So a few years ago I decided I wanted to go to college. I had worked many retail jobs, and spent years as a working artist, but I became deeply interested in neuroscience and decided I wanted to pursue it as a career. Well, one thing led to another, and the next thing I know, here it is August 2017 and I'm in a biology Master's program working on a neuroendocrinology project... with snakes. Hundreds of garter snakes. On Friday, the snakes needed their blood drawn for my labmate's project. Now, these snakes live in a pair of temperature-controlled chambers, much like walk-in refrigerators, with programmable climate control. When I was working on my project, drawing blood was done at 4 degrees C using red lights (so as not to interrupt their hibernation with short-wavelength light). I thought that was kind of a pain in the patoot, but there were things I didn't know yet, such as the value of pants in a snake-blood-drawing scenario. It is now summer, so when I blithely offered to help my labmate draw blood on Friday, I was wearing a knee-length dress, and sandals. First lesson learned; Although the actual blood draw goes a bit faster in summer, the snakes, too, are faster in summer, and they DO NOT LIKE being pinned between my knees so I can stab their tails with a needle. They DO NOT LIKE it quite a lot, so in addition to evacuating their musk glands (and bowels) onto me, they also flailed about madly, looking for something to bite wiff dey tiny teefs. So picture me, sitting on a stool with an angry, thrashing garter snake clamped between my knees, getting shat on and my bare legs glomped onto what felt like 50 times per snake, for roughly 40 snakes, their wee raspberry-prickle teeth drawing wee half-moon droplets of blood until my legs looked like a connect-the-dots of nightmares.