed and flexible about time. Like in Italy or Spain, you might schedule a meeting for "two-ish." If you can't be there at 2, that's ok, we understand, just get here when you can.

"Monochronic" and "polychronic" can also be used to describe people.

Want to guess which one I am?

On the plus side, "monochronic" sounds way better than "compulsive" or "anal".....

Labor Day: Awesome free day, or annoyance?

I've been having mixed feelings about Labor Day this week.

On the one hand, it was nice to have a 3-day weekend, especially since Saturday was mostly consumed with finishing the capstone exam (which, if you haven't heard, I TOTALLY ROCKED).

An extra day to sleep in (Monday) was nice, particularly after getting up at 6:30 on Sunday morning to drive to church in Broomfield.

I liked spending bonus time with CLH.

However, I have a theory about school/work weeks that are shorter than normal. The sequence goes like this:

1. I think to myself, "We only have 4 days of class this week! That's going to be so awesome! I bet it will fly by."
2. I go to class on Tuesday and enjoy myself, thinking how it is the first day of my school week and yet it is already Tuesday.
3. I go to class on Wednesday and am tired.
4. I go to class on Thursday and can't wait for the week to end.
5. I go to class on Friday and realize that this has felt like the longest week ever.
6. It occurs to me that 80% of a normal school week is not drastically less than 100% of a normal school week.
7. I feel cheated that my 80% week was actually 4 whole days long, when I had convinced myself it would be short.
8. I am really glad it is the weekend.
9. I feel a bit foolish knowing that the following 5-day week will seem normal or even a little short. I
10. I ponder human psychology briefly, then decide that playing computer games is a better way to invest my time.

My favorite kind of tour

Today I gave a tour of the VTH.

There are good tours and there are bad tours. There are days when I am enthusiastic and excited to talk about my school, and days when I am tired or cranky or nervous.

There are all kinds of people on tours. There are knowledgeable, sometimes semi-annoying undergrads who are applying to vet school or have already been accepted. There are middle school girls with their rabid moms who want to know exactly what Susie has to do so she can get into vet school when she applies in 9 years. There are quiet people; there are gregarious people. There are people who laugh at my jokes and people who look at me like I'm from Mars. There are people who ask intelligent questions and accept "I don't know" as an answer, and there are people who do nothing but ask me detailed questions about large animal medicine.

Today's tour was my favorite kind:

• A polite high school senior who actually looked me in the eye and asked a couple questions
• His cute, well-behaved little sister
• His intelligent, non-rabid parents, both with a sense of humor and no experience in vet med

I sort of like it when they don't know too much about vet med, or medicine and science in particular, because then I don't get really complicated questions and nobody calls me out if I make a minor mistake while explaining something. However, I have also had some not-so-brilliant people who were confused even by my most dumbed-down version of things. These folks were right in the middle, where I like them to be.

So today made up for my last 3 tours: (1) A group including an intelligent, aggressive, large animal-oriented student who would not stop harassing me about large animal details; (2) A group including [completely randomly] one of my veterinary bosses from Arizona; (3) A group of 10 or so freshman vet students and their relatives, who asked me some questions I couldn't answer but stupidly tried to, making myself look like a complete blithering idiot!

Moral of the story: Good tours are good. (Yes, I am pretty eloquent on Friday afternoons.)

I guess the police have more important things to think about...

...because it's been 12 days since my purse was stolen and today I got a letter in the mail from Federal Heights police department, with a packet of information encouraging me to do things like contact the bank, cancel my credit cards, etc.

Whoa, hello common sense!

(Seriously, I hope nobody really has to wait until the police tell them to do this stuff 2 weeks later. I also got a call from the officer who took the police report. He called last Friday [6 days after the purse was stolen] wanting to know my credit card numbers so he could put them in the system and see if anybody uses them. Well, I doubt they'll have much success, sir, since the cards have been cancelled for 6 days now!)

Oh, well, at least they're trying! I guess this just means the cops have bigger fish to fry and know better than to waste their time on something 99.98% unlikely to ever be resolved....

(In related news, new checks have arrived for both checking accounts; pin numbers have been created for both debit cards; the new credit card is functional; and I can now see my accounts online again. Good thing the Wells Fargo 1-800 number has good hold music, because I've been listening to it a lot!)

Capstone results (warning: you will find no trace of humility in the following post)

Today, they released the long-awaited results of the in-class/closed-book (a.k.a. hard/scary) part of the capstone exam.

The mean was 79.2%.

The high score was 95%.

I got 94%.

Yep, I pretty much rock.

New favorite way to kill time

http://www.20q.net/

Capstone continues (aka The Exam That Would Never End)

Though the scary in-class, closed-book portion of the Capstone exam is long past, I am still plodding away at the numerous online, open-book sections that are due by 5 pm on Labor Day.

I've thus far finished:
- the majority of the neurobiology cases
- the anatomy section
- the bacteriology section
- the combined bacteriology/virology/parasitology section

Still to do:
- the last bit of one neuro case
- the immunology section
- the nutrition section

On the plus side, all of my neuro cases that I've submitted have been graded, with nearly 100% correct answers and nice comments on my short-answer/essays such as: "Nicely answered", "Quite well answered!", "Yes!", "Well done", and my personal favorite, "Wow, just a wonderful answer."

I guess that's enough of a brief, self-esteem-boosting break. Back to work!

9 down, 64 to go

So we've had 9 days of class (and I'm being optimistic and including today, even though I'm still at home), and we have 64 days to go.

(Ok, it seems like a really bad sign that I'm already counting down at this point.)

Seriously, I had no idea this semester would be SO boring. Aside from my Bioanalytical Pathology course, everything is just sort of mind-numbing and self-explanatory. I'm really hoping that means that things will pick up as we get into more advanced material. But I'm not entirely expecting that to be the case.

Even my Management class has gotten boring. The once-interesting professor turns out to be pretty dull once he starts talking about actual class material. At least we finally received PowerPoint slides by email last night, after 5 classes with no notes and lots of empty promises about when we would be able to access the slides....

Maybe I'll feel better after the upcoming 3 day weekend!

Simon still loves to save lives!

Simon went in yesterday for his second blood donation. He had been scheduled to donate in early August, while we were still in Massachusetts, but his petsitter ended up being out of town so she cancelled.

We were going to just wait for his next scheduled appt, in mid-October, but the teaching hospital's blood bank has been in high demand recently so they emailed me on Wednesday and asked if I could bring Simon in on Thursday or Friday.

He was a trooper, again. Not thrilled about missing out on breakfast yesterday, and not thrilled to go in his carrier, but settled in once we got in the car and was very patient when we had to just sit around the VTH for an extra 20 minutes waiting for them to get my new ID badge to work.

I guess they ended up drawing his blood later in the morning than usual, so when I picked him up at 3, he was definitely a little loopy still from the ketamine. It was pretty funny - he was squinting in the bright light and had this face like a little old man.

Once we got in the car, though, he gave himself a nice bath and had a quick nap before we got home.

Johnny, of course, was once again quite intrigued by Simon's weird new smells from being at the hospital, and pestered him incessantly until Simon got mad. So, all is back to normal. :-)

Reassembling my identity

After my purse was stolen at Water World last Saturday, I have just about got myself back in order.

I now have a temporary replacement driver's license, new VTH ID badge, new CSU ID card, new debit cards, and new credit card. Still pending are: new checks, actual driver's license, and library card.

Shall we do a tacky imitation of the MasterCard commercials? Why, yes, we shall!

• Cost of replacing my driver's license = $21
• Cost of replacing my VTH ID badge = $10
• Cost of replacing my CSU ID card = $25
• Cost of the cash stolen from my purse = $15-25
• Cost of the fraudulent activity with my credit card, debit cards, and checks = $0
• Cost of cancelling my Visa card and getting a new one = $0
• Cost of closing both of our checking accounts and reopening new ones = $0
• Cost of cancelling my 2 debit cards and getting new ones = $0
• Cost of getting replacement checks for both of the new accounts = $0
• Value of almost being myself again in less than a week = priceless!

(Can you tell I am pleased with Wells Fargo this time? They have made up for the out-of-state condo purchase mayhem of last summer....)

Happy Birthday!

Dear Trevor and Taylor,

Happy 6th Birthday today! We are all so impressed that Dad has not killed you yet!

Sincerely,

Cousins Johnny and Simon