Fun with blood cells — Technology kicks ass!!

Thank you everyone for your lovely comments yesterday! I thank you for stopping by Lissa’s Ice Cream Shop; I couldn’t do this without you 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂

So we’re poring over the different types of blood cells in class last night (“Never Let Monkeys Eat Bananas”*) and as usual people start pulling out their cameras to snap pix of the model. I’d never bothered to do so before, seeing as how the book illustrations are pretty good, but made an exception in this case. After all, if that is the exact model that’s going to be in the lab practical, it helps to have a good photo!

And this is where Teh Awesome comes in.

Step 1: snap pic with iPhone
Step 2: use PhotoSync to transfer to iPad
Step 3: upload to Art Studio and label
Step 4: email to all of your grateful tablemates

Ta daaaaaaahhh!!

I love living in the future!!!!

*Mnemonic that lists the blood cells from most common to most rare

On Old Olympus’ Towering Top, A Finn And German Viewed Some Hops

In other words, it’s A&P II exam time. Yay!!

Do y’all use mnemonics to help you remember things? I always do. The groove at the back of your tongue that divides the oral and pharyngeal parts is the terminal sulcus, because everyone knows the bulimic are terminally sulky. (Wouldn’t you be?) Some Say Marry Money But My Brother Says Big Business Makes Money – that determines which of the cranial nerves are sensory, motor or both. (The title is a mnemonic for the names of the twelve cranial nerves.) How do you know which side of your forearm is the radius side? *make dramatic thumbs-up motion* Because it’s RAD, man!!! (That would be the thumbs side.)

Any other fun memory hints for me? Especially on the Central Nervous System and the Perioheral Nervous System?

Seen at the college bookstore

Do they look better if you boil them with bacon????

The party that wasn’t.

Spring semester ended a week ago (A’s in Anatomy&Physiology and Developmental psychology, a disappointing B in Diet and Nutrition) and I thought about having a little cookout to celebrate. I texted out to some of the people i’ve studied with, asking if there was enough interest to start baking. A few people said yes, among them the woman I’m friendliest with, so I set it at Saturday at noon. Nothing elaborate — just burgers, hot dogs and a few other munchies. As of the night before I had one woman who was hoping to come, another young woman who asked if she could come right at noon since she had a 4:30 commitment, and a third woman who said she was bringing four people.

Guess how many showed?

None.

The girl who asked to come at noon texted me at 11:30 full of apologies saying she was still running errands and couldn’t make it. The woman who was supposed to bring four said she was running late. Then, at two, she was waiting for someone to pick up her kid’s friend. Then, at four, she was waiting for her fiancé to change out of his work clothes and eat something. She finally cancelled around 4:30.

Seriously? A bit of WTF, no?

We had a good afternoon anyway — I’d gotten all my housework done early so I spent the afternoon reading and floating in the pool, and Mike’s burgers were delicious — but I was definitely disappointed, a bit hurt, and kind of confused. I mean, I know I’m all old fashioned and conservative, but I kind of thought that when you tell people you’re going to show up — especially when they ask you for a headcount for food and you tell them multiple people are coming — then you, you know, come.

Maybe it’s just me??

A political dig? Or am I being oversensitive?

I’ve mentioned before how much my Psych text irritates me. The discussions of Erikson, Piaget, Vigotsky etc. Are interesting, but it never misses a chance to show that the United States is really, really bad — worse than Romania and Japan and just about everywhere else — when it cones to life expectancy. Or ageist stereotypes. Or glass ceilings. It irks the hell out of me.

So, when I ran across this chart, I assumed it was another slap at my political viewpoint:

(sorry for the size, but it’s not readable otherwise)

I read it and thought, Yup, those stick-in-the-mud conservatives! They’re all scared of change and new experience and would never go traveling, or pet a turtle, or try riding a horse, or shooting a machine gun, or climb a mountain. Nope! Only liberals are cool and open!!

But maybe I’m jumping to conclusions. After all, a lot of folks who think like me don’t label themselves conservatives. Maybe they didn’t mean the political labels but were speaking generally of temperament and the attitude toward life.

What do you think?

She owns a shotgun named Luciver. I think I’m gonna like this girl.

We had a “Study Group” last night for our A&P Final (digestive system and reproductive system, yippee). I use quotes because it ended up being about an hour of studying followed by dinner, dessert and lots and lots of conversation 🙂 Of the three women I had over last night, two of them are very interested in learning to shoot.

The woman I mentioned in the post title — let’s call her Lacey — owns a shotgun for home defense. She practices with it when her father comes to town but is still a little nervous about it. Apparently she tried shooting his pistol once, but it was a .45 (I think) and kicked a lot and kind of frightened her. Also, she swears she was so bad at handling it that she’s much more accurate with her shotgun than a pistol!

So. We’re going to the range next Wednesday night! I’m going to have her double up on ear protection and play with Siguito the Mosquito and Siguette. If I can’t get her to be more accurate with a .22 than a shotgun, I’ll eat my hat.

Oh. And have I mentioned this woman looks like Barbie? Highlighted hair, blue eyes, and she works in a plastic surgery clinic; I’m fairly sure they play with Botox and other stuff when they’re bored.

I’ve said it before — Centerfire is a language that crosses all boundaries.

More grumbling about my psych professor

Look.  I know it’s a community college.  I know she’s not getting paid as much as she wants.  I know that she has a daughter and probably lives a busy life.  I actually think she’s a nice person.  So, there’s that.

On the other hand — THE PROFESSOR PART OF MY PROFESSOR IS DRIVING ME UP THE EVER-LOVIN’ WALL.

We had a current events assignment (due today).  I’m irritated at the assignment because we have to do twenty articles and I know DAMN well she’s not going to read more than three of them.  We have to do twenty so that it’s a “term-end” kind of assignment, and then she’ll grab a few at random and grade the project accordingly.  I hope she picks some good ones.  Whatever.

Here’s the irksome part — we have to submit it to turnitin.com before hard copy submission in class.

No, I don’t care about my work being checked for plagiarism; I’ve never plagiarized anything in my life, so I could care less about proving it.

What drove me batsh*t InSaNe was . . . I needed the class ID to create an account.

Now, you might think that since the turnitin.com requirement was written on the syllabus, she might have included the ID information there.

No.

You might think it would be on the current events assignment sheet.

No.

You might think she would send an email to the class with the ID information.

Oh, no!

Instead, she mentioned it *once* on March second.  I had to comb through pages and pages of handouts and notes and scribbles to find that I’d jotted it down at the end of one class when someone asked.

HATE-RAGE HATE-RAGE HATE-RAGE.

I hope she got about fifty emails between last night and this morning asking for the ID.  It would serve her right.

grrrrr . . . .  . .

Grumble, grumble, mumble and snarl.

Student study, teacher quarrel.

Yeah, yeah, it’s no MacBeth … But aren’t you impressed I found ANYTHING to rhyme with snarl? 🙂

Anyway, the prof moved up the test to this week, rather than next week. Which conflicts with a work seminar that I can’t skip. Which means I’m going to start the test about an hour late and I’m going to miss the 30/40 minutes of Open Book testing. (In the first two tests I didn’t need more than that period to finish the test.) So now I’m cramming and memorizing. Grrrrrr …

(Oh, and when they talked about the fears and anxieties of middle childhood, they had a special box on counseling children during upheaval, war, terrorism etc. Guess what photo they used?)

And this is why people think Psychology is full of crap.

[Disclaimer — I’m not saying that Psych *IS* a bulls*** science.  I know a certain person in Wisconsin who a) is smarter than me; b) writes papers and studies on Autism in which I rarely understand more than “the” and “and.”]

Last night brought the transcendent joy of the second Developmental Psychology class discussion.  I really want to do well in all my classes, so I’m doing the readings and taking good class notes and trying to find interest in the material.  Unfortunately, I keep getting sidetracked.  Why?

Because the book and my prof insist on teaching us how bad the United States is.

Chapters 2 and 3 were supposed to be on “biological and environmental foundations” and prenatal development.  Why, then, did we delve into the following highly educational tidbits?

• It’s shameful how the elderly are treated in America.  In Japan, there’s a culture of reverence for the elderly.  It’s a disgrace that we don’t share it.
• Also, China has playgrounds and parks specifically for the elderly.  We, on the other hand, have ten times their income but we won’t spend it on the elderly because we think they don’t matter. How sad!
• Furthermore, Americans have these horrible stereotypes about the elderly, e.g. that they can’t drive.  The Prof doesn’t know how we formed such ageist, hurtful stereotypes, but lots of elderly people remain active their whole lives and such derogatory stereotypes just hurt them terribly.
  [I’m biting my tongue hard enough to bleed at this point.  It keeps me from raising my hand and asking, “Are you frickin’ SERIOUS? Those stereotypes exist because THE ELDERLY CAN’T DRIVE.  We’ve seen our grandparents lose their verbal acuity and their motor reflexes; it happens to some earlier and some later, but it happens to all of us eventually (if we live long enough).  That’s a fact. So now actual facts that most people have observed personally equals an AGEIST STEREOTYPE. Good grief.”]
• Prenatal care is very important for the mother and for the fetus.  And yet somehow people are arguing against national health care.
  [Yes.  Yes they are.]

And my personal favorite?  This:

Because (the professor kindly explained) it’s important to know how big a problem it is in America, that so many of our elderly live in poverty, and that so many countries care for their aged population better than we do.

Now, y’all know I’m no statistician myself, but . . . . seriously? Because fewer Romanian elders live below the Romanian poverty line than in the United States, this is a terrible country?

That’s right, folks — it’s better to be elderly in Russia, Estonia and Slovenia than here.  Also, the Czech Republic takes better care of its elderly than does Austrailia, the UK or Switzerland.

And this nugget of wisdom is important enough to appear in CHAPTER TWO of our textbook.

*cue sound of Lissa’s head exploding*

Now, I’m not saying that a chart like that has no use.  I think a discussion of how the elderly are perceived in each country dependent on economic status relative to the national average — and the resulting social stature — could be very interesting.  Unfortunately, that’s not what the book was trying to teach me.

This may be a long semester.

P.S. Also?  Sorry, book, but when you blithely state that one-sixth of all couples who try to conceive discover that they are infertile and list absolutely no backup for that rather astonishing number, I will probably assume that you are talking out of the southernmost aperture of the gastrointestinal tract.

Thank you Calvin’s Mom

This post is devoted to the author of The Transmogrifier Files.  Thank you!

Without you, I’d have been grossly offended during my first classes yesterday and last night. I would have thought a question like this one —

Q. What is the best way to contact the professor?

A. Email

B. Email

C. Email

D. Email

E. All of the above

—  was insulting my ability to read.  I would have thought repeated, emphasized disclosure on how there are no make-ups on the weekly quizzes was insinuating that I was too stupid to understand it the first two times.

But thanks to the glory of the Transmogrifier Files, I realize that this crap isn’t aimed at me.  I show up on time, don’t miss class, complete assignments before the deadline and never cheat, so 90% of the warning disclosure is aimed at other people.

Like, say, the girl who has a drunken threesome and then skips class as a result.

Thank you, Calvin’s Mom.  The window into your life as a professor has kept this student on an even keel.