I’m not a particularly attractive person. I’m your typical middle-aged schlub, someone you wouldn’t look at twice on the street. But I have a secret: there’s a part of me that is spectacularly beautiful, and every once in a while I get to take it out and admire it.
I believe in making things easy for my stalkers, so here’s where you can find me in the near future.
The rest of the time, I’m hoping I can just stay quietly in Morris and get some work done.
My daughter has turned out to be a hippie. How could that have happened?
Oh, wait. It’s been a long time, so I forgot. I guess maybe she just bred true.
Peace and love, baby.
My smarty-pants daughter got accepted to UMM…she’s going to be starting at the university at the way too young age of 16 15*.
*She insists she’ll only be 15, which is technically true…but her sixteenth birthday will fall in the first week of classes.
Take a look at the guest list at next January’s ConFusion—there I am! It’s cool that they also mention Chris Clarke’s pulpy turn (maybe they should have invited Chris to attend). This is going to be great fun!
Not so fun is the way I spent my day: grading. I can at least say that one class is completely done, and my physiology students can now look their grades up, if they want to. I’ll be putting in another long day tomorrow to wrap up the second class.
We’re still on the road here—we’ve ducked into a place in Eau Claire for dinner, and it has free Wi-Fi!—and while sucking in the pile of email waiting for me, I see that our prom photos have arrived. Here’s me and Mary at the Geek Prom.
Yeah, she does look better than the octopus woman from yesterday, even with the deficiency of limbs.
It’s another traveling day for me! I’m off to Minneapolis for a few meetings, and also this important event tonight:
Café Scientifique
Antibiotics in Agriculture
with Timna Wyckoff
Tuesday, May 9, 6-8 p.m.
Varsity Theater, Dinkytown
Free. Must be 18 or older to attend.The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that more than 70% of the antibiotics produced each year in the U.S. are used in livestock production. How exactly are antibiotics used in agriculture? Do those uses lead to bacterial resistance? Does this have an impact on human health? Timna Wyckoff, assistant professor of biology at University of Minnesota Morris, will discuss the questions and answers surrounding this controversial topic, and share her recent work involving bacterial antibiotic resistance at conventional and organic dairies. Sponsored in part by the University of Minnesota Morris through their Café Scientifique program.
Note that the speaker is UMM’s very own Timna Wyckoff. Yay, us!
Then, tomorrow I have to scoot on down to Madison, pick up #2 Son and a few tons of accumulated college stuff, and zip all the way back to Morris. I’m hoping to have a few oddments of time to post a few things—there’s some new stuff on diploblast Hox genes that I want to mention, that will fit in well with the reruns I ran yesterday—and I’m also going to squeeze in some more grading. This is a fun week, isn’t it?
You know you’ve got an interesting blog post when one of your sentences begins, “Two of my favourite corpses…” It’s got cute pictures of dead things, too.
My favorites were actually collections rather than individuals. One set was in a barn loft owned by my aunt and uncle; apparently, the previous owner of their ranch had gone nuts and slaughtered all of his chickens before committing suicide himself. The dead birds had just been left there (the dead rancher had been carted away; my cousins and I had grisly speculations about what he’d look like if he’d been left there, too), and their bodies had mummified in the dry Eastern Washington climate. You could track the course of the massacre by examining their sad little bodies.
Another was near an abandoned barn near our home in Western Washington. Every fall, hunters and skeet shooters would gather there, and we’d hear shotguns going off all the time. We wouldn’t go near the place in the fall—those guys were crazy, drunk, and reckless. In the spring, though, we’d walk the fields around the barn and survey the skeletal remains of the carnage. Among the broken skeet (and a lot of fully intact discs), we’d find the bones of seagulls and killdeer and sparrows and once even an owl—anything that flew by was a target.
Those experiences did leave me with a rather low impression of Men With Guns.
I mowed my lawn today.
It’s the first time this year in what will be the coming weekly ritual. I hate it. Every time, I fantasize about never mowing again…let’s rip out this ghastly generic middle-class turf and sow it with wildflowers and the Big Bluestem. This should be prairie, dang it, and it should be flourishing with 8-foot tall grasses. Let it all come back and surround my house with a grassy sea, and bring back the bison to crop it down now and then. We already have a municipal schedule for my part of town—garbage pick up on Monday and Thursday morning, recycling pick up the first Thursday of every month, tornado siren testing the first Wednesday of the month—let’s add another one: bison herd foraging every other Tuesday. We also need a Morris wolf pack (they’d take care of the feral cat problem, and the deer would be put in their place), and I don’t think I’d mind the rabbits digging their warrens in my yard if they were part of a more interesting ecosystem.
No more lawnmowers. No more Roundup (not that I ever use it now), and no more fretting about what the neighbors will think if we don’t go out and shred grass now and then.
Eh, I don’t think it’s going to happen.
I just noticed…I got a favorable link from Susie Bright!
Now I’m going to be insufferably full of myself for a while.
