When I think about it, April might be the calmest month I've had all year. Which is actually rather funny considering that half of that calm was probably due to sheer exhaustion from the conference. I started out this month by realizing that I seriously overshot my stamina, and being unable to take more than one day off to do anything about it. The choir gave our Easter production for Palm Saturday and Sunday and it was a decent success! Not bad for my first attempt at a modern worship musical, even one that was rewritten by our drama team. The drama peeps at Cornerstone, by the way, are simply just that awesome. ^_^ From there we began the inexorable march towards our bi-annual inspection by IACUC.
IACUC, for those of you not in the know, stands for the International Animal Care and Use Committee. This committee is under the administration of the University and is responsible for seeing that all animal researchers on a campus are in compliance with the public laws on using animals in research. They are not directly under the government, however the government audits their administration of the laws to the rest of us. That means we all get inspected twice a year for any violations in the lab and get basically audited ourselves. Fortunately for me, a lot of what they worry about are things that we do already simply because its better for our fish that way. So aside from some bookkeeping every year, this sort of thing isn't that big a deal for us. Usually.
This year started out like all the others and our inspection went smoothly. I did find it a little difficult to talk to the new head vet (he is very much an A-type personality), but we didn't have any major violations and I was left to try and get everyone's training records up to date. Its hard work convincing people that they need to prove they've had a tetanus shot, especially when half of your staff are students and the other half are internationals. The first group usually doesn't know how to ask for their vaccination records, and the second group has all their records in their home country! Needless to say, I made progress but didn't finish this by the time April ended.
I also spent a lot of time (between computer forms) setting up fish for Bill and his Developmental Biology lab. His teaching assistant for that class is my friend Skye Lesnick, who's a grad student. Skye was running the labs, trying to care for the fish, and becoming a first-time dad all at once this month! He's always a little hyper, as he has ADHD, and generally more bouncy than me but it was exaggerated a bit more than usual either due to exhaustion or happiness, I couldn't really tell. ~_^ Just as we finished up that portion of the lab for Bill, I had to begin prepping for Yamachan's visit in May. Bill asked him to come over from England to teach Masato (and me, if I wanted) a new method of microinjecting fish embryos that didn't require us to remove the chorion (or shell) around them. He was also doing some experiments for Bill, so I spent a week running around buying and collecting supplies. You don't want to waste someone's time when they are only going to be in lab for a short period.
Thankfully, Mum was kind enough to come visit and cook for me for a few weeks starting the last week of April, and I'm really glad she did because I was dead meat. Moms are really awesome like that. I finally started catching up on sleep and laughter while she was here, and the neat thing is that it just so happened that she was here in time to see me become a member at Cornerstone. It was really awesome to have a family member there for that, I wasn't expecting that to happen at all. God has a neat way of giving us just the things we need to keep us going when we're working hard, have you noticed? I have to keep reminding myself of that so I don't complain out of reflex.
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