Personal Updates – Page 2

An update on the Hawk Owl

December 11, 2013 Matt Personal Updates

It's been over a week since a Northern Hawk Owl was spotted hanging out across a busy street from a shopping mall in Moscow, Idaho, but the bird is still here and reliably seen in the same locations. I've now seen the bird four times and may continue to watch and observe it until it is no longer a novelty.…

The latest hype in Moscow

December 5, 2013December 5, 2013 Matt All Things Moscow, Personal Updates

[caption id="attachment_428" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Northern Hawk Owl[/caption] The latest rage in Moscow, Idaho is the sighting of an immigrant that shouldn't be here. A Northern Hawk Owl (Surnia ulula) has been spotted in Moscow across Rt. 8 from the Safeway parking lot. The earliest sightings on eBird show that this individual has been hanging around since Tuesday, reliably in the…

Look what I found

October 19, 2013 Matt Personal Updates

[caption id="attachment_415" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Long-toed Salamander, Ambystoma macrodactylum[/caption] Since we finished the interior of the house, it was time to clean up the garage and start moving everything back inside. This was also a good time to start tidying up the yard before winter hits. Last weekend, we took down an old dog house that we were using to raise…

The New Kitchen

October 14, 2013October 14, 2013 Matt Personal Updates

[caption id="attachment_422" align="aligncenter" width="500"] The Kitchen before renovations.[/caption] Three months ago, we had some pipes leak in our kitchen that caused some damage to the flooring and the cabinets and resulted in us basically getting a brand new kitchen. We contacted State Farm to see about getting any coverage, and thankfully, they agreed to help cover some of the damage.…

October Update

October 1, 2013 Matt Personal Updates

Where has time gone? It's already October, which means I missed out on September. Well, I didn't really miss it. I was busy with a graduate school ritual known as the preliminary examination. Prelims are, without a doubt, the most stressful event for a graduate student. You might think it's writing the dissertation or even giving your final defense. The…

Garden Produce

August 16, 2013August 15, 2013 Matt Personal Updates

The tomato plants have fruit, but I'm awaiting them to ripen. The pepper plants are starting to produce. The strawberries are on their second round of harvest. In the mean time, the squash and zucchini are providing us with food of plenty. Yesterday I picked four zucchini, all from the same plant. This morning, I grabbed two more before leaving…

The Joy of Home Ownership: Adventures in Plumbing

July 26, 2013July 25, 2013 Matt Personal Updates

When we moved to Moscow, we knew we'd be here for more than five years and that buying our own place would probably benefit us more in the long run than renting. There are many advantages to owning your own home. The most obvious is that your monthly payments go toward something tangible. When you pay rent on an appartment,…

My Research: What I have been up to

July 17, 2013December 13, 2013 Matt Personal Updates, Research Blog

Last week, the fruits of my last three year's work has finally come to fruition in the journal PLoS One. The premise is that the personality behavior we call boldness, or the bold-shy continuum, is not only heritable, but a genetically correlated multivariate trait. The research is essentially a continuation of a project Mary Oswald completed for her dissertation, however…

The Garden of 2013

July 3, 2013July 16, 2013 Matt Personal Updates

Because I was laid up and out of commission for much of the spring, I wasn't able to work on expanding our garden much this year. Last year, I built a third 4x8 foot box and a 2x4 foot box which were meant to be tiered for planting small annual herbs in large quantities. I never got that box filled…

Birding in Lewiston

March 10, 2013March 10, 2013 Matt Personal Updates

Given my current disabled condition, there's not much I can do to get ouside and enjoy the sunshine, but there are a few places that I can go. There are paved walking and bike trails in every nearby town, and some of them offer spectacular scenery. The Trail of the Coeur D'Alenes, for example, starts in Plummer and meanders for…

The Ski Trip to End All Ski Trips

March 1, 2013March 1, 2013 Matt Personal Updates, Travel Stories

February 17th began as any other trip to McCall. I rolled out of bed around 5:00 am, packed the car with my gear, and 20 minutes later, I was leaving for Moscow to meet up with Tyler and Genevieve. We made it to Brundage around 10:30 local time and headed straight to the Centenial chair where we met up with…

Chickadees

February 5, 2013December 15, 2013 Matt Personal Updates, Photo Blog

For Christmas, I bought Erin a new bird feeder to replace one that had been broken earlier in the summer. A few weeks ago, we finally got some seed and put it outside, but this was in the middle of a cold snap where daytime highs remained in the low 20's, and the nighttime lows, well, we just won't go…

Snowshoeing: Potlatch River Loop

January 20, 2013January 20, 2013 Matt Personal Updates

This week's snowshoeing adventure takes us on the Potlatch Canyon loop trail (Clearwater NF #765). If the view above looks familiar, it's because I have hiked this loop many times in the summer, and first posted about it two years ago. This time, armed with snowshoes, we had a very successful winter hike through the woods. Despite the rising temperatures…

Free Meat!

December 27, 2012 Matt Personal Updates

Warning! This post may contain some graphic and delicious images. Proceed at your own risk. (more…)

Fall Foliage

October 18, 2012October 18, 2012 Matt Personal Updates

I've been spending a lot of time finishing up my dissertation proposal, which is due in a little over a week, and that has kept me from taking time to enjoy the outdoors. We got some considerable rain over the past weekend which lead to some dramatic skies and really clear views on Monday and Tuesday, but I just wasn't…

Aurora

October 9, 2012October 10, 2012 Matt Personal Updates, Photo Blog

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="500"] A test shot from early on in the night. Notice the two meteors captured in this frame. Apparently, I also caught the end of a major meteor shower.[/caption] This story begins Friday night when I learned that a large coronal mass ejection (CME) sent a burst of solar radiation from the sun headed toward Earth.…

Smoke in the Air

September 28, 2012September 28, 2012 Matt Personal Updates

Where have I been the last three weeks? To put it lightly, I have been choking on smoke. Since returning from the Seven Devils trip over Labor Day Weekend, the wildfires in the northwest, particularly in Idaho, have flared up. A fire south of the Devils appeared as well as a large fire just outside of Riggins. There have been…

Huckleberries.

September 9, 2012 Matt Personal Updates

I went up to Freezeout Saddle with some photo club people to pick huckleberries. As I expected, they were still ripe, and very plentiful. But the problem with huckleberries is that you can pick for an hour and still not get very much. I think I came home with maybe a pint of berries. I brought my camera up as…

Perseoids

August 13, 2012August 12, 2012 Matt Personal Updates

Every summer at early-mid August, we enter a portion of the solar system rife with meteors, and ever year around this time, many of those chunks of rock and debris hit our atmosphere and burn up, giving us the Perseoid meteor shower. This year, the shower did not occur during a full moon, and so the skies were dark and…

Hard drives and data storage

August 8, 2012August 8, 2012 Matt Personal Updates

I've come into a real conundrum lately. I'm running out of space on my hard drive. Earlier in the year when I thought my hard drive was dying, I bought an external drive which I use to move old files for storage and back up my current system. The problem is that using the external hard drive as a working…