Road Trip to Bozeman and Josh's Wedding

Here's my "little" brother, Josh, and his lovely bride, Autumn. Their wedding was held at her folks' place outside of Lavina. It was sweet, and such a pretty setting!

Taunted by Esme and Dot

Chi Pogo in Bozeman at Mary and Stacey's

And here's the butcher butcher at work on

a small halibut.

This picture sums up the week!

It's one week of men's health!

Suburban Mutt

Chi has taken to doing plyometrics to keep fit in the suburbs.

Recovery is the most important part of any workout.

The dermatology, eye, ear, nose, and throat module or what I will be studying for the next week

We are now fully into our clinical medicine modules, which essentially means less sleep. We were advised to enjoy the summer and warned that the fall semester will be more demanding. If you read the title of this post and say to yourself "boy, that looks like a lot info", believe me, it is. The nice thing about the module system is that everything we are learning pertains to the subject of the week (or 2 weeks). No more primers...it's all meat from here on out. We are also learning clinical exam skills and will have a skills assessment the afternoon before our written assessment. Yesterday we learned the eye exam and I got to take out my opthalmoscope for the first time. We practiced on each other all afternoon and I was seeing spots for quite some time. This was the standard classmate greeting: "hey, you've got large pupils...can I look in your eye?"

After I got home Kadie graciously allowed me to shine an amazingly bright light into both her eyes multiple times. Then it was on to The Chi.

This is much harder than it looks.

Recuperation after multiple eye exams...

Friday afternoon I will be learning how to do the clinical skin exam. More fun for my 2 patients over the weekend!

More zoo pictures

Oregon Zoo Polar Bear

Wild-life Live!

On Friday, I got to help out the folks who do the live-flight show at the zoo: Wild-life Live.

I was given a crash-course in their show, including a few cues to remember while scurrying around baiting perches...

As the show started, I released Pierre, the hooded vulture, from behind the audience. Next, I ran over to a perch in the midst of the lunching crowd and waited for the Red-tailed Hawk to fly out from onstage. When it was released, I waved it over and placed a juicy morsel (severed mouse head) on its stoop before quickly squatting down to avoid startling the bird.

Following that, I ran over to "pre-bait" another perch with something resembling severed mouse front-quarter before running toward the rear of the crowd to wait for the Golden Eagle. On cue, it flew first to the stoop I'd baited, then looked around. I waved to it, placed another tasty mouse tidbit on the perch beside me and watched as the eagle glided magnificently toward me.

After it made its way back to the stage, I scurried over to yet another perch, smack dab in the middle of a crowd of people with their picnic lunches spread out in defiance of the pre-show warnings ("please put all food away for the duration of the show, because some of our scavengers have discovered that human food is TASTY...") Clyde, the Turkey Vulture, was next up. I was forewarned to don the falconer's gauntlet in preparation for Clyde, because apparently she will sometimes go for people in a not-so-nice manner and in the event something of that nature were to happen, I was to put my body between said vulture and the paying show-goers... So. I readied myself.

In the lead-up to Clyde's release there was a schpeel about owls and a short demo onstage with another bird. This gave me time to second-guess myself and I noticed the stoop was labeled #4. I knew my card said go to stoop #3 at this time, so I made my way quickly over to the next stoop (excuse me, pardon me, pardon me, excuse me...) only to get there as Clyde was released -- but Clyde flew over to the stoop I'd gone to first! Swearing internally, I ran back over to the original (mislabeled) stoop, where Clyde was waiting, and I offered up the chunk of fish she was used to getting at this point. (I was later told that I'd been "very brave" to offer that up bare-handed to Clyde) Ahhh....anyway, we kept the show on track.

When Clyde had flown back to the stage, I ran to the remote release site for the Bald Eagle (way back up behind the elephant pavilion). The stage folks radioed me and I pushed the button to release the bird. The case opened and a gorgeous Bald Eagle shook its wings, peered down toward stage, and lifted off. It was AWESOME.

Following the show, I watched as Pierre took people's money and put it in the donation box.