Backtracking: Pre-Copenhagen events: Books and housekeepery.

So, here's how things have gone. Friday, I wasn't feeling very good, so I decided to work from home on my poster presentation for the conference in Copenhagen. It worked out quite nicely; I could just work away, and whenever I felt sleepy, I napped. I could alternate between sitting at a desk, sitting on my bed, or sitting in my very comfy little chair in my room. I haven't had a chance to work from home like that for quite some time. I also finished reading Animal Dreams (Barbara Kingsolver) on Thursday night, so I started in on On Speaking Well, by Peggy Noonan, figuring that picking up good public speaking tips would be inspiring.

A couple of words about the books. First, I really like Kingsolver's approach to life. Her fiction is very sympathetic towards its characters, but without being unrealistic about how difficult life can be. She isn't afraid to tackle important contemporary problems and ideas, and in Animal Dreams I really appreciated her incorporation of issues specific to the southwest. The novel is set in a small fictional town in Arizona that suffers from pollution from a nearby strip-mining operation. Two of my other favorite Kingsolver books are The Poisonwood Bible and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. In some ways, I feel like Kingsolver's books are easy-access fiction, but they show thorough research and thoughtfulness, so I can appreciate them even if they don't make me feel particularly erudite. That sensation might also be caused by the fact that she writes very clearly, which is not as easy to do as it might seem.

So that was Kingsolver. Now, about On Speaking Well. The book is clearly modeled after On Writing Well, by ________ which is a well-written and inspiring book on writing. At least, that's what the cover design and title would lead one to believe. Unfortunately, the structure of the book is quite different from On Writing Well, and is largely anectodal without being particularly informative. Mercifully, it was also short enough to finish in two days, so I can move on to other things.

So, where were we? Oh yes, on to Saturday. I still wasn't feeling great on Saturday morning, so I decided to stay home again and take care of projects around the house. A domestic day, you could call it. I did such riveting things as cleaning the bathroom and sweeping the floors. [My bathroom has a lovely enameled cast-iron bathtub and sink, so there's something quite pleasing about getting everything to the point where it's gleamingly almost-white.] Then I got to work on turning an ordinary chandelier into a bike reflector chandelier. On hearing of my interest in acquiring a chandelier, my friend Do had saved one for me, and it sat around for months while I waited for inspiration to strike. Fortunately, eventually, it did. Unfortunately, I haven't photographed it yet. It's...stupendous, but definitely needs to go to just the right place. I'm donating it to the bike co-op so it can get more exposure and hopefully get connected with just the right person. It would look good in a backyard, methinks.

And after that, I made some chocolate macarons. Perhaps you don't know what those are. I only discovered them at our local French bakery, Essence, maybe six months to a year ago. They're meringue cookies sandwiched together with a delicious filling, and appear to be something of a foodie craze item at the moment. Frankly, I don't care about their popularity, I just care about the fact that they're delicious and that they use egg whites but not yolks, because I had a bunch of egg whites left over after making mint chocolate chip ice cream earlier in the week. Ahem. So I made some. They weren't very hard to make, and they were delicious. You should make some, too. I'm pleased to have found a delicious and simple use for extra egg whites.

And by late afternoon, I finally sat down to do some mending. I am acquiring a fabric stockpile, but I don't quite feel ready to use it because I need to track down a good pattern for a summer linen dress and I may want to track down a good pattern for a nice skirt as well. I'm not good enough at sewing to ad-lib nice-looking clothing. So instead, I repaired one skirt that had busted at the seam, and re-patched two pairs of jeans. Maybe I'll get a few more uses out of those jeans before I'm forced to give in a buy new jeans.

Okay, Saturday night through now deserve a separate post, written in a separate style, so I'll stop there for now.

Backtracking: Pre-Copenhagen Update 2: Ants

Okay. Saturday night, scrottie flew back from a conference in Las Vegas. I'd gotten word earlier that afternoon that heavy rainfall in Tucson had caused my ants to fly, and a guy in Texas wanted to know if I'd be willing to collect up a bunch of them for him. Time for a battlefield decision. So I alerted S that I'd be heading down to Tucson at 4 am on Sunday morning, so if we wanted to spend time together, he'd have to get ready to come along with me. Not an easy thing to do, following up on an intense conference experience that involved precious little sleep. Somehow, we managed.

I should also note that it was his introduction to my field work. Few people have a chance to see what it's like, because of the delicate timing that's involved. I have to monitor the weather closely and then get up at an ungodly hour to drive down to Tucson, after all. I've grown accustomed to doing it all by myself, I'm discovering, but it was so very nice to have such good company.

So. We get up at 4, and I head to the lab to get our lab's truck. It's not there. Panicked, I call my advisor's house, and fortunately, her husband answers to tell me that the truck was moved over to a nearby parking structure. That setback only delayed us by about 30 minutes, not a devastating delay. We drove down as the sun came up, stopped for a minute for donuts, and then drove over to the part of town where I've previously had success collecting queens. There was a small swarm, but it mostly consisted of desperate male ants, kind of like certain bars near closing time. After scouting around, I ascertained that most of the activity had happened the previous morning, so we'd need to take a different approach to get the queens I wanted.

We drove back to Tempe to do miscellaneous things like take showers and check e-mail and such, and then Sunday evening at 10 pm, we drove back down to Tucson. We got there at midnight, and my suspicions were confirmed: in the cool darkness, the queens who had started digging nests on Saturday morning were back at work. Within an hour and a half, we were able to collect the remaining queens I wanted, and were ready to drive back to Phoenix.

By then, I was fairly exhausted, so there was a 45-minute nap thrown in the mix somewhere on the side of the road, and we ended up going to sleep at 4:30 am on Monday morning. I woke up again shortly after 8 am because my mind kept wanting to run through the checklist of things I'd need to do that day. From there it went:

Drop S off at his house -> go to the lab and pour plaster into 45 petri dishes to make homes for the ants -> track down my advisor to work on my poster for the conference -> give file to the lab to print it (very quick turnaround for them) -> get ants sorted into the freshly prepared dishes -> make sure my intrepid undergraduate R is squared away for projects while I'm gone -> pack up a subset of ants to ship off to Texas via FedEx -> pick up poster -> pay rent -> ship package -> give queens enough food to last for 2 weeks and tidy lab -> go to ceramics to finish up some pieces for gfrancie -> go home to eat dinner and pack. S also came over and kindly cooked dinner for me, so that I was able to get to bed by 11 and sleep 5 hours before getting up to go to the airport.

And now I'm in Atlanta, waiting for the overnight flight to Copenhagen. I think I may spend a day or two just recovering from the hectic field season once I get there.

It made me a little nostalgic when I realized this was the last time I'd do this crazy activity, rushing out at a moment's notice to collect queens, then getting back to the lab to feverishly organize them. It inevitably happens in conjunction with crazy travel schedules. But I'll miss the thrill of running around in the desert in the middle of the night, spotting queens and grabbing them to bring them back to the lab for study.

Welcome to Copenhagen

Inasmuch as Bornholm was a good and sweet introduction to Denmark, it had that sleepy island feel that one gets from islands in the Puget Sound compared to a visit to Seattle proper. All of which is to say, today we arrived in Copenhagen.

( cut for excessive blabbering stories, but really, you should read them, because maybe they'll actually be funny, just this one time )