Well I *almost* made it a whole year since my last blog post. I feel so accomplished for having reduced my slaven dependency on the internet over the last year. But considering how bad I was before and how much time I still spend on the computer, I'm not sure how well that worked. You shush.
Life has been life. I spent most of the spring, summer and fall being totally obsessed with my doll of a horse and riding, helping exercise horses, and teaching lessons at a local three-day-eventing barn. It consumed my life almost to the point of excluding all else. Yeah, not so good. Fantastic, but not productive. I am still fighting for balance (and probably always will be) but it feels good to take a step back. Even though I was forced to. But that's okay because I have a new JOB!
Yes. Job. Full-time. Five days a week from 8 to 5. Actually, those were the working hours advertised. Within a week I had started working 7-4 and now since I eat my lunch so quickly it's more like 7-3:30. Except when I work overtime because the place is swamped right now. But I digress. I had an interview on January 10th, was offered the job on the 11th, and started working on Monday the 13th at the UCDavis Mouse Biology Program as an Assistant Animal Technician!
The title is really very glorified. I am a gopher. I have been trained (and am still being trained) to do everything, but my primary function is to be a "supply tech." This means I drive the van three times a day to pick up clean supplies (which are cleaned and sterilized at a campus wash facility and an off-campus lab animal facility, respectively); transport mice back and forth between the two main facilities as well as supplies, feed, etc.; and take dirty supplies back to the wash facility. I also clean and disinfect the van, assemble clean cages within the vivarium, do most of the cleaning and supply prep, and help the other "real" animal techs with husbandry, daily animal checks and so on. And I love it. The initial training period was incredibly frustrating, because I am compelled to be a helpful little elf and my helpful little elf self is utterly useless when I don't know how to do anything. And training is a pain for other people to have to do. They're all great about it. My coworkers are amazing and, as a group, are the best people (and easily the best boss!) I've ever gotten to work with. But when they are switching to a confusing new computer system and a lot of things need to be done NOW, training the newbie is just one more thing to worry about. And so I struggled. But I've gotten on my feet well enough now that I'm feeling much more useful, am able to make decisions and do things independently (like color-coordinating the whiteboard, haHA) and am generally able to keep myself busy and keep my CDO little self very happy. One of the other techs, who has been doing the majority of my cleaning/housekeeping training, also has CDO and we have spent a lot of time bonding over perfectly aligned stacks of cages. (For those of you who don't know, CDO is just like OCD, but spelled alphabetically as it should be.)
The new job does mean getting up early (like 5 am early) and struggling to adjust to a radical time shift, and being exhausted a lot, and somehow I don't mind. I've even occasionally gotten up early enough to run (yay me!) and have succeeded in giving myself shin splints. So no more running at the moment. I continually agonize over the goats and what to do with them but in the meantime they're getting more and better attention than they've gotten in over a year. And they are adorable in every sense of the word, and I love them. My poor horse went from hardcore, seven-days-a-week dressage and jumping to being a stall ornament, but she still gets a handful of grain because she's FLIPPIN' cute so she seems to be happy with the arrangement. If I ever stop being sleep deprived and exhausted I've promised to ride her again.
As a side note: the sleep deprivation has been highly entertaining, especially for a couple of my coworkers. My verbal filter has been sporadic at best - not that I'm using inappropriate language or anything, it's just that my random little thoughts that I usually keep to myself get interjected into the conversation. (Do YOU know why Target is called Target??) In lab meetings my need to be helpful and socially positive has me on the constant verge of hysterical giggles, but so far I've managed to keep them in check. Hopefully more sleep will improve matters. I should probably go work on that. Toodles!
