Spencer the cat

Spencer gave me a little bit of a scare. I've been so busy getting up and running this quarter (notably organic chem and biochem, but also nutrition and A&P, all in an abbreviated summer quarter), that I've kind of been letting anything that can run on autopilot do so.

Cats are good at taking care of themselves, as long as everything's going right, so outside of opening the window for him to look out of, Spencer and I hadn't had a lot of interaction this week. So when he was lying on the floor in front of me, looking emaciated, I had an awful jolt of concern that he was sick, augmented by guilt that I hadn't been paying him much attention this week.

My concerns were dispelled when I picked him up, however, and it turned out just to be a trick of the angle he was lying at. Carl Sagan famously declared "We are star stuff"; by all indications, Spencer, the little mesomorph, is neutron-star stuff.

Read more!

Folie à trois

To say the least, it's not often that I cry in school, but today was one time.

I've returned to school as a pre-nursing student, which means I'm working on pre-requisites, and will apply to nursing school when I'm done with them. One of the pre-requisites is certification as a nursing assistant (CNA or NA-C), one of my current classes along with chemistry and developmental psychology.

Today's class was the required Washington state training in HIV/AIDS, the 4-hour version of which I've actually taught in massage school. This was the 7-hour version that CNAs are required to take. One part of the class was watching the video And the Band Played On, based on the book by Randy Shilts.

By the end of the film, I was crying. I think people who didn't live through the 80s just don't remember all the things the film evoked, but some of my friends lived and died during that time, and I have some memory of it. While the film was far from perfect, it was certainly faithful, and it was two hours well-spent.

As the video ended, and the lights came back on, I remarked to another student at my table that it was funny to go from Ian McKellen as Bill Kraus in the morning to Dumbledore in Harry Potter this evening, and she agreed. Mr thalarctos also agreed when I made the same observation to him when we met up later this afternoon.

Except it simply isn't true! Ian McKellen was offered the role of Dumbledore, but turned it down as too similar to Gandalf; perhaps he was afraid of getting stereotyped. Yet all three of us remembered him as Dumbledore--too funny!

Read more!