SO MUCH SNOW!

This is the Halloween weather of my childhood memories- snow up to my knees and lots of wind! I hear we had 20" by 9 am this morning, and I do believe we are well over two feet now.

I took a second snow day today. The roads weren't bad, but the blowing snow was and my commute is notorious for white-out conditions when everything else is sunny and calm so... not in the mood. Work and school have been crazy, and with wedding planning and being sick I've had no time for anything extra. So, instead of catching up on school work or doing dishes, I went out to the horse rescue today and trudged through the snow to pet each and every little velvet nose. I haven't been out there since the first week of August.

The mustangs from Nebraska look like horses, not shadows and skeletons. They don't look like yearlings, but they look healthy. I wonder how badly stunted their growth was from spending their first 6-8 months of life starving. Maddie, the 5 or 6 year old mare who came to us in January near death and looking like a starved yearling, reached 13 hh last month! She looks great, like a real, grown-up horse! There's a new skeletal horse up front, I would guess early 20s but everyone looks pathetic in this weather. He was enjoying his hay, and whinnied when I walked up. Who could let such a sweet horse get like that?

In the months I was gone we had two deaths, one I knew about (34 year old QH mare, Codi) and one I found out about today (28 year old hackney pony, Jack). Both were well loved, and Codi at least spend several years living the dream before passing peacefully into the next realm. I feel bad for Jack, though. He didn't get the retirement he deserved until last fall, and thinking of him out in the snow with no shelter for all those years makes me sick!

A few other new horses, including a mini in sad shape back in iso, a paint mare with a foal at her side, and a huge roan gelding in Codi's old pen. Two horses who had been in foster homes are also back, they both look great so I'm assuming it's the economy's fault that they've returned. Bobby looked depressed, I think he was really enjoying life as a beloved pet!

I need to get back on the feeder list, I miss it out there!

Work is insane. We won our grant, so I get paid a whooping $500 this semester for 20hrs a week of work, which works out to a little over 50 cents an hour. Another way to look at it is I'm paying $500 less this semester to go to school. I don't know how I could get this necessary internship experience if I didn't have external financial support! I am seriously considering getting a teaching license in biology and working in a middle school for five years just for the student loan forgiveness that program offers!

I realized that I said something the other day along the lines of, "What is more important than curing cancer?" and then laughed. The people I was talking to gave me a weird look, and I realized that what seems rhetorical to me is also rhetorical to them, but not in the same way. My sanity is more important to me than curing cancer, as is my family. I think many people in the lab would say that beer is pretty important, their kids are the most important, etc. I guess, to me, curing cancer is not what our work is directly about, and staying in the lab all hours isn't really going to make much of a difference in how long it is before we have a cure. If we don't enjoy our own lives and take care of the people who matter to us, then we lose grasp of why we want to end this awful disease in the first place.

I think a lot of people will be disappointed when the first cancer cure debuts, because it's highly unlikely that it will be universally effective. Cancer is a disease of the genes: Just like how everybody's genes are unique, each cancer patient has a completely unique disease. Our understanding of genetics will have to explode before we have a universal cure for cancer, but until then we can keep working on understanding how cancer cells work so we can attack them more effectively.