Baseball Games and Southern Hospitality

Brown College

Part of my walk home from work!

Minute Maid Park

Augie Fam Cookout!

So, yikes... I think it's time for a new post! A lot has happened since I last wrote, but I'll try to highlight the good stuff...
For all of last week and most of this week, I spent time in my "healthcare" rotation at CLAMC. So that means that I worked with two of the vet techs, Carol and Jackie, to do basic care for all of the animals there (rabbits, mice/rats, dogs, monkeys). It always seemed to work out that I was with the rabbits a lot, so I learned how to handle them, give injections, and draw blood. Also, over the course of the past 2 weeks I've been taking a few Intro seminar things. Each one focuses on a different species and teaches how to handle them, any precautions you should take with them, and sometimes how to give injections, draw blood, etc. So, I learned how to do all of those things for mice/rats and rabbits. For monkeys (non-human primates), it was really just a warning against what not to do with them (like look them in the eye). Rhesus monkeys carry the Herpes B virus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herpes_B_Virus), which is almost always fatal to humans, so I learned why we have to wear so much personal protective equipment (PPE: gown, mask, gloves, shoe covers, head covering, face shield).
Also, starting this week, I've been working a little bit with my research lab. I met Dr. Meisch, who's in charge of the lab, as well as the people who help out (including Dr. Gomez, one of the CLAMC vets). I was given a workbook all about operant conditioning and a textbook about drug abuse that I'm supposed to read so that I understand what's going on with the research... Dr. Meisch studies cocaine addiction and how it works using Rhesus macaques, so it should be an interesting project.
I also see my mentor, Dr. Robinson, every once in a while. We go to a few lectures together each week, and I learned that I'm going to be doing 2 additional presentations other than the one I'm required to do for my internship. I'll be presenting a journal article of my choice to a Journal Club comprised of vets from all over TMC, and then I also get to present a case study to a similar group (both groups are probably comprised of the same vets... there aren't that many here!), so my subject will probably be Pink, a Rhesus macaque at CLAMC that they can't seem to figure out what's wrong with.
Aside from work stuff, we've been doing some pretty fun stuff on the weekends! We've made a few repeat visits to Rice Village, and then this past weekend was pretty busy when Bekah, one of the girls here with me from Augie, turned 21 and all 3 of her sisters came down for a visit. We went out to celebrate her birthday last Friday (after making her a birthday dinner and cake on Thursday). Then on Saturday we went to a Houston Astros game, which is in Minute Maid park, a stadium with a retractable roof... The stadium was covered, so it was really bizarre being at a baseball game and being able to feel the breeze of airconditioning too! On Sunday I spent more time out on our hammock (my new best friend), and then we had our weekly Augie family dinner (cookout!). After work this week has been pretty lazy, just cooking dinner and relaxing! Last night the pastor and a few others from a nearby church took us out to dinner for some delicious pizza and gelato, because they've known Augie student who came down here for past years and thought they'd show us some Southern hospitality!
That's about it for now!
A few random sidenotes:
Jason Mraz's newest album = amazing
People look at you funny when you bring rolling suitcases to the grocery store
Homemade guacamole is a great way to make friends in an elevator

jd

Monkey Hands and Hammock Reading

So, our first weekend in Houston is coming to a close, so it seemed about time to throw another post up here. I finished up my first week of work with a few exciting things and a few not-so-exciting things. The not-so-exciting things involved attending a few lectures that were, well, boring and (of course) I nodded off a few times...
But the more exciting news is that I observed some physical check-ups of Rhesus monkeys (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhesus_monkey). They were sedated because they bite and scratch and can carry diseases that humans are susceptible to. But they were given check-ups as well as a TB test, which is done exactly the same way as it's done with humans. I got to pet a few and hold the hands of one (just like people hands!), so that was probably the highlight of the day. Other than that, I pretty much just stood there and watched and asked lots of questions about these monkeys and I learned more about one of the vets I'll be working with, Dr. Jensen, who actually attended Iowa State University for vet school.
We had a pretty enjoyable weekend, if uneventful. We went out to dinner Friday night at the Flying Saucer in downtown Houston, and then successfully wandered around the city for about an hour. We attempted to see a movie, but the lines were too long.
On Saturday, we planned on going to the Houston Zoo, but long story short, it didn't happen. Instead, I spent a lot of the day outside reading in this hammock that we found over by Martel College (a dorm that's about 2 minutes away). Then we went out to dinner at Collina's, an Italian place, in Rice Village and then spent the rest of the evening chilling outside in the beautiful 70 degree night weather!
Today was a pretty lazy day, including some grocery shopping and grilling. We have a great group of Augie kids here, so it's been fun just hanging out with all of them! Well, tomorrow starts a new work week and I have to be there by 7:30am (yikes!), so I better head to bed!
Next time I'll try to get some pictures up... in the meantime, I hope to hear from all of you too!

jd

Acronyms and Italian Potatoes

After repeating stories many times over the past few days, it's clear that I need a better method of telling people about what I'm doing this summer. So, the clear solution in this technological world of ours? A blog.

I've been in Houston now for 4 days for TMC-SRIP (Texas Medical Center Summer Research Internship Program -- phew). We got here on Monday and moved into Brown College, a dorm at Rice University. We're all in regular dorm rooms, and my roommate happens to be from China! Her name is Sophia (okay, technically Sun Yue, but who goes by their real name these days? Certainly not me...) and she goes to college somewhere in Texas. She's really nice and we get along well so far (at least my strange sleeping habits haven't gotten to her yet!). Also, her mentor is Dr. Escalante, and I want to say she was Brigit and/or Nick B's mentor down here (...is that right?).

Since we moved in, we had dinner on Monday with Dr. Storl, our Augie professor, and her family at a seafood restaurant, with $25 meals on the Augie credit card! Then starting on Tuesday we had our orientation at MD Anderson Cancer Center (MDACC). We talked about some things and got our MDACC badges, then got a short "tour," meaning we walked on part of the sky bridge (which connects a lot of the buildings) and really only saw a small fraction of the place! The entire Texas Medical Center (TMC) Campus is ginormous, so it's been interesting navigating around it.

After orientation on Tuesday, we all went to meet our mentors. Dr. Storl dropped all of us off at our respective offices (with room numbers like Y7.6028 -- YIKES!), so I met my mentor, Dr. Mary Robinson, at the University of Texas (UT) Medical School Building (MSB), where she then took me to her office in the Center for Laboratory Animal Medicine and Care (CLAMC) at the UT Medical School Extension (MSE). From there, I met a few people in her department, namely Kelly Garner, who basically is in charge of all the administrative stuff at CLAMC (and she's awesome). She and another woman, Ms. Jimmie, took me to the registrar to get my UT badge so I can get into the building (FYI -- registrar offices are universally cranky, not just at Augie). That was pretty much the end of my day, so they dropped me back off at Brown.

From there, we went grocery shopping at the Fiesta. Unfortunately, we don't have any pots or pans or really anything at all to cook with, but yet somehow we unknowingly filled an entire cart full of food for only 5 girls. So, with our ingenuity, we made frozen pizzas on the rack of the oven, ripped up a head of lettuce with our hands for salad and made baked potatoes. However, with nothing to put on our potatoes, we invented a new form of potato: the Italian Potato! It's comprised of... baked potatoes and Italian dressing (surprisingly, not too bad!).

I've been going to bed early, meaning 11pm, which, if you know me, is early. Getting up at 7am is still not so pleasant, however. Other than that, I've been doing a lot of orientation type stuff. I've had to sit through quite a few speakers over lab safety and such, and next week I'll be taking a few classes on how to handle different types of animals (mice & rodents, rabbits, and non-human primates). I've wandered around TMC a bit after work every day to try to orient myself (which, trust me, is not easy), but I can get from one building to the next, for the most part -- or at least the ones that are relevant to me and my internship, haha. I'm getting around just fine on the MetroRail, too, although walking to and from work isn't so bad either (while the weather isn't too terribly hot for now).

Tonight we wandered down to Rice Village, which has lots of shopping and restaurants and things. We ended up finding a secondhand bookstore and spent almost 2 hours in it (!!) but they even had the dissection manual I'm going to need for class in the fall at about 80% off of what I would pay at the Augie bookstore! So although we only explored a small part of Rice Village, we'll definitely be heading back ASAP.

So that's about it... I'll close with some of the new acronyms I've learned this week:

TMC

MDACC

MSB

MSE

CLAMC

UT

BCM

CPB

...more to come, I'm sure!

jd