What do you do in your free time?

Thank you to Kristian Joyce from The Ohio State University for sharing your new hobby and this unique piece with us!

What do you do in your free time?

This is a common question to encounter during an interview. I usually chuckle to myself and internally answer “sleep” but instead answer with something that I liked to do in undergrad or during my summer breaks. Reading is my go-to answer even though I haven’t picked up a novel since starting vet school. It’s often hard as a vet student to find time to grocery shop or walk the dog, let alone have a hobby. Let’s face it, vet students don’t have a ton of free time. If anything, you’ll hear us boast about how little sleep we’ve had, how many hours we’ve studied, or how many days it has been since we last showered because we don’t have time to do so. I always wondered why interviewers seem to care so much about what people do during their free time; I didn’t realize the importance of this question until last year.

Last year, I was experiencing all the things typical vet students experience. Stress. Fatigue. Burnout. It would be hard to find a vet student that isn’t experiencing one or more of these at any given time. I had certainly experienced my fair share up until then. The difference was that I was starting to lose sleep. My mind had a hard time turning off at night after working so hard all day. I was constantly thinking about something I learned that day, a test that was coming up, my growing student loan debt, whether I would become a decent veterinarian or not, among many other things. I would lay there for hours unable to relax. One night, I was browsing YouTube videos for something to lull me into sleep when I encountered a video of a woman knitting. Watching the repetitive motion of the video was not only relaxing, but it was also captivating. Night after night I would watch videos of people knitting and crocheting, and I became both fascinated and mesmerized by it.

One day, I decided to give it a try. I bought yarn and a crochet hook and made time every night to sit down and crochet. I found that the repetitive motion of crocheting relaxed my mind and allowed me to sleep much easier. Instead of lying in bed for two, three, sometimes four hours, I was crocheting for 30 minutes to an hour and immediately falling to sleep. You can’t really focus on stressful thoughts when you’re pushing yarn in and out of a stitch.

After a while, I got pretty good at crocheting. This surprised me since I never considered myself the least bit artistic. I made a little bit of everything: scarves, hats, blankets, stuffed animals, and baby toys just to name a few. One night, I messed up while making something. It turned into a weird ball shape when it was supposed to be a flower. I was just going to throw it away when I realized that I could stuff it with some catnip, close the end of it, and make it into a really ugly cat toy. It wouldn’t be pretty, but then at least the yarn wouldn’t go to waste. Turns out, my cat LOVED this new toy of hers. She not only played with it, but she also carried it everywhere she went. At that point, I realized how awesome this new hobby could be.

My nighttime routine soon became something that I did between classes, while at lunch, and whenever I needed a mental break. I began to look forward to taking breaks from studying so that I could crochet. My cat ended up with about twenty cat toys over the course of a few weeks. I realized that my house was going to become overrun with cat toys if I kept this up, so I started giving them away to friends. I was soon getting requests for more toys, different colors, and custom designs. People started asking me how much the toys cost so they could place an order! I then took a crazy next step: I opened up an Etsy shop and started my own business.

Opening up an Etsy shop was a lot more work than I originally expected. Not only did I have to develop patterns for different cat toys, but I also had to photograph them, advertise my brand, and manage my shop. Although it was a lot of effort, the payout was quick and worthwhile. Before long, I had a steady stream of orders coming in. I was ecstatic to be making money from a hobby! The money earned from this hobby helped tremendously with my finances, but most importantly it was keeping me sane.

Fast forward to today. My shop celebrated its one year anniversary in December. I have had over 300 sales on Etsy alone and I have sold cat toys to seven different countries. I put my shop on vacation for a few months to focus on studying for my NAVLE, and I missed picking up my crochet hook every single day. I found sleep harder and harder to come by, and I found my stress level rising. I quickly realized how important this “hobby” was for me.

Crochet taught me the importance of work-life balance. Sometimes you have to turn off your brain and do something that you love because there’s more to life than the next test coming up. My academic career has been entirely focused on reaching my professional goals, but I now realize that it is the journey we take to get there that matters. My travels are no longer rife with stress and burnout. They’re certainly there, but instead I think of the cute photos and wonderful reviews I’ve received, the milestones I’ve reached with my business, and the joy of sharing my passion with the people I love. This stress-relieving hobby will surely make it easier for me to cope with the demands of my future profession and life in general. I now finally understand why interviewers ask “What do you do in your free time.”

SUMMER VIBES

Holidays in the Tropics was shared with us by Faye Varias from Western University of Health Sciences. About these photos she said, "Having been raised in the islands, temperatures below 70 degrees are "cold" to me. It was nice to go home to Guam for the holidays and enjoy what I miss about home when I'm away." Thanks for sharing Faye!

Paddlers at SunsetDolphinsTurtle

Creative Corner

Thank you to Felicia Leonard from Colorado State University for sharing these beautiful watercolor paintings with us.

Peter's Wolf (2012)Discover (2012)

The Mysterious Incident of the Exploding Parrots in the Nighttime

Thank you to Kate Connell from the University of Pennsylvania for sharing this "Foot in Mouth" category winner with us!

Living in the Guatemalan jungle for three months keeps you on your toes. It doesn’t take long to learn that you have to check your shoes for scorpions every morning, that the snakes sprawled on the footpaths are just there to sunbathe, and that you could safely swim in the lake if you just avoided shoreline where the crocodiles lurk. That being said, a gringa like myself could never truly adapt to all of the surprises waiting in the wildlife rehabilitation center. I won’t forget the volunteer’s shriek of “the caiman got out of his enclosure!,” the dengue fever victims suddenly falling ill, or the trek through the hurricane to tend to a sick howler monkey.

But the story that I’m going to tell today is surrounding some of the most bizarre circumstances that I had ever witnessed. At first I thought that I was only befuddled because I was born and raised in suburbia, USA, but even the local staff members were completed dumbfounded by what happened over the course of that week.

You see, the green parrots in the far enclosure seemed to be exploding.

This isn’t a metaphor, or even an exaggeration. The volunteers would go out to feed them in the morning, and every day they would find what looked to be the remains of a parrot that had swallowed a hand grenade. A violent burst of feathers, sometimes a head, a leg; the ground moistened with what little blood circulates through those small avian creatures. It was truly quite alarming.

Allow me to set the scene a little more fully, because the setting will become important later in the story. The rehabilitation center was expansive, with a central area for new animals, larger enclosures spaced further away for animals that were rehabilitated but needed time to bond with their new flock, and then even larger, more isolated enclosures in the jungle where there was very minimal human contact. Our bursting feathered friends were in that middle group.

It was a large flock of about fifty birds that was out of sight but not yet out of mind; the birds still received two daily feedings even if we weren’t constantly checking up on them. And they only seemed to be afflicted by these bombastic pathologies during the night.

The obvious answer was there was a predator getting into the enclosure when the sun was down and the human presence died away.

So every volunteer participated in a top-to- bottom inspection of the chain-link area. Every square inch was examined and reinforced, and then eight–foot-tall tarps were zip-tied around the lower perimeter with such care that not even a small snake could slip between them. We were confident that the problem was solved.

And it was, for a few days.

I believe that in the next incident, we found three or four distinctive sets of remains. The tarps that we had hung were undisturbed. The staff members conferred in quiet Spanish, some arguing that it must be a predator somehow getting past our defenses, others saying that it might be some sort of bird-on- bird avicide. Alejandro, the veterinarian on staff, took samples of the remains to necropsy (what he hoped to find from some dismembered limbs is beyond me, but then again it wouldn’t be surprising if there were some grotesque tropical worm that could consume an entire bird overnight).

As luck would have it, one of the center’s biologists returned from the field, and with him he brought night-vision cameras that he used in his wildlife observation. They were able to align the camera to catch a wide side of the enclosure, and from there, we only had to wait.

In the spirit of full disclosure, the rest of this story is what I have been told second-hand. You see, the field biologist failed to save the video from the camera onto his laptop, and only he and the staff vet witnessed what happened that night. So forgive me for borrowing their story. But the finale is just too amazing to not tell.

A Dramatized, Imaginitized Version of What Was Causing the Parrots to Explode in the Nighttime … from the perspective of the field biologist

It was a dark and humid night. The voices of the jungle, so boisterous and cacophonous in the day, had long been silent.

The grainy, greenish image glowed from the small laptop screen. In it we could clearly see the outlines of the birds roosting at the top of the enclosure, heads tucked under wings, somehow comfortable hanging from the sides of the chain-link with their strong talons. Every once in a while a bird would stretch its wings or ruffle its feathers, but besides that, there was nothing.

It must have been two or three o’clock in the morning when it happened. A small ocelot crept confidently out of the bushes, head tilted upward, eyes on the prize. It squatted at the base of the enclosure, and with a casual hop, it sprang over the eight feet of tarp and grasped the chain-link.

Alejandro leapt from his chair in hopes of scaring the feline away before it accomplished its mission. I remained glued to the computer, too engrossed in watching the hunter.

The ocelot moved with a little difficulty as it clambered to the top, where some of the sleeping birds remained, apparently oblivious to their eminent doom.

Sure enough, the cat slipped his small paw between the links, and snatched one of the glowing birds. There was no audio feed, but I imagined the outraged squawk from the parrot. The ocelot jerked its paw out again with a few sharp yanks. That would explain the state of the birds that we were finding. Doing the math, a 2”x2”x6” bird could not fit through a 1.5”x1.5” hole without losing some dimensions.

Alejandro appeared on screen moments later, arms waving. The ocelot dove from its perch, and was gone in an instant. Alejandro looked at the camera, hands on his hips, and shook his head. We had our answer.

The following day, the volunteers returned to the enclosure. We lifted the heavy tarps from their ground-level position, and heaved them up ladders so that they would cover the nighttime roosting area instead. Traps were set to try to capture the rogue ocelot (with the intention of releasing him farther from civilization), but the scamp seemed to realize that the jig was up. He didn’t return.

In the following year, that flock of parrots successfully made it through the rehabilitation process and has returned to the wild. I’d like to think that this group has an especially good chance of making it. After all, they were the ones that learned to keep an eye out for ocelots as they slept.

Opportunity for students to attend the 2017 Veterinary Dental Forum in Nashville, TN from September 14 - 17

Dear Veterinary Student,

I am extending a cordial invitation asking

you to attend the 2017 Veterinary Dental

Forum at the Omni Hotel in Nashville,

Tennessee from September 14 - 17.

This meeting is the premier international meeting in veterinary dentistry and offers a wide range of lectures and laboratories.The Veterinary Dental Forum is hosted by a combination of the Foundation for Veterinary Dentistry, the Academy of Veterinary Dentistry and the American Veterinary Dental College.

The Foundation for Veterinary Dentistry that is the newly organized parent organization of veterinary dentistry is offering a special student registration rate that includes access to all of the general session lectures during the three-day meeting, basic social events and daily meals for $75 (this does not include a continuing education certificate). Students will also be able to attend the laboratories and special events for the normal laboratory and special events registration fees.

This meeting includes lecture tracks ranging from fundamental to advanced, small animal, exotic and equine. It is an ideal venue for individuals with limited dentistry education to develop a solid basic knowledge of the subject, and it also provides an opportunity to learn from a wide variety of internationally recognized specialists.

The Foundation for Veterinary Dentistry has a strong desire to attract new young members of our profession and we would love to host as many students as possible.

For more information please see the Veterinary Dental Forum website at:

https://www.VeterinaryDentalForum.org/

We hope that we will see many of you at this wonderful educational opportunity and we look

forward to meeting you there.

Sincerely,

Michael Overend, DVM

Chair Outreach Committee

Foundation for Veterinary Dentistry