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Survival Mode
Sep. 23rd, 2012 05:31 pmI came down with some sort of gastrointestinal bug Friday evening/Saturday morning. So much for trying to get out and row Saturday morning. My favorite saying for such experiences is "the trots." I haven't had the trots in a long, long time. Gross.
Saturday went like this: get up, eat breakfast, ride out to Lake Bryan, coach crew practice, ride back to the farmer's market (not much available this time of year), go over to Brazos Natural Foods, home. Eat lunch, lie down for a minute (not feeling so swell), ride in to campus, meet with a rower, work on setting up respirometry equipment, tend to crickets, go home, scrap around for some dinner, talk to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
scrottie, go to sleep.
Sunday has gone like this, so far: get up, wash the huge dish pile, do laundry, make muesli, eat breakfast, make banana-chocolate cupcakes (less sugar, so more like muffins), make a cross between hummus and baba ganoush (lacking enough chickpeas for hummus and enough eggplant for baba ganoush), wash more dishes, clean the bathroom and kitchen, water plants, eat lunch, head in to campus to tend crickets.
With the help of an undergrad, I can stay on top of counting cricket eggs. Every day, I collect between six and fourteen egg cups from the crickets. To separate the eggs from the sand in the egg cups, I add brine (very salty water), which causes the eggs to float (mostly) while the sand sinks. Then I schlurp up (technical term, there) the eggs and saltwater with a vacuum line with an in-line mesh filter. The filter traps the eggs, so I can count them. A cricket can lay up to 764 eggs over the course of a week. Counting takes a while. At this point, the undergrad isn't coming in on weekends. We can get a lot done during the week, but things back up over the weekends.
Next weekend will be even more hectic, because the crew is heading to a regatta in Oklahoma City. I've entered myself in the Women's Open 1x, where I expect to get slaughtered by all of the pre-elite scullers training at the Olympic Training Center in Oklahoma City. Other than that, I'm excited to go to a big regatta - good preparation for the Head of the Charles. I've got a second undergrad lined up to start work on Monday; hopefully she'll be ready by next weekend to handle the basic day-to-day projects for this experiment. Hopefully.
Coaching can be so tricky. On top of planning out research, I have to plan out practices for every week, which includes deciding who rows in which boat, and what we do while we're out on the water. The novices are just starting to get the hang of things, and have their first race in two weeks. The best I can hope for is to get them up to rowing by all 8 and doing some steady-state to prepare them for the distance. Trying to both coach and row remains a foolish endeavor, as I knew it would be.
Oh, and I need to work on reanalyzing some data from the first cricket manuscript. I've got two academic books sitting on the top of the pile on the nightstand, which I need to read ASAP.
I guess it's better than being bored?
Saturday went like this: get up, eat breakfast, ride out to Lake Bryan, coach crew practice, ride back to the farmer's market (not much available this time of year), go over to Brazos Natural Foods, home. Eat lunch, lie down for a minute (not feeling so swell), ride in to campus, meet with a rower, work on setting up respirometry equipment, tend to crickets, go home, scrap around for some dinner, talk to
scrottie, go to sleep.Sunday has gone like this, so far: get up, wash the huge dish pile, do laundry, make muesli, eat breakfast, make banana-chocolate cupcakes (less sugar, so more like muffins), make a cross between hummus and baba ganoush (lacking enough chickpeas for hummus and enough eggplant for baba ganoush), wash more dishes, clean the bathroom and kitchen, water plants, eat lunch, head in to campus to tend crickets.
With the help of an undergrad, I can stay on top of counting cricket eggs. Every day, I collect between six and fourteen egg cups from the crickets. To separate the eggs from the sand in the egg cups, I add brine (very salty water), which causes the eggs to float (mostly) while the sand sinks. Then I schlurp up (technical term, there) the eggs and saltwater with a vacuum line with an in-line mesh filter. The filter traps the eggs, so I can count them. A cricket can lay up to 764 eggs over the course of a week. Counting takes a while. At this point, the undergrad isn't coming in on weekends. We can get a lot done during the week, but things back up over the weekends.
Next weekend will be even more hectic, because the crew is heading to a regatta in Oklahoma City. I've entered myself in the Women's Open 1x, where I expect to get slaughtered by all of the pre-elite scullers training at the Olympic Training Center in Oklahoma City. Other than that, I'm excited to go to a big regatta - good preparation for the Head of the Charles. I've got a second undergrad lined up to start work on Monday; hopefully she'll be ready by next weekend to handle the basic day-to-day projects for this experiment. Hopefully.
Coaching can be so tricky. On top of planning out research, I have to plan out practices for every week, which includes deciding who rows in which boat, and what we do while we're out on the water. The novices are just starting to get the hang of things, and have their first race in two weeks. The best I can hope for is to get them up to rowing by all 8 and doing some steady-state to prepare them for the distance. Trying to both coach and row remains a foolish endeavor, as I knew it would be.
Oh, and I need to work on reanalyzing some data from the first cricket manuscript. I've got two academic books sitting on the top of the pile on the nightstand, which I need to read ASAP.
I guess it's better than being bored?
