Monday, October 12, 2009

First Feedings!

So today was an exciting day in the lab, the first of my spiderlings decided to eat! After two weeks of watching them run from pinhead crickets, two of them finally got fed up enough to eat them. I'm seriously hoping that this starts a trend among the little guys, because watching them not eat for half an hour at a time is really discouraging and rather dull. This is another good sign, because once they start eating they'll usually keep eating which will keep me out of the lab before 8:30 in the morning. So there was much rejoicing.

Oh Look, It's October!

I only slack on days that end in y, so don't give me any of this, "You never update!", nonsense. Alright, well, I do never update... but damn it, life gets busy.

Anyhow, back to the update... The first big item of news is, I graduate in April, if everything goes smoothly and my audit goes through, and if it doesn't the university and I are going to have issues. So, yes, one and a half blissful semesters left of my undergrad and then I have to apply to grad school, where the real work apparently begins. I'm really excited about it, I finally get to work with marine invertebrates! Bring on the colossal squid, I shall find them, and study them, and discover their secrets! *insert mad scientist laugh here* Speaking of mad scientists, research has begun in the lab for this year. Instead of doing the SDA and RMR research from last year we've decided to work on naive feeding behaviors and fasting spans before and after molts in spiderlings. So far, we've discovered that for some reason the spiders are scared of pinhead crickets. This was honestly a surprise to me due to how awesomely happy the bigger tarantulas are to chow down on a cricket (Feeding day is coming up, I'll be sure to get pictures). The only problem I'm finding with the research this year is the sheer amount of time that I'm spending in the lab along with the workload from all my classes. I'm still caught up and somehow have enough time for photography and my granny hobbies (Knitting, cross stitch, etc.).

In other news, I ended up in the hospital for two and a half days back in September. How, you may ask... well, I'm going to tell you. Turns out that zebra mussels are sharp and they will slice through a human foot quite easily. The cut, however, was not what landed me in the hospital, what landed me in there was the dirt that wasn't cleaned out of the wound with some sort of bacteria on it which had a chance to multiply when my foot was sewn shut. So Monday I went in for stitches and a teatnus shot, Tuesday I went back for a bad reaction to the antibiotic an my foot being a rather worrying shade of red. They finally let me go home late on Thursday, and my foot is still open and healing slowly. I can post pictures, but unless asked for they're remaining with my mom, because she's really excited about my foot healing for some reason.

Earlier this month I realized that Christmas is coming and I am nowhere near close to finishing most people's presents. My aunt's gift is the closest to being done, followed closely by my grandparent's blanket, and in a distant third is my brother's gigantic cross stitch that I don't even have half done yet. The next couple months are going to be a killer on the hands, pictures will be coming when each project is completed. Another side project is a cross stitch from one of my favorite web comics: Questionable Content This project is going to take me an insane amount of time to complete, it's by far the largest pattern that I've even thought of doing, but when it's done it's going to be amazing. I'll be posting progress photos and updates here, starting next week when I get the chance to organize all of my materials so you all can see the immense scale of this thing. 59 different colors and a base cloth of 20x24 inches should give some idea. It'll be awesome, I promise. (Special thanks need to go to Jeph Jacques for letting me use his strip for my own crafty ends).

Anyway, that's a lot of the random that's going on. One of these days, hopefully one that's on the soon side, I'll get around to updating this a whole lot more.