First Day of School, Fall 2011

Today was the first of the semester, and I'm still in denial that summer is officially over. In reality, I really only had about 3 months off, which at the beginning seems like a really long amount of time. However, every time I looked at the calendar I was shocked.

It's so weird seeing all the kiddies back on campus. I've actually been hiding out in my office for the most part. The area I'm in now isn't frequented by undergraduates too often, and it's pretty quiet over all. The best part of the first week of school is all the free stuff. This past Friday I was lamenting about how I needed a highlighter, and I was debating whether it was worth it to walk to the bookstore to buy one. Boy am I glad I didn't because I scored three different color highlighters today at a tent near the duck pond. That, AND there was free ice cream this afternoon. Welcome weeks are always chock full of freebies. I hear tomorrow the free food item is watermelon, hopefully tacos or pizza or something will come up later in the week. On Wednesday the department is having a welcome back get together, which should also have food. I think I can sneak away from class long enough to get a snack.

Speaking of class, my Quaternary Paleoclimate seminar starts tomorrow. I hear it's a whole lot of reading all semester long. I'm actually looking forward to it, I need to learn as much about this subject as quickly as possible, since it is a pretty important part of my research.

Other than the free stuff and there being more people on campus, today was pretty much like any other day I've been having this month. I sat in my office, read, and took notes on journal articles. I'm starting to get hungry, so I think I may head home soon.

Matt and I went to Santa Fe yesterday, I'll elaborate on that more in another post.

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.

Research Experience for Undergraduates

About 45 minutes south of Albuquerque is the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Station. Each summer undergraduates from different universities come to participate in the Research Experience for Undergraduates (RUE) program. Felisa mentored a student, Nikki, from the University of Tennessee at Martin. She works on plant fossils and the project she did for the REU was looking at the plant macrofossils from the middens in our lab. A lot of the other students did research projects at the Sevilleta or the surrounding area, and a wide range of topics.

Yesterday all of that hard research culminated in their REU symposium, where the students gave talks about their research. Many students actually get publishable papers out of the work they do during this program. Nikki with hopefully get two papers. Fred commented that she was comparing the quality of the talks to those we see at professional meetings, not your typical student presentations. The quality was really very good, and I was really impresses with what the students came up with in only a couple months.

There were also two students doing science inspired art projects. One student made nature based art sculptures and took "sincere" photos of the other students doing their research projects. The other student constructed a wind organ and helped the other students make kites (which did and did not fly very well). The idea was to get the research students thinking outside of the box.

I thought the whole thing was fantastic. Way to go students!

Rough Couple Weeks

Since coming back to Albuquerque a couple weeks ago I've been having a rough time getting back to normal. Specifically I've been having this constant feeling of anxiety and tightness in my chest, like I can't breath, but my lungs are clear and my asthma isn't acting up or anything. I've been showing all the signs of having mild generalized anxiety disorder.

I'm not sure what has triggered all of this, but a couple of things stick out.

Immediately after I returned from my trip I had to go to the hospital for a procedure. Originally I was going to be on vacation for another week, but my appointment was moved up so I missed out on more time at home. The results of the procedure were disappointing. A day or so after I started having the anxiety symptoms.

After coming back I've been feeling really homesick for CT. Crazy, because I don't miss the place specifically, but only seeing my family a handful of times throughout the year is taking its toll. The past couple of times I've visited home I've felt really sad after leaving, and I meant to visit my dad's grave when I was home, but I was in Virginia when I realized I had forgotten which made me feel like crap. Since getting back in to town I've been having upsetting dreams.

Last week I was going over some analyses for my research, and I realized I had overlooked something. The pattern I had been seeing in my data doesn't appear to be significant now, so I don't know what that leaves me for that project. Furthermore I don't know if I have the kind of personality that works in academia. I'm not super competitive. I'm modestly driven, but I get bogged down and stressed out pretty easily. I don't know if a high stress career is such a good move.

About two weeks after my hospital let down and a week after my research realization I developed shingles, which has only added to my discomfort. My doctor prescribed some antiviral medication, but told me that stress was probably the trigger for the outbreak.The health center sees their greatest increase in occurrences around finals week. But it's the middle of the summer. What the hell am I so worked up over?

I don't want to complain. I hate admitting that I don't feel good, but I need to let it out somewhere. I look around and I have a lot going for me, but I've been in a slump for over two weeks, and I don't know how to articulate how I'm feeling. My therapist thinks I'm still grieving over my dad, but it's been so long. I hate to think that every time something bad happens I'm going to have a delayed and drawn out process of getting over it. How am I supposed to function and live my life if I can't predict or control how I feel?

Maybe I need to go home more often, or call home more often. Maybe I need to cut down on my personal responsibilities until I get everything under control. I see my therapist again next week, I'm going to talk to him about medication options. Am I depressed? I've always been very tightly would and high strung. I worry now that my personality is going to make me sick. I had been feeling pretty good for a couple months, but it's like I go a period of time feeling fine, and then I get sucked back into a hole. I eventually come out again with some time. This week has actually been a bit better, I've been sleeping a little better over the past couple days.

I was supposed to avoid strenuous activity for two weeks after my procedure. Now that I can exercise again maybe that will help.

Virginia and the DC Area

On Sunday of our vacation Matt and I said goodbye to my mom and took a train down to DC to spend some time with his family and some friends we have down in that area.

As expensive as the train is, it beats the hell out of driving. I would never volunteer to drive through DC, although we did toy with the idea of renting a car to get down there. I just wouldn't have handled the last part through the city. In the end we decided the train was better. We left early, we were at the train station by 6:45 (if my memory serves), but the nice thing about long train rides is you can make up on sleep. Matt also wasn't sick with a stomach virus this time, which was also a plus.

Some highlights from our time in DC:

Home cooked dinners ala Matt's Mom
Games and dinner at Faccia Luna with Dan, Arhan, and Sarah
Seeing Charlie and playing at the infinitely superior mini-golf courses in the DC area

Matt and I also took in the DC zoo and the Smithsonian American Art Museum/National Portrait Gallery. I haven't been to either of these places before. The zoo apparently has two giant panda bears, but it was hot, and they were hiding, and we didn't see them. Much of the zoo was actually under renovations. This actually didn't bother me, I'd much rather see that a public zoo is being kept up and improved. We can always go back and see what we missed next time.

Young lions, living the good life. They're all chewing on cow femurs!

Kiko going to the Think Tank. They have ropes that go overhead across the zoo so they can get around. So cool

In honor of my lab and our work on body size.

Me and a statue of a sloth bear. Didn't get a shot of the real deal, and this would be cute if not for all the stupid purse and camera straps.

Flamingos! Baby flamingo!!

Connecticut Trip: The Final Recap

Some of you may be wondering why it is taking me so long to write about my travels this summer, and why I am doing it after the fact. True, doing it during my trips would have made this simpler, but for security reasons I don't like publicizing when I'm not home for long stretches.

I've also been catching up at school and have had some health stuff come up, but that's another post.

While I was home I wanted to make sure I got at least one beach day in, since New Mexico is land locked, and I don't want to cross over into Mexico to see the ocean. On Thursday we went to Ocean Beach Park, in New London, CT. On the one hand, it's nice to have bathrooms and food easily accessible. On the other hand, it costs $14 to park, which is kind of nutty. But then on the other hand again, it's a pretty clean beach, so I guess you have to pay for it somehow. I never use it, but for an additional fee they also have a small water park and mini golf.

When I go to the beach, my primary objective is to be as lazy as possible. I always being books and snacks and spend a good bit of time sleeping. I did get into the water, of course, and it was a nice break from the heat. Matt was reluctant to go in much further than waist deep, which is actually counter productive. You need to just get in, get it over with, and you'll feel much better afterward. Standing around shivering just allows you to get splashed. Being in the ocean also means you sometimes pick up hitch-hikers, like this arthropod that must have gotten on our blanket via Matt's bathing suit (eek!)...

My other favorite thing about going to the ocean is just walking up and down the shore, looking at whatever I can find. Ocean Beach has a bunch of these pinking half clam shell looking things that are actually snail shells. They're really pretty. While looking out over the water, a huge sail ship was coming in for OpSail, a tall ships event that goes on every year. They sometimes have historical ships, the one we saw was pretty far off shore but I think it was a Class A ship. I could be wrong, I don't really know much about ships.

On Friday evening Lura and Steve had us over for home made pizza and game night. I have to say, I really miss these guys and I always look forward to seeing them when I visit. It's funny because I wasn't super close with Lura in high school, but we've become pretty good friends because we kept in contact through college. There aren't too many people I still see regularly since I've left CT, not because I wanted that to happen, but it takes a lot of work on both sides to keep up.

Matt and I specifically made room in our suitcases to bring some board games along on our trip, with the hopes of having a game night. We successfully stowed away Settler's of Catan and Flux. We brought Settler's to Lura and Steve's, and also showed them a new card game we learned from our friends in Socorro called Oh Bleep! All in all, it was a fun evening.

For some reason that still escapes me, East Hartford had it's July 4th fireworks on July 9th (maybe because it was a Saturday). Matt, my Mom, and I went down to the river for some fried dough, whatever free stuff we could find, and pulled pork sandwiches before the fireworks. Despite my town having no money, and the supposed economic apocalypse that our country is going through, the fireworks were actually really good this year. The town sets them off from two barges in the river, and we got a really good seat up on the levee. Aqua, who I haven't seen in over a year, was supposed to meet us but she got held up and I didn't see her until after the show was over. Regardless we chatted while she enjoyed her much needed fried dough. The next time I'm home, I'm having her over for tea for a proper visit. No excuses.

Big East Trip: Part 2

The remainder of my visit in Connecticut was all about trying to fit in as many activities into one week as humanly possible:


Tuesday evening - Trivia
Wednesday - Wadsworth Atheneum
Thursday -Beach with my mom
Friday - Visited Grandma, Dinner at Lura and Steve's
Saturday - Uncle Dave came over at lunch time for burgers and hot dogs, fireworks in the evening

I don't generally stress too much about having something to do every waking moment when I'm on vacation, but since I only had one week in CT, I had to make it count.

After our Tuesday trek to the shore to get lobster, our plan was to meet up with Mike, his girlfriend Emily, and Katie for trivia in Hartford. The place we were going to apparently hadn't updated their website since Christmas, but made us feel like WE were the dopes for expecting trivia. We ditched that plan and went to another place for some pub quiz action. We were half an hour late but still played. I personally believe that had we gotten there at the beginning, we would have kicked some ass. After a couple beers I didn't want to call it a night, so we found a diner-type place where I had a very large piece of chocolate cake. It was important for me to catch up with Mike, I didn't get to see him at all during my last visit because I was sick, and it would have been completely unacceptable if I missed him again this time around.

On Wednesday we stayed in the area and went to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. We spent a good 4+ hours in Hartford, going to the museum, getting lunch, wandering an old graveyard, and then back to the museum. It was a good day to be inside, away from the heat and humidity. They don't let the paintings suffer from the weather, so it was comfortable indoors at the Wadsworth.

I always forget just how much stuff this museum has, it looks modestly sized from the exterior, but I can never seem to get through all the artwork in one afternoon when I visit. I came close this time, but only because I'm not a fan of modern art and I kind of blew through some rooms that had carpet costumes and large monochromatic canvasses with splatters of paint. There was also this video of a guy on a motorcycle picking up a dead kangaroo... like I said I don't really get some of this stuff.

One of my favorite paintings by Dali (the melting clock guy), is on display. I like the painting because it has images that sort of magically pop out at you the longer you stare at it. The Wadsworth has quite a few paintings by some very famous artists, and it's not like there's any high tech security there. They do have a large guys who tells you when you're getting too close, but other than that it's just you and the painting right in front of you. They also have a fairly large collection from the Hudson School of Art, and I like standing in front of large landscape paintings.