not even the lesser of two evils.

burning up

It's pretty smokey down here. The fires are immediately north of my university (maybe 3 miles north). The wind is blowing hard enough to shake my car at stoplights, which isn't cheering the firefighters up, I'm sure.

 

There is a huge billowing cloud of smoke rising from the hills just to the north of campus. The billowing smoke is a complete backdrop for the buildings on campus, so it's not like anyone has to look hard to figure out what smells like a campfire. The smoke is huge and daunting, like an evil brown genie rising from the brown hills.

Those clouds aren't the raining type...

The air is incredibly dry. It makes it a little hard to breathe- like when you stick your head out the car window. My nostrils feel parched and part of me wants to squirt water into them. It's really dry.

There are a lot of firefighters who are hearing nothing but howling wind and crackling flames as they try to stop a fire that the wind insists on spreading. I keep thinking about them. I'm worried about my exam tomorrow and thinking about my project. But there are a lot of other people dealing with more pressing issues...

I walked into the library and the tv in the entrance is showing the local news, which is angling for the most-smoke-in-the-shot ("Wow, there's a lot more smoke in this live shot here..."). About 25 students were gathered around the tv. Pretty much all of the undergrads are locals living at home around here and I'm sure many students have been evacuated from their homes. The area of the fire is all "new home communities". While I am so very sorry for people that are at risk of losing their homes, I wish there was more accountability (especially to developers) who insist on building in areas that burn annually. There's talk of shifting more tax burden (specifically taxes for fighting wildfires) to people living in high-risk areas. I wonder if this would help educate people before they bought a home in this type of area.

Classes were cancelled for today (we learned at 2pm) because so many freeways are closed that traffic is a mess and people are having a hard time getting to campus. We'll see if they're closed tomorrow as well. 

Fire, fire, fire.

Another wedding

Once upon a time, I lived in a small town in Northeastern Minnesota named Two Harbors. Trivia: it is where 3M got started, which is interesting largely because the town is approximately 12 blocks square. It is also the most socially active place I've ever lived (I mean that in the best way. People are truly "neighborly" in TH).

I made a few friends during my short time there, and one very good friend named Krista. After she graduated from TH high school, she moved away (which set her apart from most of her TH contemporaries) and worked in AmeriCorps on the East Coast. She met a guy named Sam and started doing life things, like college, job, etc. She ended up in NY city. 

They got engaged just after Jesse and I did last year, and this weekend, they got married. Lucky for us, they had their wedding in Napa Valley at a gorgeous winery. So we drove up for the big event. She was gorgeous, he was handsome, and the setting was delightful. It is such a gorgeous winery. One of the best parts of going to a wedding is being able to enjoy a location you wouldn't otherwise be privy to, and this place was really remarkable. 

Congratulations Krista and Sam!

We also got to visit San Francisco, a city Jesse and I love. We had chinese food, which is magically better in SF than any other place in the USA. It was a great weekend for us. Mostly because of the wedding, of course. But the chinese food was a notable plus...

Hooray, and hooray!

Another Fail

I love this website. I laugh outloud to most of their posts.

The the kicker is that it's produced by "the face shop" (see bottom of jar). Oh hilarity.
see more pwn and owned pictures

so enjoyable

Our friend Lonnie recently turned us onto this blog. It's updated many times per day. So entertaining.

see more pwn and owned pictures

Onto lab work

I've finished the mark-and-recapture part of my project. I'll still go out to the field once a week or so to census. I'll post a pretty graph once I've crunched my numbers.

So it's back to the lab for me. I thought I'd post some pictures of what's going on right now. I am busy building up my lab colony, which means I open up a fly's abdomen and expose her larvae (sort of like a c-section, but the mother doesn't exactly recover to dote on her new babies...). I pick up a couple of larvae on a pin (they're really small, I'll have to post pictures of that next) and wipe them onto a cricket. I call this part of my job "doing evil". 

Anyway, I make a nice home for the cricket while the larvae consume it. Here's some cricket homes:

When the pupae emerge from the cricket, it's a little grub that can squish itself around for an hour or so before they molt and their outer layer becomes their chrysalis (just like in butterflies). Here's a newly emerged grub (the one in the center) that I caught squishing around the container, and its older sibling to our right, all molted and ready to transform:

Here's a top view of a cricket house with a dead cricket and a couple of pupae just behind it. The other brown bits to our right are cat food pieces.

Here's a closeup of a cricket house.  You can see the dead cricket (boo hoo), a hunk of egg carton (for the cricket), a piece of catfood, a glass water tube and 2 pupae. One of the pupae is in the water tube (on the cotton ball). It must have been thirsty when it emerged. I find them in the water tube a lot. 

And finally, here's a couple of pupae in my hand, so you can tell how big the are. They are very fragile- they're super easy to pop, with just a little too much pressure, so I pick them up with a crumpled up piece of tissue paper. They're that fragile.

So that's it for now. It's this colony that I'll use to pursue my next project- the effect of experience on host choice...

more to come...