It's after 5 PM on a friday.  I'm the last living soul on campus. It's the last day of finals (and therefore the semester) and I'm sitting in a lab feeding ant colonies and reading a new Entomology textbook.  I just wrote my summer to do list.  It's strange out right now.

It feels good, though.

So, there is an Indian grocer across from my apartment.  (It's the Gandhi and cholera Indians; not the Sitting Bull and smallpox Indians.)  The store has usually great produce, sometimes you have to keep your eye out for bad stuff.  Half the store is just spices, half is rice, the other halves are all sorts of stuff I can't pronounce.  It's a fat ( Read more... )

I sold my old not-so-road-legal Nissan last week for $300.  I just bought plane tickets to Ant Course for $298.84.  The rest is covered by a scholarship (room, food, equipment and tuition).

I feel like  I traded a shitty car for the best career experience of my life.  It's like Eco camp school for ants.

Finally beat Civ4 Colonization.  What a game.  I could not beat it 6 months ago, even on the easiest difficulty, so I moved on.  I started again with some fresh insight and it took me a couple days to beat it.  It's not so much an open game like Civ but instead its a puzzle--you have to figure out how to build the best colony fastest and then win ( Read more... )

I just became aware of how nerdy my livejournal friends page is.   Creee-ipes.  Ugh, such good stuff.  Statistics textbooks on amazon?  A history of quantum theory?  Entomology community (WHAT BUG IS THIS)?

Well today I collected my first queenright Aphaenogaster rudis colony.  So goddamn cool.

So I have a bug bite that may indicate Lyme disease.  Yay.

Its a bullseye rash, I'm in the woods all the time, I get ticks often etc. etc.  I'm not really panicking because I caught it early and I check often for such things.  As an ecologist in New England it's not if but when I'll get Lyme disease.  It's named after a town 20 minutes from where ( Read more... )

Plants vs. Zombies is the best game ever.  It's ten bucks.  Go play it now.

HOLY FUCK I'M GOING TO WIN THE NOBEL PRIZE.

For Bugology.

Found another potential exotic myrmecochore in my backyard.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corydalis_solida

"China, Russia and Ukraine were among countries banning imports of pork and pork products from Mexico and three U.S. states that have reported swine flu cases, while other countries, such as Indonesia, banned all pork imports.
The CDC says people cannot get the flu by eating pork or pork products."

Dirp.