A day in a hippo (graphic)

Finally, here are some pictures from the legendary hippo necropsy extravaganza, and as previously indicated, there are hippo-parts in the following pictures. Insidey-hippo-parts, if you catch my drift. Be warned.

Since the necropsy facility at the park is 4WD-access-only, we caught a lift up with the vet (awesome guy, very generous with the beer & pizza) and his assistants. Truly, this is the best way to see a safari park, appreciate the rhino deciding not to park in the road, and get drooled on by a giraffe.



Left to right: Kristin (pathologist), Johanna (clinical path resident), me.

One never quite knows the appropriate expression to assume when posing with an ex-hippo...



The pale pink markings on the skin visible in the above and below pictures are scarring from frostbite when they had a really cold year and the pond froze. That was when they lost the previous hippo - she dived under the ice and drowned.



Hippo feet are cool.




Happiness is learning that a box-cutter is a perfect tool for getting through hippo skin.




The most time-consuming and exhausting part of the necropsy was simply reflecting the skin. There were multiple, often symmetrical subcutaneous haemorrhages (man, that felt awesome spelling that word with an 'a' again), I'm pointing at one with the knife:



Here is where we realise that pretty much everything in the cranial abdomen is in fact fused with the peritoneum... Most confusing when you're expecting to be able to get into the abdomen and find a pile of organs and suddenly there's spleen but no abdominal cavity....




There were extensive areas of petechial haemorrhage on the serosal surface of the small and large intestines - the mucosal surface was even more extensively affected.



Here you can see the three large chambers of the fore-stomach, and an area of inflammation on the large intestine & mesentery that was overlying the diseased bladder.



The tip of the bladder is necrotic, and although it hadn't perforated it wouldn't have been far away...



Here's the opened bladder - at the right side is the necrotic end, a partially constricted sac filled with a 1.2lb urolith, mostly "sand" with some firm stones. Amazingly, this hippo hadn't actually blocked. We're not sure if the constriction in the bladder is a reaction to the stone, or if it was a pre-existing structure that subsequently filled with urolith.




The heart was cool - check out the extensive trabeculae.


I'm not sure if more hippo pics will turn up later - there were several cameras sporadically in use by whoever had "clean" hands.

Portland & yarn

On Sunday Johanna packed us into the front of her ute and drove us to Portland, mostly for a yarn crawl with some sight-seeing thrown in. Here's a picture of Mt. Hood - that snow never melted over Summer.... Creepy.



And here's my elbow getting in the way of Mt. Hood while Johanna ate lunch.



The main hospital for Portland has a gondola! That's too awesome for words, but I wonder if it's really that useful for emergency services....


I think this is Ross Bridge, crossing the Willamette river, which is the one in Corvallis that flows North to empty into the Columbia. Pretty, eh?


We didn't actually get into this shop, but I suspect it's awesome. You can tell by the bomb hanging above the door (saying, "Sorry, we're open").



An extremely dangerous shop: Yarn Garden. I could spend a whole lot there, the range is enormous and they have the most gorgeous yarn I've ever seen. Even Mort appreciated it, and sincerely wanted to build a fort.



Best of all, Manfred could finally ride the llama.



This is Yarnia - an interesting place with cones of very fine yarn arranged by fibre and colour. You choose what you want, and they wind multiple strands onto a cone to achieve whatever yarn weight and colour combination you like.



Twisted was also a very cool shop, with excellent shop models for sock yarns.



After all that, I was pretty conservative and only came away with moderate swag:




We also learned that unfortunately not everything that comes from Germany is Awesome:




We ate dinner at a Cuban restaurant, Pambiche, which had brilliant food (exquisite desserts) and really nice presentation.

Nothing specific, really

Last week Mort managed to get up a hill to get a view of Corvallis. Even though it's a bit hazy (there was an awesome fog earlier in the day), you can still get an impression of what a green, tree-filled place this is.




The weather has been edging more and more into Autumn, and we're getting frosts now. In self defense, I knitted a scarf - I think the chunky cabled brioche stitch should keep out most of the cold I'm likely to cycle into around here.




On Wednesday we officially joined the Heart of the Valley Homebrewers club (even though we've been a little involved with their activities already). Below is a typical club meeting, held at the Calapooia Brew Pub. Note the pubs here have darts boards, just like on TV, and no smoking, just like home.



Earlier in the week I had the opportunity to be involved in the necropsy of a hippo - it was an amazing experience, and not one that comes up often. When I can get the photos from other people's cameras (I wasn't taking pictures, myself), I'll put them up on the blog. They might be a bit more involved than everyone wants to see, so I'll make the content clear in the title of that post. Apparently not all people get as excited as I do about things inside hippos.

Woo beer

Finally we've begun to accumulate brewing equipment, and it feels great. Some of it is begged, some borrowed, and some we actually paid for.


The outcome this weekend was our first US brew, hopefully it'll turn out ok. It certainly smells good.


It's the season for gourds in the local supermarket, they're all so pretty.


Also, there are tiny pumpkin things:


Of course, the Halloween candy is awesome to look at, although I haven't tried any yet....



But there's always something a little wrong with portable yoghurt that looks a bit like an Olympic torch...



In other news: I'm donating my hair to Locks of Love.

Gordon Lakes trail

Sunday was a really great day spent hiking (tramping is something else here, it seems, and it's not something the nice girls admit to). We went with the Sierra club (the local Mary's Peak crowd) to Gordon Lakes. We started/ended at the yellow star and ate lunch at the red star.




We saw Soapgrass Mountain, which is actually identified on Google Maps (below), so you can see where we were, relatively. Note the cool interactiveness of the embedded link....



View Larger Map


On the trip we met a bunch of really great people, learned lots of scarey things about poison oak (although it doesn't grow at the altitude we were at), and scored a dinner invitation.

Here's the trail-head, not looking at all like we're about to head off into foggy doom. The weather was misty and cool, pleasant for walking in but a bit chilly for waiting around in. Of course, mad Kiwis who insist on wearing shorts when everyone else is in long pants don't mention things like that.



These cute little plants are "Bunchberries" according to the locals.


The lakes were spectacularly calm.



Lichen ruled the forest, which was eerily silent for most of the hike, except for when a tree fell, which certainly makes a sound even if you can't see it.





This is an awesome little myco-heterotroph, a funky plant that parasitises fungi. I don't know exactly what it is, though.



This is a puff-ball of some description. Even though it's only the beginning of the fungus season (I think), there was a great variety about.



We sat in a large naturally-formed meadow for lunch (not thinking about ticks at all).


Dessert was "blue huckleberries", looking suspiciously like blueberries... And tasting like happy.



And for those of you who may have been concerned... Manfred attended and judged lunch worthy, if a little damp.

Septembeerfest

Septembeerfest last weekend was great fun, we only got around about four of the beers, but they were all great.

Here's how the Keg-bar unfolded:



With the inevitable result...


In keeping with the harvest theme, there was free pumpkin-beer on tap (the kegs in the background were to refill the pumpkins as required, and yes, the guy who brewed the beer also grew the vessels):



Here is an example of pure brilliance: the ultimate in simple, functional, bare-bones mobile pubs, can't have a festival without one.




The harvest season and impending Halloween (which is apparently a pretty big deal here) is becoming noticeable throughout the town. While pumpkin-carving kits have been in the shops for a few weeks, this last week the pumpkins appeared in earnest:



On a totally different topic from harvesting stuff - Mort finally got a picture of a snake, although it was a dead one. That's the lens cap as a size reference, which is only really useful for those of you who know how big our camera is.


All that talk of dead snakes makes a nice segue into the following contradiction in contraception:



See the problem?



Also, we just bought waterproof pants that claim "... the size of a Gaseous Water Vapor Molecule is much smaller than the size of a Liquid Water Molecule... ". Awesome.