Highlights of our trip West

The month of May has flown by and so much has happened since I last updated!  So I'll cover the highlights...

• Chimichanga is a boy chinchilla.   He still doesn't let me perform a full exam, but he's definitely a boy.  I'm just glad I didn't find out by adding another "female" chinchilla to the cage. :)

• Chase and I found a house to purchase!  It's a cute little starter home with 1 more bedroom than we have here in the apartment.  My favorite room is the bonus/family/sun room.  It's got lots of good lighting and laminate flooring...so it's going to be the craft room/office/pet room.  I can't wait to have an easy to clean area around the chinchilla!  That bonus room really frees us to use all 3 bedrooms as bedrooms...now we just need inhabitants for the other 2 bedrooms!  My 2 dogs are going to love the back yard (and so are we).

• I won some awards!  I'm one of Mizzou's 3 internal medicine award recipients (ie...I'm an internal medicine nerd).  That one comes with a year subscription to a journal that I can wait to read! I also received a cash prize for small animal community medicine.  I'm super excited about the cash...since we're a touch (ie...completely and utterly) on the broke side.   My dream job didn't come cheap...8 years of college....150K of educational debt.  AND we just bought a house...so money is a big issue in my brain right now.  

• I graduated, and I am licensed and ready to start my new job on Friday.   I just have a couple more loose ends to take care of.

We just got back from another epic family vacation... 2 weeks of exploring the west.  We visited the Black Hills, Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons...  Here are some photos

   

Mammoth Site (in the Black Hills) - this is a paleontological dig site that is available for tours.   It was a sink hole with sides too steep for mammoths to get out...once they stumbled in for a drink of water.  Over time it filled in and HUNDREDS of mammoths were preserved.    It was awesome!  Some of them are still laying in the position they died in - trying to escape the pool.  Even though this wasn't a national park...it was well worth seeing.  We'll definitely go back someday.  They've only dug about 20 feet...and have 60 feet to go.  How many more mammoths will they unearth? 

Grand Tetons.

One of Yellowstone's 1000s of thermal features.  

Devil's Tower - we didn't get to go up and check for aliens.  ;)



Peace and Love, y'all!