ROAD KILL

Well, as expected, I did not wake up in time to attend any of the talks given on graduate student orientation day. I managed to get to UBC by 11:30am, but the information fair was still going on, so I didn’t miss everything. I managed to receive a few bits of info and picked up the graduate student’s handbook. Having been a UBC student before, I think it was less important for me to go to this thing compared to students completely new to UBC.

While I was driving to and from UBC, I managed to see some really weird road kill related things. Having lived all my life in urban and suburban Vancouver, seeing road kill is a fairly rare occurence. Today, I saw road kill all over the damn place. When I was getting on the onramp to the highway, I saw what used to be a fairly large sized animal. All I saw was flat mound of fur and a splash of pink, this was no squirrel I assure you of that. It appeared to be the size of a housecat. If that wasn’t enough, when I got to around the Grandview Highway exit, the entire left lane of the highway was covered in fish! I’m not taking one or two small trout. It was if someone had painted the lane with a coating of fish meat, guts, scales, and skin. It smelled really bad. I was luckly enough to avoid the slick mess, but I can just imagine what the tires look like if you had driven through it. I later found out that a fish truck had lost its load. They had to sand the area to keep it from being too slick. Now I thought this was the last of the road kill for the day, but I was wrong! As I exited the highway, this bird flew awkwardly towards my the right front of my car. I’m pretty sure I missed it, but it was awful close, and I haven’t checked the front of my vehicle yet. Ew. Finally, as I left UBC I was driving on 4th Ave. when I saw squirrel flattened to the height of a pancake. It was just a platter of fur, ringed by a pink stain. Poor thing.

I saw a lot of animal carnage on the road today. Which will probably mirror the human carnage that will inevitably exist on the roads this Labour Day weekend. Only stupid people don’t wear seatbelts! Buckle up dummies!