Work hard, play hard.

Last week was the epitome of the saying, "work hard play hard"

As I predicted yeah, last week sucked. But that was a gross understatment. GROSS understatment. I had never been as mentally fatigued as I was on thursday afternoon, I was about ready to just breakdown. I don't know, tomorrow I find out if it was worth it because I get my results back, gah.

Friday I went to eat dim sum with elisa yay! that was definitely good and it was good to see her, I don't think I've hung out with her since we went to eat at Titos (chili's LOL) in mid january! :) although she got back to work late :( sorry 'bout that.

I guess it's good to start with the good :) Saturday I went to a training for the fish database internship thingie and I got there okay and the training, it was a little bit slow at points, but it was very informative. Also I got to go out on the boat later in the day to see first hand what an intern does. The people I've met so far have been really great and nice, very friendly and outgoing. The zoo's good, but people wise, not the most sociable volunteers there. After the training and before the boat we had time to go to lunch, so I went out and the only place I could find was Applebee's so I went in there, by myself...and when I entered the song "ALLL BYYYY MYYYYYSELFFFFFF DON'T WANNA BEEEEE ALLLL BYYYYY MYYYYSELF" was playing, LoL I was so cracking up. It was hilarous LoL On the boat, I got to check out some of the fish they caught, I'm definitely going to have to brush up on my fish identification...but hopefully by the summer, or maybe even spring I'll get better at it, and like with most things practice makes perfect. So I'm planning to do that in the summer.

After all of that fun and enjoyment in the day I went to chrissy's house at night :) I hadn't spent quality time with her in a really long time, so it was definitely good to have some laughs. Laugh inducing moments included a three teated cow, trying to put her puzzle together, billythewitchdoctor.com, making chrissy watch Ben Affleck striptease at a gay club, and last but certainly not least. Thank you myheritage.com I think I lost a few pounds from all that laughter. And from being a crackhead, some of the MANY celebs my heritage is linked to, donny osmond, some korean communist leader, viggo mortenson, the rock, this ooold lady Grace...uhm i can't remember her last name, but the eptome of an OLD white woman, GARY FREAKIN' BUSEY! THEY LABLED ME AS GARY FREAKIN' BUSEY! I was a crack head for the rest of the night.
They just traced chrissy back to all of these fobby asian girls. Me, I'm now Gary Teri Busey.

And Freakin' a. Chrissy has this lego block calender from hong kong which defeated both of us.


Sunday, less good :( So I got at the zoo to volunteer and like normal started preping the diets and such and the keeper got the rest of the diets, but as we were about to go, I notied one less bucket...so me and my friend were like, aren't we missing something? and then he told us that one of the sunbears died a few days before. Arugh. that was heartbreaking.

A few months ago, they had brought in a new sunbear from the San Diego Zoo because in SD they were trying to mate a male and another female and so this bear was sorta the third wheel and we had a very large enclosure here for only one bear so they thought they would try to put our sunbear and the san diego sunbear together. When she first got here they said she was very agressive and anxious and just a very bad tempered bear. Then they put them in separate cages next to each other, they didn't really get along, but that's pretty normal when introducing two mature females. They would bark and growl every once in a while, eventually it seemed to lessen slightly although both seemed pretty stressed. Since it lessened and it had been a few weeks, they decided to let them in the enclosure together to see how they'd do. They just fought and fought until the keepers could get one back into the nighhouse.

After that fiasco, they kept them separate and would just rotate them inside and outside, but after that fight outside, I could tell that Kaika (the sunbear which was here first) was just worn out and she wasn't pacing or anything unless Ting (the sunbear from san diego) started barking or growling. The past few weeks Kaika was just more submissive so I thought maybe they'd finally start to get along a bit better, but it turns out the life was just draining out of her. On Friday they found her comatose in the nighthouse and they couldn't wake her up, so she died. They did a necropsy and found that something made her lungs stop working, but the couldn't determine exactly what, so no conclusive answers were found, but the keepers basically say it was just the stress. I'm sure she was just shocked to have this new bear come in and then start challenging her, then they got into the fight which probably cause her to be a lot more nervous and stressed out. It was just not a good situation and she wasn't as young as she used to be, so it just consumed her.

There have been 2 other deaths on this string with the animals I work with. One was from advanced cancer, Spike, the othe sunbear was put down and then Macho one of our deers was also put down because he was getting very very old and stopped eating. Both of those were unpreventable, but this one was worse because it was a stress induced by the keepers so it might have been prevented. It could have gone either way though, ting could have been a great companion, they didn't know until they introduced them.

The whole thing just sucked because our keeper took it especially hard and it just made for a very depressing sunday. At least she's no longer under that stress...

At least saturday was good :) and today I got my art midterm back and I did pretty well on it, so there's always a balance to life.