Monday, April 19, 2010

Spring Celebrations

Later this week, Max turns 1 months, Beth turns a year older (in a new house) and Irene will celebrate her 5th anniversary.
Earlier this month, Annika turned two! Two! Wowee. Zoe and Zacha turned half.
Sometime this month, Cheryl celebrated(s) her anniversary (in the same state as her husband??)
Felicitations to all.

Friday, April 16, 2010

Women in science blog

Found this great blog about women in science http://womeninwetlands.blogspot.com/ and want to read read read! (it might have been mentioned before). I made it a followed blog so we can get to it from our dashboard. Don't miss Beth's plant question below.

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Botany question: Magnolia and Hostas

So we'd like to take a cutting of our awesome 45 year magnolia tree with us to our new house. Is that possible? And if so how?

Similar question on the hostas - how can I transplant some of them without destroying the whole "plant". We have rather large hostas which seem to be an heirloom variety or at least they look different than any ones I've seen for sale.

Also, with the house situation it looks like we might might be getting into our new place for my birthday! Which would be AWESOME as I have movers scheduled for the day after. It's been a bit of a fiasco - I'll fill in the details once I'm sure that this is all really happening. We've been renting our former house since the 2nd which is odd. But the new one (new to us, it's almost 100 years old) may be ours in about a week. :-)

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

6.8 Billion is reassuring

Despite the recent spate of babies among GBKs (and Norlosers, as it happens), global population is slowing down.
6,814,579,631 this morning
6,774,798,449 April 22 last year
6,663,013,026 April 22 2008
So, while one might think that adding almost 40 million people to the planet in a year* is despressing, it is truly making me giddy when I compare it to the 111.7 million that were added the year before.

*Actually 51 weeks. I am apparently doing this a week earlier. The 40 million new people are still more than 20 times the population of my state.

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Not quite what I thought I signed up for

The short version just doesn't express the overall ridiculousness and fatigue involved in the situation.
Many books have gone missing from my 101 class.
The book store noticed that the same student sold back 4 books recently.
3 more books went missing in the middle of lab Thursday.
My lab instructor wants me to do something.
I have a student e-mailing me from the hospital where her grandmother is being tranferred and trying to find out how she can borrow a book since the woman she lent hers to apparently disappeared with it.
I have a student crying in my office about the state of her marriage.
I actually confront a student in the bathroom, search her book bag (she has only one book in it) and, in a scene straight from a bad movie, actually check the tampon disposals for books after she leaves.*
The rest of the lab is pissed off that I didn't nail her.
The campus security chief spontaneously contacts me. He somehow knows about book problems, but no student has come forth claiming his or her book has been stolen, so he has no victim, thus no crime and no investigation.
Two students who had given up their books as permanently loaned suddenly had them returned on Friday, although the actual books were not theirs.
I was sent a nasty e-mails for confronting a student in the bathroom when I knew she was going through a divorce.
I'm afraid the women's softball team is going to hurt the student "returning" of of their books to somebody else
I was sent a nice e-mail apologizing for the nasty e-mail when I was only trying to help.

That still doesn't convey all the ridiculousness.

*I was going to change the gender of the alleged thief, for the sake of anonymity, but that would make the bathroom scene actually more ridiculous that it actually was.

Friday, April 2, 2010

Soylent Green Is Peeps!

Peeps diorama contest. Reminds me of the gingerbread house scenes. Or at least the ones some of us tried to make.