End of Term Freakout

In the next few days, I have to complete the slides for and practice a talk I am giving on Wednesday to my Ruminant Nutrition class entitled "Supplementation of Ruminant Diets with Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids," study for the second midterm exam in that same class to be taken on Wednesday after my talk, and finish writing a grant proposal for my Comparative Immunology class on a project to use laying hens to study ovarian cancer (due Thursday). Far more brilliant minds than mine have been working on immunological problems associated with cancer for decades--why in the hell did I choose to wrestle with that topic?

In case you were wondering, laying hens are a preferred animal model for ovarian cancer for a multitude of reasons. Four of these reasons are: they develop it spontaneously, like women; their risk of getting it is associated with the number of lifetime ovulations (that is, risk increases with age, as in women); the histopathology of the tumor cells in their ovaries is the same as that in women; and in late stages, the cancer metastasizes to other organs, as in women. If that wasn't amazing enough, let me just point out that sauropsid dinosaurs (later evolved into birds and reptiles) separated from synapsid dinosaurs (later evolved into mammals) around 360 million years ago. Oh, and I shouldn't forget to mention that in avians, the left ovary regresses before they are sexually mature and they are left with only the right ovary and oviduct.

But back to my freakout. Course work, pfff, that's just the tip of the iceberg. Following the discussion at my thesis defense, my advisor and I decided to re-do the statistics for my second experiment, necessitating a complete re-write of the results and discussions sections of that chapter in my thesis, not to mention making new tables (about 10 of those) and new figures. She's going out of town next week so I have to meet with her on Tuesday to go over the new results. All of the thesis stuff has to be finished up and submitted to the graduate school in the next two weeks. There's certainly some French homework due next week too but I'm afraid to look.

I've not slacked off and let this stuff go to the last minute. It's been like this all term, lurching from one thing to the next. But it has piled up just a bit excessively this week and I'm having a bit of a freakout here at the end of the term.

Which brings me to the real point of this post. When I leave for campus each day, the dogs are already settled in. This picture helps calm me down just a little bit. 

Yes, Mimi is a complete princess, requiring not only a dog bed but two fleece blankets to lie on, plus a third blanket that partly covers her. Azza gets nothing in her crate but there is a thick, folded blanket between her crate and the cold floor.

It's a comfort knowing that even before I leave, they are in position, waiting more or less patiently for me to come back home.