Barkshed... pronounced Barkshd.

So, I haven't posted in a while, so I thought I'd give some updates on what's going on in my life.

Firstly, classes have ended, and I got good grades, so double yay!  I can now concentrate entirely on my research until August.  Speaking of research, I'm working with my first set of sticky pitfall traps, so that's pretty neat. I've hit some wrinkles, but that's all part of the process.

I have also started 'oil pulling' in the mornings, on a whim. It is a dental health craze, but I thought I'd give it a go and see if it did anything to the coffee stains on my teeth. I've been doing it for about a week now, and no significant results, but I'll give it more time before I judge.

Today I went to Barkshed Recreation Center in Arkansas with some other grad students.  The others were collecting leaf litter for Berlese funnels, and I was just there to get some hiking in.  As we drove in, we discovered that the GPS couldn't pronounce 'Barkshed' which was pretty funny.  We had a license to go trailblazing, so instead of walking along trails we were walking through a forest, which consisted mainly of many slopes.   It was a really intense hiking experience, and we saw a lot of cool wildlife.  Firstly, there were a TON of large, charasmatic swallowtail butterflies as we drove in.  We also saw a slimy salamander, a grey tree frog, another type of frog, and some aquatic salamander juveniles.  For arthropods, we saw an enormous scarab beetle larva, some cool looking millipedes, bunches of spiders (including a large mature widow of some sort, with yellow markings on its back), termites, and ants.  We also briefly saw a jumping spider that mimics an ant, which was super awesome!  I'm sure we saw more things, but I'm super tired, so I'm going to wrap it up.  I had an awesome time!

On Photographs

I am very excited, because today I submitted my very first photo to bugguide.net ( http://bugguide.net/node/view/908314 ) Link!  Although I enjoy taking insect photos, I don't normally get ones that are in focus enough or show enough of the characters to bother uploading. In going though some old photos though, I found multiple pictures of an individual, and it actually showed a lot of the parts I know as beetle characters. I love that website, and I am excited to contribute a little to it. Hopefully I will be able to contribute more, and maybe help identify things in the future.

On a related note, I'm super excited that I figured out how to crop photos without using paint. It was a good morning for learning!

I will end with a couple photos that I liked, but don't consider valuable to upload onto bugguide.

A Syrphid fly of some sort, getting nectar from a yellow coneflower. Not many characters are visible, but it's a good photo to exhibit how the family looks a lot like bees!

You can see a couple flies getting nectar in this photo. I'm still on the fence about cropping and submitting this one. 

Japanese beetles are so pretty. They are identifiable in this photo, but bugguide already has quite a few photos of these. 

You can see, if you squint, a really pretty blue/green damselfly in this photo. There aren't many characters visible though.

Here, I'll zoom in for you. 

((All photos copyright Caitlin Race 2013))

Culinary Abominations

On occasion, I will find myself hungry, but without any leftovers or any clear idea of what to cook. I look in my fridge and I have one or two random food items, and my brain decides it is a good idea to just put them all together and eat it. This is what I refer to in a fond and somewhat horrified manner as 'culinary abominations.'  Today was one of those days.

Looking around my fridge and kitchen, I found I had bread, tortillas, a bit of cooked rice, peanut butter, condiments, cheddar biscuit mix, a bit of cheese, and eggs. Now, I'd already had eggs in a basket today (with cheese) so I didn't really want it again. My brain said, I should eat the rice, and that's when we caught the train to crazy town.

My Dinner:

1 cup of cooked rice, 1 tablepoon of miracle whip, 1 tsp brown mustard, some Fiesta! seasoning, some garlic powder all mixed together like an egg salad gone wrong.  This was put into a tortilla spread with crunchy peanut butter, and eaten cold.

It was.... surprisingly edible, but sometimes I wonder what in the world I am thinking when I make dinner.

Have a nice dinner everyone!

Project Update

So, I realize that I haven't posted in a couple of ..... months. BUT I have been making some progress, just nothing that was particularly interesting until now.  I have been adjusting to attending classes again, and I have finally figured out the nature of my thesis question.  That has been a huge load off of my mind in the last couple of days, and now I just need to figure out all the set up so that I can do the project I have planned.

Okay, so quick background. My insect, Spodoptera frugiperda (Fall Armyworm), has two 'strains' that exist within the species.  They are only distinguishable by molecular markers and some behavioral patterns, and they aren't 100% reproductively isolated from each other, so they haven't been designated as two separate species yet. We aren't quite sure how often the strains hybridize with each other in the wild for two reasons. First, the molecular markers to identify hybrids are not currently the best, and second the hybridization studies done in labs contradict each other a little bit. That is because as the moths are kept in captivity, their strain fidelity seems to break down and they mate between strains more often. So, I am going to collect both strains in the wild and establish colonies. Then I will make hybrid crosses with the wild ones, then every couple generations, to see how the rates of hybridization change.  I'm pretty excited to work with this system, because I will get experience with molecular techniques, randomization of experimental design, and I will get to think about the question of what defines a species.

In other news, I seem to be able to mail things out from my apartment, but getting things that are mailed to me has been an effort fraught with frustration. I still have not done my taxes. *sigh*  Everything should come out alright in the end though.

Until next time, signing off.

The New Year

Ah, the first week of the new year!  It's been a while since my last blog post, but everything has been looking up.  I have just gotten back to Arkansas after spending a couple weeks hanging out with my family and my boyfriend for Christmas and New Years.  Those holidays will be covered in a separate post.

It's been quite a busy couple of days. I drove back to AR on the 1st, and I started an intersession class on statistics on the 2nd.  Trying to fit all of my returning home activities (picking up stopped mail, grocery shopping, cooking proper meals, and attempting to put away all the stuff I brought back with me) into the hours after the 9-4 class has been a challenge.  I have all the important things done now, for the most part, and so I feel like I'm a little more in control of my time.  One of the things I've been trying to work on, you can call it a 'resolution' if you want, is to be better about budgeting, both my time and my money.  I think I'm off to a decent start with that this year.  All in all, I am feeling very optimistic.

My class has been AWESOME.  I wasn't sure what to expect from an all day lecture about statistics, but I'm having no trouble staying awake.  We haven't gotten to much statistics yet, because we have been covering some basic ground about the philosophy of science, and learning how to use some basic tools in "R".  I'm really excited about how simple the program/language is, for a programming language that is.  I hope that I will continue comprehending the programming features we've gone over, and I look forward to starting some statistics training tomorrow!

Weekend Activities

I actually got up and went to church today. It's a bad habit of mine to disinclined to do things unless I have someone to do them with, but I kicked myself in the butt and went, and I'm very glad that I did.  I went to the service of Mission Boulevard Baptist Church, and they were quite welcoming.  It was very nice to be interacting with people face to face. Phone calls and chatting on the internet are great, but there is very little substitute for real face-time with people. I fear I am too much of a hermit, typically, for my own good sometimes.  I am so taken with the place on the outset that I considered going to the choir practice, but I got distracted and anyways, I don't quite want to jump in with both feet on the first day. All in all, I am definitely planning on returning next week.  Several of the people there are associated with the university, either working there, formerly having worked there, or attending classes.  There were lots of charming children running about and it was a lively place to be.  I think it will also be good to get to know people outside of the university setting, as well as my classmates.

In other news, I made a great pot of soup.  I took the 15 bean soup mix you can find with the dried beans, and chopped an entire thing of celery, 1 large onion, and a bit of ham plus a ham bone into it. Then I brought it to boil and then simmered it for about three hours. Perfectly delicious, especially on a cool day.

I am preparing to go on a trip to Kansas State in the latter half of this week, so don't expect to hear much from me then.  I have enjoyed phone calls and texts with several of my family members.  I have been abusing the Agatha Christie section of the local library to read the Hercule Poirot novels.

That's about all I can think of at the moment.  Ciao!

Thanksgiving

It is coming up on holiday time and so I have been reflecting on my friends and family.  I don't realize how much time there is in the evenings until I don't have anyone around to spend it with.  I have kept touch with some of you better than others, but I will try to get better about calling and/or texting people. Through the magic of the internet, I got to have dinner and a movie with my boyfriend. We had a video chat, we watched The Mask of Zorro and ate Mexican. It was fun, it felt very themed. I am going to have Thanksgiving dinner at my Professor's house, with his family and some of the other graduate students. I am thankful to have a group to eat with. It may have felt a little lonely otherwise, even though I have another video date that evening when I get home.  ^_^

I have taken advantage of the Thanksgiving market sales to make some banana bread, some pumpkin bread, and I have even gotten myself a little spiral ham.  I am going to cook it up and then store a lot for meals later, and make the bone into a big pot of hambone-bean soup.  I am much looking forward to it. My freezer is quickly filling, which will be nice in a couple of months when I am super busy and have less time to cook.

In a housing update, I have continued to see the occasional roach nymph.  I am not as worried about it, because nymphs do travel a lot more than adults, and so I think they are immigrants from somewhere else. All the same, I put out some baits, because I haven't seen any spiders. I told the office, and they said that the pest control treatment can take a couple of weeks to take real effect, because it needs to get onto some travelling roaches and be taken back to their colony area. That makes sense, and I am not currently too worried about the situation. In a way, it just gives me more of a reason to keep my rooms fastidiously clean than I normally have. It keeps me from getting lazy!  The lightbulb in my front room burned out, and when I went to ask them where I should go to get a new one, and what the wattage should be (since it wasn't recorded on the bulb) they just gave me a new one out of the back room. It has the super small socket, instead of standard, so they said they would just give it to me since they are hard to find. That was convenient.

That is all I have for now, until next time, dear readers. Until next time...

PS: I also listened to all of the archive for the faux-radio show podcast "Welcome to Nightvale" and it was pretty cool.  https://soundcloud.com/nightvaleradio