Spring break: how quickly the time flies

Sadly, there's no denying it: spring break is almost over.

It seems like just yesterday I was so excited to be posting about an upcoming respite from my academic responsibilities.

The last week of classes before break went well. As I could have predicted, I wasn't especially productive, anticipating that I would have plenty of time during break to catch up on studying, take my two finals, work on my shelter med project, etc.

Dad came for a visit last Friday and stayed through Wednesday. We had a really good time - fortunately CLH basically had this week off from work, too, so we did fun things like going to see "She's Out of My League" (a perfect me+Dad movie), going out to eat a couple times, wandering around Old Town, checking out the outlet malls in Loveland, and hiking in Lory State Park.

We also did some more ordinary/less-fun things like finish filing taxes, fill out two FAFSAs, go to church, and have an organ recital with CLH in Fort Morgan.

After Dad left on Wednesday, though, I was solidly hit by the undeniable fact that I was 5 days into spring break and I had done zero studying/schoolwork so far.

Oops.

So after we went to the Body Worlds exhibit at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, it was time to get to work.

I struggled on Wednesday and Thursday to get through some surgery notes, but my main focus was on Clinical Sciences: namely, equine and food animal tetany, flaccidity, weight loss, diarrhea, parasites, GI disease, and colic. Yuck.

This morning, I finally had what turned out to be a clever epiphany: "studying" at home, with the laptop and the radio and Hulu and cats and food and 5000 other distractions wasn't working so well. So I loaded up my study materials and headed over to the Windsor library.

And two and a half hours later, I had studied most of my ClinSci material nonstop, while maintaining focus! Whoa! Who knew that could happen??

I'm giving a tour of the VTH this afternoon, and my ClinSci exam has to be taken on campus, so it worked conveniently for me to have a quick lunch and then head over to the university to finish studying and take that darned test. (Which I did, and got 58.3 out of 60, and now I feel like I have actually done something productive on spring break.)

Unfortunately, I also just remembered today that I have a big BoD exam opening up online next week (Tues thru Thurs), and I have been totally ignoring all of the material in BoD for the last 4 weeks thinking that I would just spend a lot of time learning it over spring break. That was, until I forgot about it until now. Whoops.

On the plus side, I picked out a topic for my shelter medicine project (feline leukemia virus) and have a good idea of where to get references and the info I need to complete it. I don't think it'll be as bad/time-consuming as I thought, and it's not due till the end of next month anyway.

Plans for the rest of spring break: Tour this afternoon, then home for dinner/games with CLH and a friend. Sleep in a moderate amount (9 am?) tomorrow, then be productive: study more surgery notes (final exam due on Wednesday), get a good start on readings in the BoD textbook, and get my notes and backpack organized to get back to school on Monday (plus laundry, groceries, etc.). Sunday: continue whatever is leftover from Saturday.