Happy New Year! Today is also Martin Luther King Day. Here's to you MLK.
It turns out that graduate school (sometimes) feels like an extension of undergraduate life. The spring semester commences tomorrow after a five week break. What did this graduate student do? Watched many hours of movies on AMC and adult cartoons, baked a plethora of holiday treats, and indulged in alcohol and desserts.
My tree went back to it's cardboard home on January 2nd. Not bad.
And then right after the New Year, I finally became (somewhat) motivated to write my grant proposal and thesis proposal. I finished the proposal four days before it was due. Good for me! And since I am teaching three lab sections this semester, as well as the start of my data collection, I have spent the whole weekend watching movies and football. I cleaned my apartment and I haven't slept until noon in almost two weeks. The semester is welcomed.
Not a New Year's resolution, but a new-semester-new-routine-so-might-as-well-exercise reasoning. I did it once, I can do it again. Grains and legumes are stored in my cupboard. Fitness, yes!
My wonderful parents gave me a pair of nice binoculars for Christmas. Exciting (and probably sometimes boring) times ahead on my roadside surveys!
I had the opportunity a few weeks ago to accompany a fellow graduate student to three caves in central Texas. Two of the caves did not have bats, but we had to suit up with knee-high rubber boots and a helmet with a headlamp. The smell of guano is intense and smells of decaying organic matter, but it has a distinct smell among feces. When we went into the Old Tunnel, where there were a few thousand bats, we had to walk through knee high muck; it was guano mixed with water. One of the worst things that I have ever smelled. But, I live for these experiences. I found a bat skull in the first cave, along with a plethora of tiny wing bones.
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