The Good Work

Yesterday and today I have been wrapping up an experiment that I have been working on for the last two months. Wrapping up entails taking apart 21 leafcutter ant nests to count all of the ants and their pupae and weighing the entirety of their fungal mass. It's a lot of hunched over up-close work, but I enjoy that sort of stuff and it's fun to get to interact with the ants and their fungus. The fungus is a lot like cotton candy in its consistency--light and fluffy, but also sticky. So pulling out the ants and their pupae is sort of like trying to pull raisins out of cotton candy, without losing any of the cotton candy. It feels quite surgical, but at the end of the day the experiment will be finished and we will be moving on to other things (analyzing the data, writing papers). The difficult part is that I have to kill much of the colony and the fungus for the remaining analyses, but at least I get to save the queens and restart their colonies with new fungus. Then I almost feel like I need to take a day to celebrate finishing this project.

At the end of the day yesterday, I was quite tired, but then J and I made zucchini-crusted pizza and watched a movie. I think if either of us had been left to our own devices, we wouldn'd have had such nice evenings--I wouldn't have had the energy to make food and J said he would have stayed in the lab, analyzing data until late, which would be okay, but would lead to mid-week burnout.

So life is good.

Oh lordy

Why am I still at school?

Oh yeah. Ants. And a wonderful conversation with my lil' sister, who's getting all growed up.

What a day.