I Made It Through!

Early mornings waiting for our carpools

The Anatomy Monster

this is basically a Poland Spring bottle filled with vanilla extract...weird right!

Rainbow for the end of our 1st week!

TGIF!!! Seriously this has been one of the most difficult weeks of my entire life, but I made it through! As one of my professors put it today, I am now roughly (a little less actually) 1% done with my education here at Ross. I survived my first week of classes and I think this is going to work although it will definitely NOT be easy! Everyone in my class including myself is worried about anatomy as it seems to be ruling our lives to the point where my nutrition professor said the other day, "I'm here to remind all of you that there is more to vet school besides anatomy". Regardless I'm going to tell you all about anatomy anyway. Yesterday I received my cadaver dog bright and early at 8 AM and I must say no matter how well prepared I was for that moment it was still a little strange to see a room full of dead dogs ready to be cut into. That being said, after the first few minutes I was fine with the situation and proceeded professionally as we began the dissection. To save you all the gory details as I'm sure some of you reading don't ever want to think about the fact we dissect dead animals for educational purposes I won't tell you much more about the cadaver itself. Also, not sure if I mentioned this previously, but we were assigned a bone box, which you can see in the pictures accompanying this post I meant to take pictures of us studying the other day, but I was just too busy studying (so I guess that's a good thing). Anatomy is going to be the monster that gives me nightmares for awhile. It's just plain intimidating, but I'm sure I'll get used to it and hopefully learn to love it. Yesterday I didn't have histology because the class is split in half on lab days. I was scheduled to do my lab today and so was Ru so we get to be lab partners for that. Unfortunately we only had like 20 minutes to do the actual lab because the professors were lecturing for an hour and a half. This was very reminiscent of Microbiology lab with Davies if any of you reading this took that class. Anyway, Ru and I are going to go to the lab to finish it on Sunday and we'll probably go to visit our dogs in the anatomy lab as well. I got home today and just could not bring myself to study so I decided to bake some banana bread with the 5 bananas that were way overripe. Yesterday we went grocery shopping and I bought some vanilla extract and baking soda so I could bake something anyway. I mentioned I bought some vanilla and by some I mean like a 16 oz water bottle full of vanilla extract. You can see it in the picture above. It's made locally in St. Kitts and I noticed it tastes a little different, but it's good. Well baking was a little bit of an adventure because our oven went out again yesterday because the gas tank was turned off outside so I had to relight the pilot light by myself. I thought I was going to blow up, but everything worked out and I didn't burn myself. Then I realized that the only baking pans we have are a cookie sheet and a 10x15 (huge) glass casserole dish. So I doubled the recipe to fit into the casserole dish which was fine because I had so many bananas anyway. Then I realized that it was going to be more of a cake so I wanted to make frosting, but I didn't have any confectioner's sugar so I had to improvise. I found a recipe for frosting using regular sugar but it required heating it on the stovetop. Well the last time I heated up sugar I burnt myself pretty badly, just ask Corey or my old apartment-mates, but I decided to go ahead and try it anyway. It actually came out pretty good and if you are interested I will share that recipe with you:

Frosting in a Pinch:

1 cup sugar

4 Tbsp butter

4 Tbsp milk

1 tsp vanilla

Optional: dash of cinnamon *I added this because I like cinnamon in my banana bread

Stir all ingredients except vanilla in a small saucepan and slowly bring to a boil stirring slowly and frequently. Boil for 1 full minute and then take off of heat. Add vanilla and place entire saucepan in cold water (I just filled a bigger pot with cold water and placed it inside). Let sit for a few seconds and stir gently until thickens. Beat to slightly whip to consistency for spreading on cake. Be careful because mine thickened a little too much and I had to run the saucepan under warm water to melt a little.