Personal Updates

Somehow, I managed to go to two conferences in one semester. Tomorrow, I’ll be heading to Port Townsend, WA along with several other members of the department for the bi-annual Evo-WIBO conference. This is a small, regional conference for evolutionary biologists in the Pacific Northwest. There are only going to be around 200 or so people attending (compared to the 2-3000 at SICB), and there is only one talk session at a time. So lucky me, I got chosen to give an oral presentation. Did I mention it’s a small conference? It begins Saturday morning and ends Sunday at noon….

The puppies are now over 8 weeks old and oh so cute. As you can imagine, seven growing pups indoors can create quite a mess that is hard to keep on top of. On top of that, any time you step into their room, they all mob you for attention. So, as spring weather has descended upon the Palouse, we found scrap lumber and fencing and built an outdoor playpen for the dogs. So far it is doing the job. It’s also giving the pups some much needed fresh air and sunshine, which in turn tires them out so all…

    This semester, one of my classes has required me to turn in all of my assignments in LaTeX. LaTeX (la-tek) is built on TeX, a typesetting language meant to produce beautiful documents reminiscent of the days when papers were printed from engraved plates. Typesetting was an art that got lost in the digital age. When I first got the news that assignments were to be handed in using LaTeX, I admit I was a bit worried. The assignments were already going to be difficult enough since it is a bioinformatics class working with data types I have not…

Harvest Moon, originally uploaded by Matthew Singer. Beth, one of the photo club members and employee at the Prichard Art Gallery downtown, mentioned at our last meeting that a student was in town with the current exhibit at the gallery. He didn’t know anyone and was desperate to hang out with people his own age. So we got a group together last night and hung out around the town. I thought the visiting student was an art student, but it turns out he’s actually studying conservation biology and had spent some time working environmental education. And, he’s from Maine. Well…

  Out of nowhere, our dog population has increased four fold. Here’s the back story. Several weeks ago, I came home to find two extra dogs at the house. They were two German Shepherds, a male and a female, that Erin had decided to watch for a friend while she got on her feet and found a place to live with her dogs. Four big dogs in our tiny house is a bit much, and it didn’t help that the two we were watching were very active. Lana, the female, is a very nervous dog, especially around men, and she…

Somehow,  I had arranged the semester to be fairly light allowing me to work on my research. I was only signed up for one class, the work of which parallelled the work I have to do for my degree, namely write up a dissertation project proposal. On top of that, I was slated to teach one lab section, so overall my class and teaching load would be light. Funny how things actually work out. I am taking 3 classes, though one not for credit, and teaching two sections of lab. 314 lab isn’t really that bad, it’s all computer-based, but…

Holy crap it’s Thanksgiving already!  Well I’ve been thinking about what to make this post about. There are several great options: The real story of thanksgiving and how it became what we perceive it to be today, the start of the commercial materialism season, the nature of human behavior, and so on. But I think rather than the normal cynical post about our need to celebrate lies and propaganda, I’ll just fill you in with a brief update of what I’ve been up to. For starters, it’s been a busy semester. The past month, I’ve been breeding the 3rd generation…

I went to Florida, originally uploaded by Matthew Singer. Taking a break from the usual trips into the mountains, I went to Florida last weekend to celebrate the marriage of one of my good buddies. The wedding was in Pensacola Beach, with the actual ceremony on the beach outside of town. I’ve been to Florida before, but not the Gulf coast, and especially not the panhandle, and so when I got there, I was quite surprised at just how built up it was. When I think of Florida, it’s usually the Tampa/Orlando area, which I try to avoid, or the…

While the east coast has contended with an earthquake and a hurricane, we have been enduring our summer heat wave, temperatures in excess of 90 degrees. It rarely gets to 95 out here, but when it does, it’s brutal. Of course, when it’s in the mid-90’s up on the Palouse, it’s over 100 down in Lewiston. Currently, our weather station reads 98 outside and 92 inside. We don’t have air conditioning. There’s really no need for it. While it’s in the 90’s now, at night, it will cool off below 70, sometimes getting downright chilly. We wake up in the…