Get Back to Work!

Over the past couple weeks I have been getting back into work mode. I did pretty good this week getting in at a reasonable time and staying all day in my office working on various odds and ends. School is starting back up in a week, I can hardly believe I'm going to be starting my second year at UNM so soon. If I was going to be teaching again I'm pretty sure I'd be having major anxiety over it, I'd be in a horrible mood. But, I'm actually feeling a little better than I was last week. I'm excited about the upcoming semester, I'm looking forward to getting a lot of my own work done.

This past week I've pretty much been working on trying to find out as much as I can about fossil sites in New Mexico caves. It's been very productive, so I just stuck with that all week. It's now Friday and I feel pretty confident that I have all of the faunas I'm interested in on my computer in a fairly simple spreadsheet. It only took about a day of messing around with the Neotoma Database and about a day and a half of tedious copying from tables in books to get it all together. I have just over a 1000 entries in my new data sheet, now it's just a matter of looking at what I have.

I haven't seen Felisa much this summer. We were at the mammal meeting together back in June, and I've seen her a handful of times around the department. It'll be good to get back to having weekly meetings to see where I'm at with research, and to finally see what we should do next with our book chapter. A couple weeks ago I put together three chapter sections with associated questions which we should address. I think if I had my way I would have us split up the topics and do some literature reviews to see what questions we could address.

I also downloaded some new carnivore data. The original set I had before got messed up, but I think I figured out what went wrong. I briefly looked at the new stuff and it looks like I avoided the problem I had before; however, I can't get fine time bins like I was hoping I could. I'm coming to the conclusion that a lot of stuff really hasn't been dated well, which makes it really difficult to do certain kinds of projects. I can understand, dates are really expensive. I know that when I do my next excavation, I'm going to definitely write some grants for a lot of radiocarbon dates.