How Australians cheat at Pavlova

Last night we did something strange and scary.... We drove somewhere we'd never been before (40 miles away) to visit people (pathologists Beth & Barry) for dinner. Barry was able to demonstrate exactly how Australians cheat at pavlova:

And so the pavlova wars continue.

They are in a rural area, and have a much greater variety of birds than we've seen in town. The yellow birds are American Goldfinches, I think the rose-coloured one is a pine grosbeak, but I'm not sure.

Below is a picture of a screen door in front of a hummingbird.

Here's some cervical spine from a young horse with really severe wobbler disease. The head end is at the right, the green asterisk indicates the site of spinal cord compression. The vertebra to the left of the asterisk is malformed.

The Stepford House

Sometime, probably early July, we'll be leaving our little upstairs unit and moving into what we shall from now on refer to as the Stepford House.

This area will become the beer-garden:

The kitchen is extremely acceptable, and we'll finally have a pantry. All the kitchen whiteware (and the guest toilet) is black for some reason.

Our bedroom is huge, with double-doors, a ceiling fan, a full-sized en suite bathroom and a walk-in wardrobe. When people come to visit us, we'll actually have somewhere humane to put them!

Shoes!!!

Mort finally has some new shoes, thanks to a certain gift voucher.

In food-confusion: The major cheap brand of peanut butter around here is way too similar to a cleaning product.

Jif "crunchy" - no harsh scratching...

Mega (lazy) storage at the OSU library

I finally made a foray into the main campus library last week. Until now, all the books & journals I've needed have been in the collection held in Magruder Hall, the veterinary building. However, when you need a paper from a 1953 edition of the American Journal of Roentgenology (still not entirely sure how to say that), an expedition into "Compact Storage" is required.

Compact storage consists of numerous long, moveable bookcases - here are most of the pre-1990 journals beginning with "S". And yes, I did feel a little like a foreign spy taking photographs of journal storage at about 7.45am.




In order to have the massive strength required to move all those bookcases, librarians are fed a sole diet of....



















But weaklings like me use the magic buttons of access.



















Mort & I are house-sitting for Elena & Patrick, taking care of their mad cats and pretty garden. I think this is a type of clematis:

I was on necropsy duty last week, and saw a really striking bone tumor in a dog's skull. You can see it compressing the brain (arrowhead), although there was no history of neurological signs and the dog certainly didn't appear to have been chronically ill. Turns out it takes more than brain compression to stop a Labrador eating....

Storms and cells

We had a couple of decent storms last week, and I generally seemed to end up racing them home (on my bicycle)... On Thursday afternoon, the first thunder started just as I came up the drive - about 2 minutes later rain was pouring so hard it made a decent fountain of the neighbour's downpipe:

This next picture will probably be pretty dots and squiggles to most, but to me it's my "photo of the week", I took it with Kristin's microscope & camera. This is some awesome extramedullary haematopoiesis with a generous scattering of haemosiderophages in the lung of an alpaca. Essentially, you'd expect to find most of these cells in bone marrow, not lung, and all the brown globs are the result of certain cells breaking down red blood cells. Points for finding the immature eosinophils...... No points for megakaryocytes.

On & off the needles

Way back in Winter I knitted Mum some socks for her birthday, thought I'd show them off here... The yarn is Crystal Palace Panda silk (bamboo, merino, silk), and I'd love to make a top out of it. It's very pretty and feels gorgeous. The awesome and crazy part of this pattern (Bayerische socks) is that all the cables are knit with twisted stitches, so they're super crisp and pop up from the purl background.

Currently on the needles is part of a shirt I'm making with Misti Alpaca (lace weight/2-ply), and some insane socks of geekdom for Mort. Sorry, no prizes for identifying the motif....

In other news, it looks like we've found a new place to live, and should be moving in July. So I guess don't send us anything to our current address after mid-June.

Mort gets his hands dirty

Since the necropsy technician left on Friday, Mort is helping out with the standard "house-keeping" until new technician is hired, much to the appreciation of the rest of the diagnostic lab.

The dodgy (and blurry) pathologist in the background is Beth, who merrily spent the afternoon heckling.