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Limbo [status, cars, ants]
Jul. 31st, 2024 01:57 pmWell, I'm back in Tempe for now. Best to not overstay my welcome with family in Tucson, plus even more than that, I needed to check on the leafcutter ant queens. Overall, they are doing well. The first eggs are just starting to hatch into microlarvae, and the only colony I've lost so far is one that I repeatedly tried to give a fresh fungus garden. It was a pair of queens where I think the queens may have contracted infections very early on, so they just never bothered to try starting a nest. They laid some eggs, but they never gathered their eggs into a cluster, unlike every other nest.
So overall, this is a pretty high success rate with this group of queens, so far.
Since I'm now car-free in Tempe until the mechanic maybe eventually gets back to me, it's harder for me to get up to Tempe Town Lake to go rowing. It's 9 miles to get there, which a mapping tool estimates would take me about 45 minutes. Sounds about right. That by itself doesn't sound so bad, except this team gathers at 4:45 am, so I'd be pushing my 4 am wake-up limit to try and get there on time. On top of that I would need to budget water for biking, on top of the water budget for rowing itself. And I'd be out in the heat for 45 more minutes after practice wraps up, in addition to the 45 minutes before practice. Know your limits, as they say.
So I think I'm just going to try and go for a medium-distance bike ride every other morning. From here, a loop up to Tempe and up around Papago Park is probably just about the right length.
Regarding the mechanic, I waited yesterday until late in the afternoon to call and see what's up since they hadn't called me yet, and they basically just replied that they're backed up and will call once my car has moved up in the queue. Meanwhile, a friend suggested obtaining a device that would allow me to interpret "check engine" error codes directly, which seems like a good investment for the long term, since not all "check engine" circumstances are equivalent. In this case, from some cursory reading, it sounds like the engine knock sensor is generally a good thing to have, but it's not catastrophic to drive around with a faulty one. But on the other claw, they might yet uncover other pack rat surprises. So we'll see.
Things will only get really problematic if this spills over into next week, when I've been planning to drive up to Payson for a social insect conference. The situation can be finagled without a car, but it would be added hassle because I'd originally put myself on a list to offer rides to other conferencegoers.
In the meantime, there are old data analysis scripts to dust off, organize, and rerun. Not exactly entertaining to read about.
And somewhere in the midst of it all, I really need to give Princess TinyBike a thorough bath.
So overall, this is a pretty high success rate with this group of queens, so far.
Since I'm now car-free in Tempe until the mechanic maybe eventually gets back to me, it's harder for me to get up to Tempe Town Lake to go rowing. It's 9 miles to get there, which a mapping tool estimates would take me about 45 minutes. Sounds about right. That by itself doesn't sound so bad, except this team gathers at 4:45 am, so I'd be pushing my 4 am wake-up limit to try and get there on time. On top of that I would need to budget water for biking, on top of the water budget for rowing itself. And I'd be out in the heat for 45 more minutes after practice wraps up, in addition to the 45 minutes before practice. Know your limits, as they say.
So I think I'm just going to try and go for a medium-distance bike ride every other morning. From here, a loop up to Tempe and up around Papago Park is probably just about the right length.
Regarding the mechanic, I waited yesterday until late in the afternoon to call and see what's up since they hadn't called me yet, and they basically just replied that they're backed up and will call once my car has moved up in the queue. Meanwhile, a friend suggested obtaining a device that would allow me to interpret "check engine" error codes directly, which seems like a good investment for the long term, since not all "check engine" circumstances are equivalent. In this case, from some cursory reading, it sounds like the engine knock sensor is generally a good thing to have, but it's not catastrophic to drive around with a faulty one. But on the other claw, they might yet uncover other pack rat surprises. So we'll see.
Things will only get really problematic if this spills over into next week, when I've been planning to drive up to Payson for a social insect conference. The situation can be finagled without a car, but it would be added hassle because I'd originally put myself on a list to offer rides to other conferencegoers.
In the meantime, there are old data analysis scripts to dust off, organize, and rerun. Not exactly entertaining to read about.
And somewhere in the midst of it all, I really need to give Princess TinyBike a thorough bath.
