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...

the third candidate

I saw this bumper sticker in Glendale. Made me laugh outloud.

My brother added "Finally, a president we can trust, and one who can tell the difference between a moon and a space station from relatively far away".  

How it looks

Field nights have been busy for me lately. Wednesday, we marked about 200 flies, and last night we marked about 90. There were only 6 returners, and the low numbers were a little surprising, but I'm going out for the next several nights in a row, so I'm sure I'll get good numbers. 

I did talk to a few Big Losers. They were taking a walk down to Mulholland highway and back up to the mansion. One couple asked me what I was up to. I said "Field work", what are you studying? "Well, I'm looking at this fly that parasitizes a cricket (laugh)", OHohh (in the tone of "that's nice, c'mon honey, let's get out of here").  So I'm basically famous now.

Anyway, here's a video of the flies responding to my recorded cricket song. They're pretty tenacious. 

a flat

I had a flat tire the other day. It is times like these that I am so grateful for the way my dad raised me. Before I was allowed to get my driver's license, he insisted on teaching me a)how an engine works and b)how to change a flat tire. Of course, I thought he was the meanest dad on earth and clearly he hated me terribly to put me through such stupid hoops. I remember sitting at the dining room table as he sketched out the engine and explained it to me (it was actually pretty cool) and the repeated practices of changing tires.

Well, it's all more than paid off. When I take my car in (more specifically, when I used to take my sad volvo in), I can talk at least a little bit intelligently with the mechanics, which gains me some respect. And half the time I don't need to take it in because I can figure out pretty much what's going on (sometimes with a call to dad) and deal with it myself. I also have the confidence to learn about the problems that my dad's lessons didn't teach me, because I know the basics.

As for the flat tire business, I think this is one of the most important skills every driver and non-driver should learn. That and how to use jumper cables (also taught to me by my dad). Do you know how to change your tire? It's not that hard, but you have to know how to do it. Especially because when you get a flat, it's not in a situation where you're able to figure it out so well.

I moved down here to Southern California 3 years ago. I got a flat tire on my first day of work, halfway there. That sucked. But I sucked it up and made my dad proud. I pulled off the freeway into a parking lot and changed my tire in 6 minutes. While I was at it, some guy came up to me and offered to help. I can't tell you the pride I felt as I said "No thanks, I got it". I got to work on time and without a mark on my outfit. My hands were filthy, so I asked where the bathroom was and added that, ugh, I got a flat on my way to work and had to change it. Yeah, I was bragging. 

Anyway, I was thinking about all this a few days ago while I was changing my tire and thought I'd write about it. Everyone should know how to change a tire. 

mark and recapture

I have 2 fabulous research assistants, Nancy and Andrew. I simply wouldn't be able to do my work if I didn't have their help. And they're fun to be with, so I'm pretty lucky. I should also mention that they often bring their sig-Os, Angel and Jessica (respectively), and I appreciate their willingness to help when they get nothing for it. 

Anyway, Andrew took a bunch of pictures the first night we marked. They're pretty cool.

Here's a coyote running across our field just as we arrived. We see its poop a lot.

No caption necessary. We see at least 20 of these ladies each night.

Alright, here's me getting the flies out of the trap. I use a plastic vial to take out a few at a time, because there are so many of them now that it's not possible to count them while they're all in the trap. I have to have one person watch for escapees while I'm in there. 

Once I've got the vial full of flies, I stick it into a cooler full of crushed ice. Since flies are exothermic, cooling them down is like anesthetic. But I have to be careful not to cool them for too long, because it would kill them (by slowing down their metabolic processes so far that they stop). 

Here I am marking the flies on their wings with sharpie. 

These flies are not afraid of humans. Not much is known about them, but the only predators I can think of for them are bats, so they have no genes for being nervous around big mammals. Here is a fly that I've just marked standing on the tip of my pen. This isn't uncommon, it's kind of a hassle. But cute:)

This is the "recovery room". After the flies are marked, someone drops them here so we can see if they recover. It's pretty important in a mark-and-recapture project that the marking process doesn't kill the organism. I would say it's imperative...

So there you go (Erin:), it's like you're almost there. I wish I could have all of my friends and family come and do this with me. It's a pretty cool experience and I would love to share it with all of you. 

not much, a lot.

I haven't posted in a while, partly because not much postworthy has been going on with me, and partly because school started and my fieldwork kicked into high gear. For the record, I'm getting TONS of flies and the cricket population is declining rapidly. It's as we expected, just not so quick! Here's a graph of my censusing:

As you may know or remember, or not, I'm studying a fly that parasitizes crickets. This means that when my fly is pregnant (we call it "gravid" in insects), she flies around listening for chirping crickets. As an important side note, only male crickets call, and they call to attract female crickets. So when my gravid fly finds a chirping cricket, she drops one of her little maggot babies onto the unfortunate cricket. The maggot baby then digs into its host and spends the next 8-10 days consuming the cricket's insides. This makes for a sad cricket and he stops calling pretty soon after the maggot finds him, which means that the female crickets can't find the males anymore, which means the cricket population starts to crash. So as the fly population increases and larvae depositing becomes a popular trend, the cricket population starts crashing because sex suddenly isn't so popular (because the female crickets can't locate any male crickets). Then, because there is justice, as the cricket population crashes, the gravid flies have a harder time locating hosts, so the fly population crashes.

This has not been formally shown (the fly is uninteresting to most biologists and has been largely neglected as a study subject ecologically), so my nights out counting flies and crickets is doing that. My graph looks pretty good so far. Though I'm very nervous because this censusing business is only the smallest aspect of my study and, as my advisor Dave stated, "A cricket and fly census does not a thesis make". So I am also marking captured flies and then releasing them with the hopes of attracting them with a different fly song (long story, boring too, maybe another time when I have nothing to post). So last Friday, my excellent assistants (and their girlfriends and boyfriends) and I marked all of our trapped flies with sharpie on their wings. 3 nights later, last Monday, we trapped again and had NO recaptures. That sort of sucks. I don't know if there were really no returnees, or if the sharpie wore off. We marked some flies in the lab and after 4 days I couldn't see any marking at all. Who'd have guessed that sharpie isn't so permanent after all?

To add a little pressure, I expect the fly population to crash any day now, and I have to wait until next week for an additional fly trap to come back from Utah before I can try an official mark and recapture (I need 2 traps to do it correctly). So I'm a little nervous.  Dave's words ring in my head like an ominous warning: "A cricket and fly census does not a thesis make". Jesse and I are in a big hurry to get back up to Seattle permanently, so I need to get all of my data this field season, and it's happening so fast that I'm worried it will be inadequate. 

So that's what's been keeping me busy. That and Biometry class (statistics for biology). 

At least that's it. I could be complaining about having to drive to Arizona and Utah for my fieldwork like my labmate, and I could be complaining about having to work part-time during all of this like a lot of grad students (thank you for supporting us, Jesse). And I could be complaining about having to collecting cat poop and being stuck in the lab doing DNA sequences like my other labmate. I'm pretty lucky overall. 

So why am I always complaining?

I love life.

new bike

Not my favorite day, this day.

 A friend moved recently and gave me his mountain bike. I was glad, since I had recklessly lost my previous bike (actually, I left it too long with a friend in South Carolina and I believe he has since sold it). This new mountain bike was no beauty- heavy, old, plastic pedals- but it was a bike and I was glad to ride it. 

Being a former cyclist snob, I felt it necessary to get clipless pedals for this bike. These are the type of pedals that you lock into with fancy shoes. I think it's the only way to go. I bid on and won a smokin deal on ebay- 2 pairs of pedals for $10!! So Jesse could have one pair as well. I couldn't believe my luck. These pedals normally run between $45 and a million dollars, so I was pretty pleased. 

Well, I took my bike in to the bike shop so they could change my pedals this morning. Free of charge, which was nice. But when I got my bike outside and tried to step into the pedals with my old shoes, they did not agree. Which was not nice. I was disappointed, but not bummed, as I had spent a mere 10 bucks for the pedals and they came with a pair of cleats. I would just change the cleats on my shoes when I got home. Or tomorrow. Whatever.

Also, as I rode home from the bike shop, my bike started making crazy sounds. I think the guy banged into my rear wheel one too many times and set it off course, so it was rubbing all over the place. Which was not nice. But I was cranky about the cleats and just wanted to get home. 

Which I did.

That night, I headed out for field work. Which is a 30+ minute drive to the middle of nowhere. I got there just after sunset, so the park's gate was closed, which was not nice. So I tossed my equipment over the fence and hiked into my field (not far at all, maybe 100 feet, but I was cranky, so it was a cranky hundred feet). I started setting up to find that I had neglected to replace my batteries after charging them all. So my headlamps were completely without batteries. That's alright, I have a flashlight and light isn't really that necessary. It's too far to drive out there and back for nothing. I checked my cd player and speakers (the two critical elements for attracting my flies) and they had batteries. Phew. So I turned on my cd player. No go. Switched batteries from my little flashlight to the cd player- still no go. THAT SUCKS. I'm more than cranky now. Nothing can be done for field work tonight, so I pack up my stuff, toss it back over the fence, and drive home. Boo. That sucks. A waste of a night.

So I get home. You may be wondering why the 2 stories- bike and field work. Well, because when I got home, my bike was gone. Which was strange. Our apartment building has underground parking with secure gates. But apparently that's no problem for bike thieves. And most strangely, Jesse's bike was leaning against the wall immediately behind my bike, but his was still there. 

Ugh. So my new pedals that didn't work with my shoes are gone on the bike that was too heavy. Maybe I didn't appreciate it all enough. 

Oh, and here's the kicker. After I've been home a while and I'm just sitting on the couch wondering how my bike got stolen from our secure garage in a good neighborhood, it occurs to me that I didn't check the "hold" button on the cd player. You know how the little "walkman" style cd players have the "hold" button to prevent you from accidentally turning them on? Yeah, well I forgot about that. So I pull out my cd player, flip the hold button, and the thing turns on, happy as a clam. 

So I could have done my field work after all and not wasted tonight and tomorrow night (because I'll have to go out again now). 

And I don't have a bike, and one less pair of pedals.

I'm pretty cranky.

Frack and his boxes

Frack's love for boxes prompted me to start this blog. And here's a video depicting this love. Even when the box is too small to contain his love.

Frack Jump

Do all cats do this?

I think he is trying to look out the peephole, but when I lift him up to it, he's not interested. Maybe he's just training for the feline olympics.

more olympics

More:

Hi-fiving

Hand Shaking (you have to shake the judges' hands)

Artistic/rhythmic/synchronized Hand Shaking

Dungeons and Dragons

Taxi Hailing (the arena for this is fun)

Gardening

No Moore

So we're big fans of the Dave Matthews Band. We have tickets this summer to 2 shows- last night and tonight at the Staples Center in LA. We got to the show last night, and when the guy sitting next to us showed up, he told us that LeRoi Moore had died. This is pretty shocking. LeRoi was the saxophonist for the band, 46 years old, and had an accident on his ATV earlier this summer. He was recovering alright from that, but died suddenly yesterday (the guy next to us is friends with a driver for the band and had learned that it was a blood clot.). So that was a bummer. The show went on, it was sad. 

Anyway, I just thought I'd mention it. 

Other Olympic Games

Jesse and I were watching Olympic speedwalking last night. It's a funny looking sport and the athletes are very serious. No disrespect to speedwalkers. 

It prompted me to ask: How did speedwalking begin? who started it? And why has it lasted? I mean, seriously. 

Again, no disrespect to speedwalkers. It looks tough, but I just don't get how it stuck as a sport, let alone as an Olympic Sport.

So we began an Absurd Brainstorming Session. We have Absurd Brainstorming Sessions sometimes- like our "Worst Child Names Ever" brainstorm, the results include "Crappy", "Cavity", and "Toilet". These were just some of the names fit to post...

Anyway, following is our current ABS list of "Other Olympic Games". Humor is enhanced when you include images of the commentary, training regimes, athlete intensity, and medal ceremonies for each of these...

Here is our list thus far:

• Tag
  
• Hide-N-Seek (one of my top favorites- what would the arena look like? A house? Jesse says they would just play all around Beijing) (Commentary: "This is Jack Jones' second Olympic Games, he has been an outstanding hider for the Americans")
• Red Rover
  
• Dodge ball
  
• King of the Hill
  
• Go Fish (or even better, War)
  
• Swings
  
• H-O-R-S-E 
  
• Kick the Can
  
• Ping Pong (oops, already an Olympic Sport)
  
• Bingo
  
• Flying (everyone sucks at this one, good commentary potential here)
• Stairs (this should beat out spweedwalking)
• Easter Egg Hunt (Isreal says "Huh?")
  
• Tetherball
  
• Make Believe
  
• Grocery Shopping (remember Supermarket Sweep?)
• Badmitton (oopsy again, another silly sport gone Olympic)
  
• Four Square
  
• Water Balloon Toss
• Trampoline jumping (Holy Mackerel! Another one!?)
  
• Capture the Flag
  
• Rock, Paper, Scissors

Do you have any to add?

P.S.

Dan's comment to add synchronization to any current event warrants mention. It has added a new dimension to the absurdity and we are enjoying it tremendously. Synchronized boxing. We've come up with some good ones in late night brainstorms that I can't remember now. Thanks Dan.

Field work in SoCal

Here are some pictures of last night's field work. Keep in mind that I'm living in Southern California, so naturally, my field location is also the set for a tv show. My mother-in-law joined me to count crickets and she suggested that we go early and have a picnic. We drove around the grounds looking for a suitable picnic spot and discovered the Biggest Loser campus... 

This is where we picnicked. The pool was set up with cabanas for the show (lights and microphones too). Do I look like a field biologist or a tv star?

I peeked into this room from our parking spot. If you watch the show, you'll recognize it as the room the losing team goes to decide who they're kicking off. You can see the black glass-front refrigerators on the left.

Filming equipment.

Here I'm setting up my fly trap at the gravel turnout.
This is my cricket field. I'm taking the compass bearing so I can be sure to walk a straight line. 

Me trudging off to set my reflector poles.

Setting said reflector poles.

Can you see the cricket? It looks different from crickets most people are used to because it's a field cricket. They're bigger, darker and more fun.

Here's one of 4 black widow spiders I saw just last night. They sure make you nervous.

This concludes our tour of Jen's Fieldwork in Southern California. We hope you enjoyed your visit.

Flies!

2 flies came to my trap tonight! This is very exciting. It officially marks the beginning of my field season. I'm very pleased.

Charlene (my mother-in-law) and I set up the trap and then headed over to my field to count crickets. One hour and 70 crickets later, we drove back to the trap and found the flies! Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!

harvest time!

I decided that my cucumbers were ready to eat today. 

They were quite tasty, though not crazy delicious. I sort of expected them to be sweeter than normal, since I had just picked them. 

Here's a biology lesson for you: You probably know that plants perform photosynthesis to make their energy. sunlight + CO2 + water = sugar. Plants have an enzyme that chains sugars together to make starches, which are easier to store for future use. When you harvest a fruit (ie. remove it from its plant), it stops photosynthesizing, therefore stops making sugar, but the enzyme keeps working to turn sugars into starches. So if you eat a fruit that was picked a week ago, it will be more starchy and less sweet than a fruit you picked a minute ago (assuming they are both ripe). That's why fresh picked corn is so damned awesome. 

There is another lesson about how commercial farmers pick fruit long before it is ripe, transport it with a fungicide to prevent loss to fungus during travel, then spray the fruit with ethylene gas to ripen it. Which is why farmers market produce is tastier and better in so many ways than grocery store produce. 

And what you can take from all of this is that fruits naturally produce ethylene gas, which in turns stimulates them to ripen (positive feedback cycle), so if you keep fruits in a bag, they will ripen quickly. This is why you should hang your bananas and keep fruits in a basket instead of a bowl (unless you want them to ripen quickly).

I should turn this into a "lessons in biology" blog. It seems that I need an outlet for this trivia.

Anyway, I expected a little more greatness from my cukes, but they were certainly tasty, and it was much more rewarding to eat them than a store-bought cuke. I have more growing, so now I'll have to cheer them on. And my beans too, who are doing great.