Daily Post (Josh) 2010-02-09

Relatively sedate day today, thankfully. No migraine leftovers, for one thing, and the stomach issues I'd been having last week seem to have more or less leveled out - a refreshing break, I think. A&P lab was productive - scads of new terms to memorize for the heart and major blood vessels, but after Roxanne asked for some clarification on the location of a few vessels, Dr. Torres gave the three of us an exclusive overview of the respective structures on the cadaver after class. Rather fascinating really - among other things, the old fellow seems to get a lot less intimidating over time. Still a little disturbed by how much his musculature resembles turkey cuts - not good when your subject looks like your favorite meal.

I also found out that Dr. Torres' son is a photographer of some skill as well, which is pretty darn cool. He even clued me in to a few locations I might be able to utilize for shooting over the summer.

I find myself reflecting, a bit, on how our little group must seem to Dr. Torres - out of all of his students still sticking with the class, we must be the ones that struggle the most, but he seems to have a certain amount of fondness for us. Perhaps there's a level of respect there for the enthusiasm and effort, if not the resulting grades. Then again, I may be overestimating how much he picks us out - he's very good about taking a personal interest in all of his students, which in turn gives me mad respect for him as a teacher. Even if he didn't have the subjects down pat and have a decent amount of panache in terms of expanding on book material, teachers that put forth such a human aspect are rare, and worth cultivating.

I have to admit, I did end up breaking my perfect attendance record this term by skipping photography class, electing to put the time into study for the A&P midterm with the girls. Both Jen and I were exhausted enough that we weren't sure we'd get any use out of a session afterward, and the class today was due to be entirely on photoshop manipulations, which I am already well versed in on the technical aspects; just not overly artistically skilled in this direction. Either way, the resulting composite I'm working on for Thursday should end up about the same. I've got a concept I'm quite pleased with, but I despair of ever making the screen match my vision.

The actual study session seemed to go pretty well; we all did much better on the practice midterm and questions from prior quizzes than last night, thanks in part to sitting down and putting together a stat sheet of sorts to differentiate between the dorsal and ventral rami, dorsal, ventral, and lateral horns all in one place - much easier to see the comparative differences. Prior to this point we had been trying to learn individual statistics, so to speak, of each structure independently - didn't work at all, as it was entirely too easy to attribute one piece to the wrong structure from simple info overload.

Things were also quieter at Roxy's this evening - no spare people, although Debbie did stop by long enough to donate some killer homemade potato soup for dinner. I'm not at all ashamed to say that I dived in for seconds without hesitation.

I feel pretty sated this evening - I know it's going to be worth going over things one more time before the test tomorrow, but I also know that at least some of the bits that are sloshing around in my head right now should settle with sleep.