A Chaotic Couple of Weeks

Well, I’ve probably set a new record for myself--2 weeks without a post. As you might imagine, I’ve been a little busy lately. For some reason, midterms really snuck up on me and hit me hard this spring... suffering a head cold and an internet outage in the middle of it didn’t help much. Throw in the fact that I’m in the middle of redecorating my living room, and you’ll see that I’ve barely had time to sleep, let alone blog.

Not that I’ve had much exciting news to blog about--the highlight of my last week was sorting through my massive book collection, trying to pare it down to the point where they fit neatly on the bookshelves. The purged books are all now waiting to be packed up and given away, lining an entire wall of my bedroom. (They’re lined up cover-to-cover, stacked two layers deep... perhaps hundreds of books... I’m afraid to count.) So, sadly, this isn’t much of an update, so much as a preview of future posts.

My planned ponderosa post petered out... after missing the trip to the trees, I was hoping to at least summarize what the lab was about. The data analysis portion sounded quite interesting, and I was ready to get into it, but it turned out that the biology department hadn’t renewed their licenses on the software that does the statistics. We ended up just toying with the results in Excel, which only gave us a vague description of ponderosa growth rates. The only thing I could tell you for sure is that the height of a tree correlates with its width (big surprise) and that larger trees seem to have grown a little faster. All of our data regarding elevation and density ended up being pretty ambiguous. Since then, we’ve abandoned forest dynamics for praire dog population studies. I’m writing a report for that lab, which is turning out to be rather interesting. So, rather than ponderosas, I’ll soon be blogging about praire dogs instead. (That will also give me an excuse to use some of the many dogtown photos I’ve taken over the years.)

However, since the next two weeks are shaping up to be as busy as the last two, I might not get to it right away. Don’t worry; this time I’m trying to prepare. A friend of mine will be doing a short guest blog series here next week. Also, as spring begins to emerge here in the Rockies, my shutter-button finger is beginning to itch, so expect to see a little nature photography over the coming weeks. That won’t be the only art, of course... I have a few fractals waiting in the wings... I just need to find time to polish them up and hang them here.

Please, accept my apologies for this most recent absence and my thanks for your patience.