Personal Updates

  • Perseoids

    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 the stars were bright. Some of the photo club folks wanted to have a camping trip this weekend, and that devolved into a fire and star photography night at our place. The meteor shower was pretty good Saturday night. There…

  • Hard drives and data storage

    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 drive is not an ideal solution when my primary (read: only) computer at the moment is a portable notebook. Thus, I don’t want to be using the external hard drive to store all of my music and photography, the two…

  • Garden Update

    For the past month, we’ve been able to enjoy some of the produce coming out of the garden. The lettuce has been producing beautiful and tasty leaves. There’s nothing like a freshly-picked salad. One of the lettuces has flowered and will soon go to seed. I think we will let it mature in an attempt to collect seeds to plant for next year. However, the rest of the heads continue to produce leaves to pick. Back when the chickens ate my lettuce to the ground, I planted more seeds in case the plants didn’t come back. Well, they did come…

  • Publications

    I don’t usually like to gloat about my accomplishments, but sometimes a little self promotion doesn’t hurt. I’ll start with the announcement of my first publication, which officially rolled off the presses last month. Last year, our lab was contacted to write a book chapter in a methods and protocol book on assessing anxiety behaviors in Zebrafish. So Barrie, Maia, Mary, and I set out to publish our behaviortyping protocol for assessing observer preference, depth preference, and feeding latency for high-throughput experiments. Robison, BD, MJ Benner, ML Singer, ME Oswald. A High Throughput and Inexpensive Assay for Anxiety Related Behaviors…

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    Aurora, part II

    Well, I made my last post a bit too soon. After spending the evening on Freezeout Ridge (story and photos to come soon), Erin reminded us that the aurora might still be occuring and that we could possibly see it tonight. Clarkia isn’t the best place to test this hypothesis because its surrounded by tall mountains in all directions, so as we passed through Bovill, I noticed a glow on the northern horizon. At this point, it was only 10:00, still early enough that the glow could be residual light from the sun. I pulled the car over and set…

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    Aurora

    We got alerts that a solar flare could cause an aurora that would be visible into the middle states. So, last night, I checked the sky and luckily it was clear to the north. I saw a faint glow on the horizon and set up the camera. Sure enough, there was an aurora. The excitement didn’t last too long. I wanted to view this one from Steptoe Butte, one of the best places around for viewing auroral activity. So, we got in the car and started driving west. Unfortunately, the sky was overcast over much of the Palouse, and by…

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    Fireworks in the Mountains

    A garden update from the last post: I’m happy to announce that the lettuce that the chickens ate down to the soil is growing back quite nicely and will be ready for consumption within a few days. And now on to the main post: Elk River hosts an annual Independence Day celebration they call “Fireworks in the Mountains,” but they don’t necessarily hold it on the 4th of July, but on the weekend before or after if the 4th happens to be mid-week. The event attracts a lot of people and the general store stays open late to sell its…

  • Gardening

    I can’t believe it’s July already. Time is flying by this summer. June has been a mixture of hot and dry with cold and rainy, and that has been good for my garden. Last year, I built two raised beds, each 8′ x 4′, but I only got one bed filled with dirt. It yielded some nice tomato plants that I had started from seed, until the goat got in and ate them down. This year, I got the second bed filled with dirt and built two more 8′ x 2′ beds which I filled with strawberry plants. The two…

  • Adventures in fast, reliable ineternet

    For the past seven years, I have been living with slow, unreliable internet. In 2004-2005, the Weis Ecology Center was on dial-up service. Camp McDowell in Alabama was also on dial-up service, shared on a wireless network. If you can remember far enough back when dial-up was the forefront of home internet technology, you might also remember how long it took for webpages to load and how it would randomly lose connection, and then the busy signals trying to reconnect. In 2006, those problems had not improved. Ferry Beach had a more reliable connection, though it was still slow. I’m…

  • The Last One

    Since last week, we had been down to three puppies. Three is much more manageable than seven, but still a crowd. In fact, having two out at a time was still a handful. Tuesday, I made up posters advertising the rest of the pups, and in less than 24 hours, we had two more sold. This left us with one Pink Girl to care for. Having one puppy isn’t so bad. They’re a lot more mellow by themselves, they don’t eat as much, and most importantly, there’s not as much pee and poop to clean up. Of the three that…