I don't think I ever posted a link to photos from ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
scrottie's and my brief kayaking trip last weekend, out in the Sacramento River Delta. If you start here and click left, you should see some sights. There are lots of boats in that area that are interesting to ogle, including the half-sunk giant crane platform built in the 1940's that was apparently operational up until just a couple years ago. Apparently towards the end there was a phase where the owner would come out with a bunch of gasoline, and would fire up a bunch of pumps to pump water out of it, and would stop once the gasoline ran out but before the thing was completely un-sunk. Then it would sit for a while again, fill up with more water, and the cycle would repeat.
Anyway. Let's see. What else is new around here. Things are a bit crazy, really, between trying to wrap up obligations at Berkeley, trying to figure out a living situation that's something more than a cardboard box in Tempe, trying to make sure arrangements are in place for New York, and trying to prepare to teach Animal Physiology in the spring. Yeah. I'm feeling overwhelmed, to put it mildly.
Thus, last week's work consisted of:
-Quick, pull together a budget for start-up funding expenses for NY
-Help a student work on final poster revisions for a conference in early January
-Wrap up some of my own data collection and analysis for the conference
-Spend way too much time taking care of crickets while the grad student who normally does so takes a well-deserved break
But over the weekend, well. I wrapped up the Holiday Challenge on Saturday, but just as I was about to get underway on the erg, I discovered a text message from my brother saying they were in town. So he and his family came over for a nice visit in the late afternoon/early evening, and I got to conscript my nephew and niece into making snickerdoodles with me:
Sunday was a full-bore Helga day. It was also the first day in a VERY long time where it was justscrottie and myself, and that made it very clear that we really need more time and space to ourselves - something that's extremely hard to come by in CA. The decision to have a stay-at-home ChristmaSolstiHanukkaKwanzaa wasn't made lightly, but has been helpful for retaining some small shreds of sanity, I think. Anyway, in addition to the usual things, like sweeping and folding laundry, I got S to help me shop-vac the sofas, and underneath the sofas, too.
Vacuuming under the sofa is always hilarious when you have cats.
We found Emma's q-tip collection under one sofa:
And I found every single ball-shaped cat toy (6 in total) under the other sofa.
I feel so much better about life now that those huge dust and crumb deposits are cleared out. I still have a very long ways to go in terms of packing and such and so forth and so on, but at least that was good forward progress on one front.
And now, back at it. Now that today's cricket care is finished, it's time to finalize the syllabus.
scrottie's and my brief kayaking trip last weekend, out in the Sacramento River Delta. If you start here and click left, you should see some sights. There are lots of boats in that area that are interesting to ogle, including the half-sunk giant crane platform built in the 1940's that was apparently operational up until just a couple years ago. Apparently towards the end there was a phase where the owner would come out with a bunch of gasoline, and would fire up a bunch of pumps to pump water out of it, and would stop once the gasoline ran out but before the thing was completely un-sunk. Then it would sit for a while again, fill up with more water, and the cycle would repeat.Anyway. Let's see. What else is new around here. Things are a bit crazy, really, between trying to wrap up obligations at Berkeley, trying to figure out a living situation that's something more than a cardboard box in Tempe, trying to make sure arrangements are in place for New York, and trying to prepare to teach Animal Physiology in the spring. Yeah. I'm feeling overwhelmed, to put it mildly.
Thus, last week's work consisted of:
-Quick, pull together a budget for start-up funding expenses for NY
-Help a student work on final poster revisions for a conference in early January
-Wrap up some of my own data collection and analysis for the conference
-Spend way too much time taking care of crickets while the grad student who normally does so takes a well-deserved break
But over the weekend, well. I wrapped up the Holiday Challenge on Saturday, but just as I was about to get underway on the erg, I discovered a text message from my brother saying they were in town. So he and his family came over for a nice visit in the late afternoon/early evening, and I got to conscript my nephew and niece into making snickerdoodles with me:
Sunday was a full-bore Helga day. It was also the first day in a VERY long time where it was just
scrottie and myself, and that made it very clear that we really need more time and space to ourselves - something that's extremely hard to come by in CA. The decision to have a stay-at-home ChristmaSolstiHanukkaKwanzaa wasn't made lightly, but has been helpful for retaining some small shreds of sanity, I think. Anyway, in addition to the usual things, like sweeping and folding laundry, I got S to help me shop-vac the sofas, and underneath the sofas, too.Vacuuming under the sofa is always hilarious when you have cats.
We found Emma's q-tip collection under one sofa:
And I found every single ball-shaped cat toy (6 in total) under the other sofa.
I feel so much better about life now that those huge dust and crumb deposits are cleared out. I still have a very long ways to go in terms of packing and such and so forth and so on, but at least that was good forward progress on one front.
And now, back at it. Now that today's cricket care is finished, it's time to finalize the syllabus.
