Shockingly

Although I didn't make a whole lot of progress on my dissertation proposal yesterday, I did make at least a little progress, which was nice. It's hard for me to stay motivated to work on the weekends, because if I do too much I get burned out before the week even starts and then I get very little done at school.

On top of that, I got four short articles sent off to Ask-A-Biologist to accompany the launch of a podcast interview about ants. I'm not going to link the ant stuff quite yet because the articles are still under revision, but after that, you should definitely check the whole thing out. It's dorky in the cool scientist sort of way. Also, I say, "That's a very interesting question!" about a hundred times in the podcast. Lesson learned. Not every single question is interesting.

But the madness didn't stop there, oh no. I also made progress on assembling these dorky bike reflector things that I've wanted to make for the stern ends of my panniers (yes, I'll take pictures upon completion), though I wasn't able to finish them entirely (another trip to Ye Hardware Store is in order). And lastly, I worked on converting the bike map for the Phoenix area into book format. Now the paper-based annotation can begin, and then the electronic annotation, and then the conversion into a .pdf for the purpose of sharing the map with friends. Oh joy.

Altogether, some satisfying projects got completed.

Evaluations

I finally collected my spring teaching evaluations. Holy crap my students were generous and rather glowing in their praise. I did get the usual "she grades too hard," but I kind of expect that given that I do maintain high standards and can't always write out the full paragraph answer that would be required to REALLY explain why their answer is wrong. Altogether, it was a great spring for teaching, and the students especially enjoyed the lab where I really deviated from the standard approach--it was an animal behavior lab on my leafcutter ants.