Day 11 - Another picture of "you and your friends" - or not.

So for Day 11 I was supposed to do a post with another picture of my friends and I. But I already told you people, I don't have friends, the loosely defined "friends" I have I don't hang out with, and if I did I wouldn't have a picture of it. But if you do want a picture of what I spend the most time with it would be this: 

Rough skinned Newt, Taricha granulosa

Actually I spend most of my time with thousands of larvae, and most of the larvae have some sort of deformity. I study (okay, technically I'm a research assistant, but there isn't a ton of difference) these little creatures in the lab I work in.

Two headed newt larvae. So sad, yet so neat.

These newts contain high amounts of tetrodotoxin which is 10x more toxic than potassium cyanide, which makes them one of the most toxic creatures in North America. Yeah, somehow saying that makes my job sound so much cooler than it really is. If you scare them they like to show off their bright orange color. Aren't they so cute, in a deadly sort of way? 

Unken reflex = don't eat me!

15,840 minutes

The stack of posters that I spent the evening hanging up around campus for Disney. 

Hey look, and I'm breaking tradition by posting this much earlier than normal. Go me!

2,880 minutes

This is my office where every Monday night I get to sit and wait for some poor student to decide that they are desperate enough to come to me for help with Human Physiology. So far it has yet to happen. However I haven't given up hope yet, there is still the hardest exam, exam #3 - The nervous system, and finals coming up. Mainly I just sit here bored, trying to tell myself to do my own homework.

So my office. Yes, that is a really old oven built into the wall, I don't know why, it also has baking pans sitting inside it. Somebody decided though that we would appreciate a microwave better than an oven, which I really do, so it has a microwave as well. To top it off it also has a bottle of Windex (for making the old oven shiny?), and a fairly large set of biological and medical books that I'm pretty sure don't get read much. Here is a sample of the reading found in the office Internal Medicine, 4th edition (3,000 pages of itty-bitty font!), the 1996 edition of Medical Diagnostics and Treatments, Infectious Diseases also 4th edition, The Lippincott Manual of Nursing Practices, 2nd edition, and my favorite Sabiston's Essentials of Surgery. Yes, Sabiston's Essentials of Surgery really is just what you think, a book of surgeries complete with chapters entitled: Surgical Complications, Preoperative Preparation, Anesthesia, and Technique, Sutures and Drains. Yep, your average biology undergrad reading material. Oh, it also contains a copy of the textbook for just about every biology class on campus, just 2 editions too old. Lastly, there is a white board and a copy machine on the walls not shown. And of course, this ancient computer, which oh so stealthily has the password to it written on a blue post-it note in the corner. Unfortunately this computer is old enough that it doesn't have a slot for my memory card - though it does have a slot for a floppy disk, yeah those ancient dinosaur things that I'm pretty sure are extinct or should be - so you will have to wait for me to post this when I get home so I can upload the picture.