Creepy crawlies

Yesterday was a crappy day.
I haven't had a really bad day in a while, so I guess I was overdue. It wasn't that anything bad happened per se, but I was just in a murderous mood. I wanted to punch everyone. It was really awful, considering I had 7 hours of class and then 4 hours of work. I took the dogs running in my 2 hour afternoon break because I needed to blow off some steam. Yesterday was just one of those days where I wanted to take the dogs, a tent, and some food and wander out into the middle of Hocking Hills and stay there for a few days. No class, no job, no people, no homework, no responsibility. Just me, the dogs, and chirping birds.
The highlight of my day was my Field Ecology lab. I freaking love that class. It's intimidating because I'm one of 3 girls out of 28 people enrolled, but yesterday we went to a little stream in the middle of the Plains and basically caught as many critters as we could. We used nets and sieve plates, shovels, our hands .... basically anything that worked to catch all kinds of stuff. We caught a lot of fish, some salamanders, crawdads, mayflies, larvae of all kinds of insects, lots of nematodes and worms, and a lamprey, which is like an eel with a sucker for a mouth. It was only about 3 inches long, but when we found it you'd think our ecology professor thought we struck gold. He practically cried when he saw it. I guess they're pretty rare around here, or at least really hard to find. I must admit, it was pretty cool looking. But after we were done catching all this stuff, he told us to fill the bags we had all the organisms in with alcohol so we could preserve them and identify them later.
This is the part of science I don't like ... since I was the only girl there out of 14 people yesterday, I was designated the duty of pouring the alcohol into the bags. So basically, I was killing all these sweet organisms so we could ogle them at a later date. Fantastic. I'm the little girl who couldn't put worms on fishhooks without breaking down into sobs.
I had a lot of fun catching the little critters .... but then when we had to kill them all, especially the lamprey, my bad mood came rushing back. I was having the time of my life with my hip waders on, digging in the dirt with the boys and picking out worms the size of a grain of rice. Watching the worms and fish thrash around in their bags of alcohol while they slowly suffocated made me sick. I was really enjoying the wonders of God's creation while I was squatting in the stream, looking at my sieve plate and finding all the little creatures that you'd miss at first glance, and when I had to put them in plastic bags and suffocate them with chemicals it basically deflated any happiness I'd felt earlier.
So, then I had to go to work. And it wasn't the greatest night in Kroger history either. They asked me to stay an extra hour but I told them that I really couldn't. It isn't that I couldn't ... it's that if I had stayed, there is a chance I would have jammed a bottle of wine down some cocky college guy's throat.
So, on that note, I'm feeling better today!! I woke up in a good mood, and it's refreshing. I only have class until 10 today and then I work from 6:15 to 11, so I have gigantic break in the middle of the day where I can play with the dogs, take a nap, do some homework, drink some coffee, and watch it rain. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh .... I can feel the stress melting away already.
Peace