Incredibly, life goes on

Yesterday I hosted a guest speaker from the San Diego Zoo who was invited by the graduate students in my department to give a seminar. For some reason, speaker-hosting is a rather complex process for me, perhaps more so than it should be. I'm learning, though. I suppose it's particularly hard because the people I have had to invite and host are generally people I don't know very well and whose subject matters don't always overlap greatly with my own.

Yesterday's minor snafus involved me getting to the airport a little bit later than expected (largely because I had to drive our lab truck and squeeze it into a miniscule space in the oversize lot), and forgetting to e-mail a copy of the speaker's schedule to all of the various parties who met with him so they knew how he would be getting from one place to another. Next time I'll do better.

The interesting thing about inviting this speaker was how well it highlighted some of the recent divides (i.e. over the past academic year) in our department. This particular speaker was invited last year by the graduate students who study behavior, and he studies reptiles. There's a substantial segregation in our department, however, between students who study vertebrate behavior and students who study invertebrate behavior. Frankly, I think those of us who study invertebrates can stand to really benefit from branching out and discussing and learning about vertebrate behavior. The nature of the problems we encounter can be quite different or strikingly similar. But the other grads' actions speak for themselves; only two of the invertebrate biologists aside from myself showed up to a single event.

I suppose I'm mostly irritated because I'd like to believe last year's chosen speaker was someone who was selected because his subject matter had pretty broad appeal. I suppose I was wrong.

For the record...

I managed to get up early every day this week. Consequently, I could only sleep in until 6:30 this morning.

I really like the way my teammate K answers the inevitable question, "Do you *have* to get up that early to row?" (she has to wake up a full half-hour before I do to drive to the lake; I cannot complain about when I wake up)

She answers, "No, I *get* to get up that early."

I know that, for many of my non-rowing friends, this is still difficult to understand. What drives a person like me to do something that has such profound consequences for all other aspects of my life? My only way of answering is to say that I hope that some day such questioners find something that they are lucky enough to be equally passionate about, and something they find equally rewarding.

Cupcake nirvana

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I have an important announcement to make:

I have achieved cupcake nirvana again, this time with a recipe I reengineered myself. Perhaps someday I'll share my secrets to success. You really have no idea how exciting this was.

Altogether, today was a lovely day--I spent the middle part of it with A, baking both chocolate and coconut cupcakes and concocting four different frostings: almond, Bailey's, lemon, and maple. All were delectable. For the evening, a bunch of folks came over to help eat aforementioned cupcakes and drink various sorts of drinks. It was a kind of random assortment of friends, but that made it fun for me to watch what conversation developed (lots of talk about food, of course).

And now to bed.