Holidays

Holidays!

Since I last wrote, there's been a week of class, a test, an assignment, a family dinner and some holiday time.

The last week of classes wasn't too bad. The new chemistry topic (Kinetics) bores me to death! but I guess it's important in relation to drug effects etc so I'm trying to take it in. It is hard, however, to drag myself out of bed in the morning knowing that I'm trading an extra hours sleep for an hour of rates of reactions.

I did the embryology lab for BioSci 107. it was pretty fun - the lab exercise is to create an model embryo out of modelling clay. the model is marked on relative size and arrangement of the embryo's structures (namely blood vessels, gut derivatives and neural tisue). turns out it's reasonably difficult to make an accurately shaped neural tube - they look like little dinosaurs :)

also had chem lab - determining the alcohol content in wine. That was pretty cool. kind of interesting set up having a sandbath to heat the wine. I think because sand is a shitty conductor it stopped the wine from heating up faster than the thermometer could read? so that we didn't boil out a bunch of the water content as well as the ethanol? Maybe. Our red wine had an alcohol content of 10.7% according to our calculations. (Here's hoping that's actually right)....another pair near us got 10.6% though so we were possibly on the right track.

I love easter. I just thought I'd add that in. I'm eating those mini easter eggs with the yum chocolate truffle ganache stuff inside for dinner. they are amazing.

So much for chronological continuity...Anyway, what else? The assignment! Poplhlth 101 - Health systems and the NZ health reform. The assignment itself i didn't struggle with too much. we were given all the readings we were allowed to use so there wasn't the usual battle with Scopus (that's a science journal database for those who don't know) to take up the first weeks of working on it. The questions were all pretty straightforward - define this, compare and contrast these, discuss that. Reasonable word limit. had to cut down to meet it, but not by too much. The only real issue I had with it was that the biggest question (a 1200 word mini-essay) was based primarily on two papers by former NZ minister of health Annette King......and my lord are they drivel. *disclaimer*in my opinion*disclaimer*  it's basically 70 pages of "we have this problem and that problem so we're going to try a new thing....but we're not going to tell you exactly how the new thing will work or how we thing it will help...we're just banking on the fact that the world will get better if we change something". what a pain in the ass to read through.But the assignment got handed in and all that jazz. Will hopefully get it back in the first week of next term.

The other exciting thing that happened was the Pophlth 111 test. It was supposed to be the hardest test of the year - out of all the papers. the tutor told us outright that it is specifically designed to weed people out. last year, everyone did so badly that they instigated plussage to make up for how hard it was.

So I studied reasonably hard for it.Lots of practice questions. and I thought it was....ohhkayyyy. i got most of the answers outright. there were 6 questions out of 30 that I wasn't sold on first time through so I went through again and nutted those ones out. all There is now is fingers crossed that the marks come back alright. So i'm not going to agonise over it. No...i'm not....

Since then, I've been on holiday :)

lazing mostly. haven't studied enough. but i shall get onto that this week. 

Hope everyone's holidays are going well! happy easter!