Yep, just spent the last 3 1/2 hours killing and dissecting rodents, all by myself, ironically listening to "Modest Mouse". I didn't even think about that coincidence until now. You see, we've had a routine established here. A routine that seemed to be working quite nicely. Since Shaoyuan seemed to make it clear that in China, animals don't have any rights and therefore he wasn't going to put much effort into finding an IACUC-approved method of euthanasia, I'd decided to let him handle their writhing, kicking, and screaming little bodies. Then he does his morphometric measurements and hands them off to me to cut open and see if there are any embryos. It was a fairly efficient assembly-line type system. But then today I wake up, and the guys are all gone. This happens. Alot. So I had breakfast alone. Again. They showed up for lunch. Then after lunch, I went into the lab and started to process the specimens that we collected yesterday thinking Shaoyuan would appear at some point, but he must have decided to nap. By 4 o'clock I had a pretty raging headache so decided to come back to my room, pop a couple of Advil, and drink a bottle of water. Next thing I know they're all gone again without a word to me. Crap, we had 11 rodents, all female, that had to be processed today. So I figured I'd wait until dinner to see if they return. No show. So by about 9:30 pm, I'm up to my knuckles in rodents. And swatting mosquitos. To the science folks - be thankful most of you aren't being eaten by mosquitos while working at your microscopes. I have a bite on each butt cheek, one on my wrist, another on my face, my ear, two on the left elbow, and one on the right.
So I've killed my share of mice before. Even had to cervically dislocate a mouse on our kitchen floor who escaped a snap trap injured but not yet dead. It sucks. Not much fun, but I can do it without getting too squeamish about it and without getting upset over feeling them struggle under my hands like I used to. But the screamers are no fun. At least mice don't scream. Jerboas scream. "Do you hear the lambs, Clarice?"
A-n-y-w-a-y. Enough of that. At least it's done. Aside from that, it's been a pretty somber day. I guess you all heard that the three days of mourning started today. It was pretty surreal to see it all on TV. We're kind of in the middle of nowhere, so there wasn't much fanfare here, but apparently at 2:28 pm in every city all across China, everyone stopped whatever they were doing for 3 minutes of silence. The news has shown throngs of people with heads bowed and the mournful sound of sirens, train, boat, bus, and car horns. And tonight there are candles lit all over the country. There are a half dozen outside our dormitory. Not sure who lit them, but I just saw them as I was coming back in from lab. This catastrophe has really hit the national psyche hard. Everyone is talking about it. The same news program is on 27 of the 46 satellite TV stations that we get here showing the destruction and the rescue efforts 24 hours a day. There was a 24 hour telethon that ran over the weekend. Apparently a lot of people took the weekend to drive supplies to Sichuan to try to help. It's pretty remarkable.
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