acting professional, day 3

today was the final day of the APV meeting, which means last night was the notorious banquet.  it always ends up a trainwreck because along with the banquet (which is flowery conference language for “meal that is brought to you rather than buffet style”) comes the big fundraising auction.  in order to get people to bid crazy high on crazy items (example: a particularly obnoxious tie, black with brightly colored dancing condoms all over, has been annually sold for the last decade), they get everyone somewhat crazy drunk by plying us all with wine throughout and after the meal.  after the high spirts of bidding wars over monkey paintings & whatnot, everyone boozily wanders over for round 3 of the hospitality suite.  you can see how the situation of happy camraderie with your rarely seen cross-country friends + bidding frenzy energy + rivers of gratis cocktails for 6 hours = high potential for hijinks.  as if the in-house insanity wasn’t enough, our troublemaking friend from mauritius called a trio of cabs and extended the party to the local nightclubs until sometime around 4am.

i, however, was not in any of those cabs.  in previous years, i would have been right up in the thick of it, but a couple of us were making a concerted effort to attempt to stay close to the straight & narrow.  one friend was giving a talk this morning, and there were a couple of the sessions i was particularly interested in not missing, so we contented ourselves with a more moderate level of partaking in the craziness.  it was nice to wake up this am lacking a touch of the dt’s.

and so after learning several valuable things (measles vaccines: hard to find steady supply, searching for alternate sources good; web archiving of teaching materials & clinical database stuff about monkeys is a brilliant idea), we checked out of that hotel and moved downtown for the AALAS meeting starting tomorrow.

things we learned at APV:

• trouble walks on two legs and is wearing a turquoise shirt.  most likely with a super suave tropical foreign accent.
• “bavarian cream” = hypermucoid strain of Klebsiella, which is way bad, and will cause heinous abdominal abscesses in african greens.  wtf?
• crazy monkey boxer shorts sell for far more at auction when modeled by a less-than-fully-clothed old guy than when the same guy simply carries them around the room for display.
• latent malaria is probably a lot more common than we thought in cynos.
• new world monkeys can store phenomenal amounts of iron in their livers, quite to their detriment.
• AMP has a really nice outreach program for private-practice vets.
• it’s funny how many men welcome the chance to take off their shirts and swing them overhead, chippendale’s dancer-style, at the merest suggestion to do so.
• a single high dose of acyclovir can halt & reverse symptomology of reactivated b-virus in immunosuppressed macaques.

i think i need a nap before starting round 2 of this.