Stupid Terrorists

so i guess i lied. that last one wasn't my last post before i leave for maine. i was just checking out the weather for the next 10 days in the small town of walpole, maine, where the darling marine center is located (that's where i'm going, in case you didn't catch that). you know, to plan my wardrobe and all. and dude! it's, like, cold there for summer! highs in the mid-70's, lows in the 50's and 60's. holy crap. combine that with 58 degree water, and that doesn't make for a happy latina. at least we're going in summer and not later in the fall. i'd really freeze my ass off then. their high temperatures are what i'm used to for the overnight lows way down here in the south in august. that's like april and late october weather for us. i'm defitnitely going to minimize the time that i spend actually being in that freezing ass water up there. it's only 30 degrees colder than the water i've been in all summer*. that's not that big a difference, right?

anyway, i'm a tad bit peeved at the stupid terrorists (but i'm glad their evil plot was foiled) who made liquids in my carry-on bag a no no. i can't take toothpaste? or eye drops? what the hell, man? i'll eat some toothpaste in front of you and squeeze some drops in my eyes to prove it's legit. i swear. but at least they haven't banned carry-on luggage all together like they did in the UK. and here i was checking to make sure i'm allowed to take a disposable razor in my carry-on (which i am). but now, it doesn't matter, since my shampoo and conditioner aren't allowed. i guess it will all just have to go in the suitcase that i check.

i'm the teeniest bit nervous about flying now. i hope that no one has anything against atlanta or portland... or memphis or amsterdam or madrid. those are all the airports i'll be visiting in the next month. yikes. i'll have lots of reassuring phone calls to make once i get to maine and spain and back home. oh, and i also hope that no one has the urge to blow up any spanish trains. that would suck.

ok, enough freaking myself out about flying. it'll be fine.

*that was sarcasm, folks.

Looking Up

hello again. i seem to be disappearing for long periods of time, and for that i apologize. i've decided that i just don't blog when i'm sad and sappy. i'm sure you all realize that the last couple of weeks have been, um, emotionally trying for me, and i just didn't feel like laying all that stuff on you guys. but i'm back for now. this will probably be my last post for a while, too. see, i leave for maine on saturday, and i'm not sure how much internet access i'm going to have while i'm there and then in spain. i'll try to let you guys know how things are going, though.

things are definitely looking up for me now. surprisingly, they let my mom out of the hospital monday, so no more daily trips to pensacola for me. she's doing much better now, but she's going to be on all kinds of diabetes medicine now, what with her pancreas being pretty much fucked and all. but at least it's not trying to eat itself anymore, and it's not leaking digestive enzymes around her other organs anymore. so, hooray for that. i think she's going to be kind of taking it easy for a while. i'm going over there tonight to see her and sammi before i leave for a month.

oh, and some of you know that my 24th birthday was sunday, so that's always fun. well, this one wasn't fun exactly, but still. chad and i ate dinner at san miguel (it's the nicest mexican restaurant i've ever set foot in, btw), and we unpacked a little. we still have crap sitting everywhere, though. i really hate that, but i just don't have the time or the energy to devote to getting the rest of our stuff into the appropriate places.

sorry this post couldn't be more entertaining, but i have to run now. adios!

Magically Delicious

i cannot even begin to tell you guys out there in internet land what a hellish week i have had. i mentioned that my mom got put in the hospital, and let me tell you guys, pancreatitis is BAD stuff. and she has the worst kind possible. the kind where the chances of survival are basically 50/50. she got moved to baptist hospital in pensacola wednesday, and she was moved into the intensive care unit later that night. her doctor thought she was going to die that night, but he didn't tell us that until thursday. but she didn't. she's still in really bad shape, but they moved her out of ICU saturday and into a private room last night. my whole family flew or drove in. it's like some kind of twisted family reunion. my brother had to go back to tennessee last night, though, and my uncle jimmy had to go back to south carolina. i'm not sure when uncle george is flying back to california. all the demerol and morphine mom was on was making her loopy, and the nurse told me that she woke up sometime last night and didn't even know her name. they've backed off the pain medicine by a lot now to avoid that in the future. when she was in ICU, they had her on so much pain medicine that if they gave her any more she'd stop breathing. she's talking much better now, though. she's still not allowed to eat or drink anything, but they've started to feed her a little bit through a tube in her stomach instead of through her IV. for the first 6 days, they were pumping her stomach constantly. so, there are signs that she's getting better, but she won't be out of the hospital anytime soon. sammi is staying with me and chad until wednesday. the only reason she can't stay after that is that chad and i are going to port st. joe thursday and friday. i feel crazy guilty about it, but i have no choice. i have to go. there's no one else to do it. so, sammi's going to stay with my granny this weekend. i might go pick her up saturday.

on top of all the stuff with my mom, we've been moving. and what a pain in the ass that's been. the house reeked of cigarette smoke after the previous owners moved out, so we were forced to paint the living room as well as the purple fairy room (which chad says is now "thrasher blue", as in the atlanta thrashers - a terrible color on a hockey jersey, but nice on a wall). sammi helped me with that. plus, there was a raging flea infestation... and those little buggers find me magically delicious. i seriously look like i have chicken pox. and kind of feel like it, too. i am covered in flea bites from head to toe. literally. i have them on my neck, back, stomach, arms, legs, feet, hands, chest, and even one right at the top of my butt crack. they decided to get invasive for that one. chad's been putting poison in the yard for days, and we flea bombed the house (we used all 6 foggers in the pack), but they're still on the back porch (despite spreading and spraying a couple of different things). poor krull. he's scratching like crazy. i feel his pain. we're going to ask the vet if he's too young to get a flea pill instead of the puppy spray stuff. it doesn't work worth crap. i even had fleas in my car. chad took care of that last night, though. they seem to be gone from inside the house, so i'm ok now. still itchy, though. chad and sammi don't have anywhere near the number of bites that i do. probably because all the fleas flock to me.

sammi and i have to go and clean up the apartment today so we can turn in the keys. then we can turn to the task of unpacking. our new bedroom suite is being delivered sometime tomorrow, so we can start that while we're waiting for the delivery guys.

all right. time to wake sammi up so she can shower and we can get to work.

Back Again

hi guys. it's been another one of those weeks where i don't have much time for blogging. i went back to port st. joe this past thursday to check on an experiment. i only killed 12 sea urchins this time (compared to the whopping 60 that were dead last time i went out), so i was excited about that. when i go back next week (for the last time this summer) chad is coming with me, so he will finally see exactly what my field work entails and learn why i always come home with so many cuts and bruises.

in other news, chad and i are planning to begin our big move on thursday. i'm going to go and paint the guest room ('cause right now it's a purple fairy room, and i'm just not that into purple fairies), probably wednesday or thursday. i'll take krull with me so he can get a feel for his new yard. he's growing pretty fast, and it's becoming obvious that he was born to be a yard dog. he's still doing ok with the not pottying inside, but he chews on everything, and he's growing like a maniac. i swear he's gained a few pounds since we brought him home a week ago. yep, he's definitely bigger. when he gets rowdy (that is, when he gets bitey), i try to take him outside and let him run off his excess energy. he doesn't, like, bite bite, just little puppy chewing. but it still kind of hurts sometimes. and he shouldn't chew on people. we tell him "no" a lot (using our "we mean business, we're not just playing with you" voices). but, he sits on command, and he fetches (sometimes, when he's in the mood for chasing), and he's really cute when he's kind of sleepy and just licks the crap out of you. he particularly likes feet. he's a big toe-licker. so if you come visit us, beware. krull the warrior king is going to lick your toes. and he might try to eat your shorts. don't let him do that. i refuse to play with him anymore when he starts trying to eat my clothes, no matter how big and pathetic those puppy dog eyes are and no matter how much he whines.

our parents were all planning on coming to help us move this weekend, but i kind of doubt that my mom is going to be able to come. see, my aunt called me last night to tell me that my mom is in the hospital with pancreatitis. yikes. she's on tons of morphine, codeine, and other assorted pain medications with a tube in her stomach. and she's not allowed to eat anything until it clears up. my aunt was supposed to call me back today when she found out how long mom would be in the hospital. i read about pancreatitis, and it seems that it usually clears up after a few days (as long as you get to a doctor before excess bile and stuff leads to an infection), but it hurts a lot while you have it. so, i might be heading over to jay hospital tomorrow to see my mommy. i was also thinking about going to pick my little sis up so she can still come this weekend and help me clean the apartment up after we move and then help me reupholster the couch. sammi (my li'l sis) is currently staying with my granny. i'll call her in a little while and see how things are going over there.

that's about it from latina land. i'll try to post again in a couple of days. adios!

Meet Our Puppy

it's a little sooner than we'd planned, but chad and i now have a puppy. one of his parents' neighbors' dogs had puppies with the bull mastiff that chad's parents somehow adopted from the same neighbors (they fed him, and he hung around), and the puppies aren't being very well taken care of. the puppies are about two months old now, and the owners aren't really feeding them or anything. so chad decided to go ahead and "rescue [the one he wanted] from those pitiful conditions." so one came back to mobile with us. to live in our apartment for about two weeks. until we move and he can live in the back yard. he's a boy, and we named him krull. as in krull the warrior king. from How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. it makes me laugh.

anyway, he's pretty good at the whole living inside thing. you know, for a dog who has been outside his whole short life. he sleeps a lot. right now he's zonked out on the couch. don't worry, he can wallow on that one all he wants, since i'm about to reupholster it anyway. isn't he cute?


































i left for a couple of hours eariler, and he managed not to potty anywhere in the apartment, so that's pretty good. he whines at the door when he needs to go. we tried to barricade him in the kitchen, but he's pretty crafty. so we just moved everything out of the living room that we didn't want him chewing on and closed the bedroom door so krull can only go in the living room, dining area, and kitchen. i didn't think he could get up on the couch, but when i came home from the lab a little while ago he was sitting on it, wagging his tail at me.

i was worried that he'd go nuts and bark his head off while no one was home (while he's awake, he pretty much insists on being in the same room with us), but he seems to be doing pretty well. hangin' out, sleeping, chewing on some rawhide bones and toys.

and that, my friends, is our vicious guard dog.

Officially Homeowners

chad and i are now officially homeowners. we closed on the house yesterday, and everything went smoothly. it took forever, but it went smoothly. yay! no more papers to sign and initial! we signed or initialed every page in a stack no less than an inch thick. some of the ones from the mortgage company, i would swear we'd signed before. but oh well. all the paperwork is done... and our first mortgage payment isn't due until september 1st. so we're basically getting away without having to pay either rent or a house payment for august. sweet.

we did get keys (but not all of them) yesterday at closing (the rest of them will be left in the house when the current residents finish moving). but the folks who live there now don't close on their new house until next friday, so we won't be able to move in until the week after that. our parents are coming down the 29th to help us move all our big stuff, and my mom and sister will probably stay that night and help us get the apartment spic and span, and then my mom is going to help me reupholster the couch. that will be, like, the busiest weekend ever.

so, the weekend after that is my birthday, but maybe i'll invite some of you peeps over to see the new house then anyway (and celebrate the fabulousness of latina?). or perhaps we will do a weekday dinner party like nessa. we shall see. i'll let you guys (you know who you are) know once we get settled.

for now, it's off to spend the weekend with the 'rents. we haven't seen them in a while (or, i haven't seen my people in a while. we just saw chad's people on the 4th of july). then, the next time we see them, we'll be using them as labor. but they won't mind.

An Awkward Visit to the Gynecologist

yeah, that annual exam deal that most women go through is not typically something i like to talk about. it's unpleasant, but over quickly. and today i feel the need to share. my appointment for the year was this morning. and it sucked.

so, i arrived ten minutes before my appointment, which was at 8:10. and of course, i was called back to an exam room fifteen minutes after my appointment time, and twenty minutes after that, the doctor came in. and he was cute. really cute. he's what you would get if you crossed jordan krestanovich with bill kinkel (for those who know what those two look like).

there should be a rule that says that a male gynecologist is not allowed to be cute. it just seems weird to me to have a cute guy poking around my private parts. my old gynecologist, who was also of the male persuasion, went and retired on me. that bastard. so i have a new gynecologist now. who is male. and who is not at all old. and who is cute. i want my little nerdy old man back. the attractive and not old guy weirds me out. he made me nervous. and he kept cracking little jokes, trying to put me at ease. like, when he listened to my heart, he said, "yep. still there." my little old man used to ask me about grad school and stuff. that's the sort of thing i can talk about with my doctor. i don't need a cute one who makes jokes. have i mentioned that it's weird?

anyway, the second item of business that weirded me out about the cute doctor was the way he introduced himself. oh, and the office has moved to a new building. so, new place, new doc, weirdness. but back to the point, he walks in (while i'm sitting on the exam table, wearing nothing but an open hospital gown with this thin paper blanket covering the exposed bits), and says, "hi. i'm cory." not "hi. i'm dr. jacobs." but "hi. i'm cory. i'm one of the OB/GYNs here." as if i didn't assume that he was a doctor. the doctor with whom i had an appointment. and he was cute. and that was fundamentally weird.

and then, he did the whole exam thing, which took two minutes, and then i was dressed and he was writing me a new birth control prescription, and then i got the hell out of there. because the whole thing was just so weird.

may none of my girls out there ever have a cute gynecologist. it's weird, man.

Greetings

hello all. i know it's been a while since you've heard from me. you must have been going crazy. but here i am, back for a short post. i've been busy lately, so i haven't really had much time for blogging. i was back in port st. joe last wednesday thru friday (where i was sad to discover that i had contributed to the deaths of 60 sea urchins), and i've been busy with house stuff... tons of mortgage papers to sign, questions to ask, meetings to set up, etc. chad and i are meeting with our insurance agent this afternoon to sign more papers, then we're doing the final walk through of the house tomorrow morning. then friday afternoon, it's closing time. and i'm sure there will be tons more papers to sign then. then there will be moving... and the purchasing of a new bedroom suite... and the cleaning of the apartment before we turn in the keys. there may also be reupholstering of the couch. i'm not sure about that yet. i just know that i can't find a slipcover the appropriate shade of green (though i did find a throw the right shade at linens n things). i'll probably hit some fabric stores later this week to consider my options for reupholstery. if it gets done, i'll do it myself. it doesn't look that hard. i did a search yesterday for some DIY instructions, and i really don't think it will be that difficult.

anyway, i have to run off to dauphin island to weigh and scan some seagrass leaves. sorry i don't have time to write more. adios!

Who Doesn't Love a 104 Degree Day?

so, i went out this afternoon around 1:30, and when i passed by a bank with one of those flashing time and temperature things, it informed me that it was a blistering 104 degrees. well, that blew the 96 degree forecast right out of the water, now didn't it?

wow. is it ever hot. and will it ever rain again? i seriously cannot remember a drought like this. ever. or a "week ahead" forecast with no rain in it. we are nearly a foot and a half behind our average rainfall for the year. it rained, like, a week ago. but where are the afternoon thunderstorms that we're all so used to around here? i'd much rather see afternoon downpours every day (or nearly every day) than have some tropical something come and dump two feet of rain on us in a day and catch our rainfall totals right back up to the local average for this time of year. i hope i didn't just jinx myself there, what with mentioning tropical weather and all. stay clear, tropics! stay clear! ...for at least another three weeks.

so, as of right now, the closing date on our house is all set for july 14. the inspection looked really good (did i tell you guys that already?), and our insurance agent has been out and is ready to write us a policy as soon as he gets the appraisal report. the appraiser went over to the house yesterday morning, but i don't know what he found yet. katy has advised me not to freak out about that, because the appraiser pretty much works for the mortgage company and will likely appraise the house for about $100 more than we offered. at least, that's the way it worked when she bought her house.

hopefully, we're done with paperwork until closing. or, we will be as soon as chad signs the seller's disclosure and we fax it back to our realtor. but anyway, we can't wait to officially own the house and move in and stuff. i've been watching tons of HGTV lately and making plans in my head for what i want to do inside (even though it looks really great as it is). the first thing i'll do is get a slipcover for the multi-colored couch so that it matches the other one a little better. and i want to put a chair rail in the living room so i can paint the walls two different colors. but that might have to wait until after maine and spain. but if i have some free time in early august, maybe not. we shall see.

Mission Accomplished?

so, chad and i fell in love with another house yesterday. it was not one of the houses on our list (you know, the ones we wanted to look at), but our realtor thought we would like it. and we did. the inside looks fantastic. it's practically within spitting distance of the university (but not in hillsdale, 'cause that's the ghetto and there are plans in the works to bulldoze the whole thing). the house is actually really close to the apartment we lived in before we moved to the one we live in now. i told chad yesterday that we just keep moving around in the same part of town. and we do.

anyway, we made an offer on the house yesterday, and it has officially been accepted. so we're well on our way to becoming homeowners. the house has been almost completely remodeled, so you absolutely cannot tell that it was first built in 1969. it got a new roof last year (it's metal, but at least the dark green color matches the fake shutters), and a new water heater. we talked to the seller yesterday while we were checking out the house, and he has done a ton of work on the inside - new kitchen cabinets (old cabinets transferred to laundry room), new insulation in the attic, new carpet, new marble surrounds and tile in the bathrooms (new tile throughout the whole house, really), fresh paint in the whole house, new sheetrock in the laundry room, and they're having a tree stump removed from the back yard before closing. see, a tree fell on the laundry room during katrina, so they sort of had to get a new roof and redo the sheetrock in there. on the plus side of that, all the trees that were going to fall during a hurricane have already fallen, and their stumps have been removed from the back yard. the current owner told us that the house used to be a 4 bedroom house, but he knocked out the wall between two of the bedrooms to make the master bedroom huge. he also put his and hers closets in there. like i said, the inside looks fantastic. this is what the outside looks like.

















the inspector is going to inspect the place tomorrow morning, so we will definitely know exactly what we're getting into before we close. the latest date that we'll be closing is july 14. we'll probably close before that. then we're giving the sellers a few days to move out. we should have about a week to move out of our apartment at the end of july. so no paying month to month rent for us. yay! let's just hope that everything goes smoothly from here on out.

More House Hunting

*sniff* someone else bought my dream house. bastards. oh well. chad and i offered them $104,000 for it, but there were two other offers on the table, and they aren't allowed to tell everyone how much the other offers are. our realtor called us yesterday morning to tell us that all three offers were really close and that we'd hear something after lunch. it was way after lunch (like, 4:30) before we heard that they went with another offer. by that time, chad and i were already flipping through this week's local real estate guide, checking out other possibilities. so, we're going to look at some more houses (7 of them) this morning at 11. we drove around last night checking out the outside of a bunch of houses we were considering. i'm glad we did, because it helped us eliminate a lot of places. actually, by the time we came home from that, we only had one possibility left out of the 11 listings we were originally interested in (it's a good thing our realtor sent us almost 20 more listings to mull over last night). two of the houses actually looked really nice, but the neighborhood looked kind of sketchy (as in, we did not see one single white person in the whole neighborhood, and we saw quite a few people driving around). i don't have anything against black people. i have at least a few black friends, but i really don't think that being a different race in a one-ethnic-group neighborhood is the best idea in the world (not to mention that it hurts the resale value).

the other places we eliminated were in really sketchy neighborhoods. as in, we're pretty sure there was a drug deal going on down the block at this one house we drove by. there were mixed races in that neighborhood, but it was still pretty ghetto. most of the houses weren't in very good condition. i kind of expected it with that house because it was super cheap (3BR/2BA for $68,000). another one wasn't really in the ghetto, but it practially shared a lot with two car dealerships on airport blvd, right near schillinger rd (for those who know the area).

then there was the house in irvington. i didn't know anything about irvington before we drove over there, other than it's in south mobile county, about a half hour from mobile. so we checked out a house over there that was reasonably priced (3BR/1.5BA $80,100 - pretty typical for that area). it was kind of a long drive. and then we hit the dirt roads. and chad said, "this is too country for me." those of you who know chad will realize that it would have to be a pretty hick, totally back-woods place for even chad to think it's too country. and it was. the nearly mile of red clay road was a little much for us. there is an alternative route that takes you on paved roads all the way (which we took out of there), but the house is still on a dirt road, and it is not close to anything, except a few other houses. it's not even really a neighborhood. it's more like a hit and miss collection of run down white trash trailers (i have nothing against a nice, well kept trailer, but these were anything but that), really shitty houses that are falling apart, and cute houses that are well taken care of. we were disappointed to note the blue tarps still plastered on the roof of that house, which was so not alluded to anywhere in the listing. so yeah, we want to stay far away from that house, for many reasons. yep. staying far, far away from the hurricane damaged houses. because, you know, the house is damaged (and i refuse to mess with a house with roof damage) and there's the small fact that getting house insurance in that area is going to be a bitch. so, from now on, we won't be considering any houses south of theodore.

my favorite house (from the outside) that we're going to look at today is off of azalea road (just south of cottage hill rd), in a cute neighborhood. the only problem with it is all the freakin trees, man (bad for the satellite dish and the whole hurricane issue). otherwise, it's a good price (we plan to offer $98,000 for it if the inside looks nice), the house has been completely remodeled (but we still need to see the inside), and most importantly, it is not in the ghetto (or the soon to be ghetto). but there are two other good possibilities. one is in a neighborhood right near hillcrest and cottage hill (where chad's ex-boss lives), and the other one is in theodore. the one in theodore is the biggest of the houses we've looked at so far (2100 square feet!). hopefully, we'll be able to get our realtor to talk to some of these sellers and find out their bottom lines. as in, what price do we need to offer to get them to sell us a house today? the waiting to hear something after you've made an offer is excruciating. i'm all about the instant gratification, man. i'm impatient, so this waiting crap sucks for me. plus, i don't want to waste my time making an offer that the seller has no intention of accepting.

wish me luck...again.

House Hunting

yes, my friends. you read that correctly. i typed house hunting. chad and i are buying a house. *squeal* i'm so excited. the lease on our apartment is up july 31, and then our rent is going up $50 a month (if we renew our lease, which we aren't). so we decided to buy a house. it was sort of a spur of the moment decision, but i have found my dream house. it's beautiful, and it's in one of the best neighborhoods in mobile county (near the airport, not close to the ghetto, outside the city limits, and in the best school district in the county). it's bigger than we really need, but i love it. and i haven't even seen the inside yet. it just went on the market today, and they aren't supposed to start showing it until saturday. but chad and i have an appointment to see it tomorrow afternoon at 4. i'd say we picked a good real estate agent. here's the picture from the listing our realtor sent us.

















the lot is a full acre, it has a wood burning fireplace, and the back yard is fenced in (convenient for chad and the bull mastiff he wants to get). it's three bedrooms, which is more than we need (one will become an office/library), but i'm ok with that. it also has two bathrooms. and it's in our price range. how nice for us. the bad thing is that eight other people are interested in it, so there are no guarantees (but we will have a kick ass resale value when we move in a few years). if one of them offers more than the asking price, we're screwed. as long as the inside looks nice, we plan to offer the seller what they're asking for it. then we'll have it inspected and all that stuff... if no one else snags it before we have a chance.

i looked at a few other houses with the realtor today, too. one of them i liked. it's just off of university blvd, pretty close to where we live now (and damn close to the wal-mart neighborhood market). that house was $15,000 less than the house i really want. it's also in a good neighborhood, and it also has three bedrooms and 1 1/2 baths (full bathroom in the hall, half bath in the master bedroom). it's smaller than the other house, but it also has a fenced back yard and all that jazz. it's freshly painted inside and out (well, the trim is 'cause the outside is brick), and the roof looks good. so that's our back-up house. it would cost us a lot less money than the other one, and if we can't get the other one, i'd be happy with it.

we've also looked into having a house built. the only problem with that is that we would have to pay the $610 month to month rent for our apartment until at least november (maybe longer) instead of our renewal rate of $485. that would suck. we found one listing for a house under construction in a neighborhood off bellingrath road (also outside the city limits) for the same price as the house i really want. the realtor is supposed to find out when that one will be finished for me. that's our third house option.

i talked to the mortgage company chick a few minutes ago, and we've officially been approved for $115,000. the house i want is almost $20,000 less than that, but they're willing to add closing costs, insurance, taxes, and everything in. we might not do all that, but it's nice to know we could. the loan officer actually said we could have gotten a bigger loan (maybe even $150,000), but i don't feel comfortable spending that much. if we were going to do that, there's a house in west mobile that was $ 127,000 that was only a year old that we'd buy. we don't think we could afford those payments, though, so we'll stick with around $100,000.

you can be sure that i'll keep everyone posted on the house situation.

in other news, my latest trip to port st. joe went as smoothly as can be expected. all of my cages were present and accounted for, and they all had the right number of urchins in them. hooray for true controls! and i even got home while it was still daylight (around 8 pm). the people at one of the parks were bitchy, but eventually i got things straightened out. from now on when i deal with those people, i am going to ask to talk to someone of the male persuasion. all the chicks i've dealt with there have been bee-otches. but both guys i've dealt with have been super nice. it must be my girlish charms. so from now on, i only deal with men from the dep.

so, that's all for now folks. wish me luck with this whole house thing. let's hope i get the one i want.

Already Monday

so, what am i doing on this monday morning? i am sitting in my living room, telling myself to go work out instead of sitting here all morning reading or watching tv until it's time for me to head over to dauphin island and start getting all my stuff together and ready to go to port st. joe at the freakin butt crack of dawn tomorrow morning. i'm not doing the best job of motivating myself, though. and i haven't worked out since last wednesday, so i feel guilty about that. my excuse last week was that my arm hurt. actually, it still sort of hurts. and itches. why does my arm sort of hurt and itch, you ask? from that stupid tetanus shot that i told myself i must get or face certain death. yes. today begins day 6 of latina's tetanus shot adventure. i should not still be counting the days since the shot by now. all pain, swelling, and redness should be long gone by now. chad said that his stopped hurting after day 2. true, there has been vast improvement compared to days 3 and 4 (which were bitches in the small universe of latina's upper left arm), but i'm still pissed that there is any evidence of a tetanus shot left at all by now. i'm sure those around me want this stupid itchy red lump on my arm to be gone as much as i do, for all of my complaints. it sort of looks like a spider bite. you know, all hot and red and hard and swollen.

let's recount the days of this tetanus shot fiasco.

day 1 - got the shot, it stung. the stinging went away after a few hours. there was no visible evidence that a giant chrome horse needle was ever plunged deep into my wimpy arm muscle.

day 2 - woke up with the arm hurting like the devil, with a dime-sized red bump between two red spots that marked the places where the band-aid was stuck to my arm. as the day progressed, the bump grew in size and there was excruciating pain any time i used my left arm. but the bump was still only half-dollar coin size at the end of the day.

day 3 - my arm hurts even when i'm not moving it, and the huge red deformity is now approximately the equal in diameter to a baseball. even having a t-shirt on it is unbearable. but at least the bump stops growing.

day 4 - pretty much the same as day 3. slightly less pain when i move the arm.

day 5 - significant improvement (finally!). doesn't hurt much when i move my arm, but still hurts when i push on the bump or lay on the arm (which i do a lot when i'm sleeping). bump shrinks to quarter-sized, but is still very hard and hot and red and itchy.

day 6 (today) - feels just like yesterday. this thing should so be gone by now. but at least i can use my left arm regularly again.

are the effects of a tetanus shot usually this long-lasting, or am i just freakishly sensitive? my consolation - tetanus has to be worse than this. 'cause, you know, i don't think my life is any actual danger from the shot.

anyway, that's enough bitching from me today. tomorrow, it's off to psj to check on my experiment. i'm hoping all the cages are still intact and secure and that no urchins escaped. and now there's no fear of tetanus.

I Hate Permits and the People Who Issue Them

whew. two posts in one day. that's become a rarity for me. but i just cannot contain my pissed off-ness, and there is currently no one here for me to vent to. so i will vent to the internet instead.

now, the source of my pissed off-ness. i'm sure you remember last month when my life consisted of permit application after permit application. well, most of these permitting agencies promised a response within two to three weeks. a month later, i still had heard nothing from any of them. so i sent an email to the chick who first sent me the application info. and a couple of days later (read: today), i get two emails from two separate agencies saying that they've (allegedly) been trying to call me, but they got no answer and had no way to leave a message. here's the simple explanation for that: the entirety of dauphin island has been without power from 6 am to 6 pm for the past two days while the power folks do... something. i don't know. i just know that the sea lab wasn't supposed to have power yesterday or today.

anyway, i'm really pissed because when i called these people back, the chick i talked to acted like i'm the biggest moron on the face of the planet. the first guy i tried to call wasn't in the office, so i left a message explaining that the lab has been without power and that i would call him back tomorrow. so then i tried to call the other person who had contacted me, and got the girl who thinks i'm stupid. the first words she said to me went something like this: "yeah, i think that collecting seagrass is going to be a no go. see, seagrasses are in decline and our park is no exception, etc, etc." like i'm dumb and don't know that seagrasses are declining all over the freakin globe. i only study them for a living and have been doing so for the past 5 years. that's all. i'm trying to help the freakin seagrasses and the people who manage them by finding out as much as i possibly can about what factors (natural as well as anthropogenic) affect their productivity and how. doesn't that tell you that i have no intention of going in and digging up every friggin seagrass shoot i lay eyes on and killing vast areas of seagrass meadows? that wouldn't be very bright.

on my permit application, i had to list the species i'm collecting, what i'm doing with them and why, how many samples i need, etc. so, i said that i will need 1,500 shoots of Thalassia testudinum and 2,500 shoots of Halodule wrightii, to be collected over a two year period. i also said that i would be collecting these shoots by digging up small plugs of grass with a shovel. like the grass that makes up your lawn, seagrass shoots grow very close together (on the same rhizome, in fact). so, one plug dug up with a shovel will bring up anywhere between 15 and 100 shoots, depending on the species (Halodule is much smaller than Thalassia, so Hal will give me close to 100 shoots/plug, while Thal will give me 15-20 shoots/plug). anyone who has ever seen seagrass should know this. yet somehow, my application was interpreted to mean that i would be taking 1,500 plugs of Thalassia and 2,500 plugs of Halodule. yes, my friends. that would be insane and would probably go a long way toward to destroying the seagrass bed. but that is not what i'm doing. i'll actually be taking about 80 plugs of each species, spread out over a two year period (and spread out over a rather large area)... which i proceeded to explain to park service girl. so she said she will reconsider my application, but i have to re-submit the application, specifying the number of plugs of each species i will need instead of the number of individual shoots. what a pain in the ass.

oh yeah, and when i called the other chick who is applying for all these permits with me to tell her all of this, she informed me that the guy at the park we've been doing research at finally realized that we've been using an expired permit (where the hell is the freakin renewal, for crying out loud?). and i'm going back over there tuesday. which means that when i re-fax all this crap to park service girl tomorrow, i have to get her to fax me a permit by monday or i'm screwed. yay me. who wouldn't love applying for research permits?

Wednesday

wednesday is such a boring day of the week. smack in the middle, it is. but this wednesday has something a little bit more exciting in store for me than the average wednesday. today i'll get to hang out with vanessa and deva, which i haven't done in the longest time. see, vanessa recently moved into her very own apartment, and she is hosting a little dinner party for us (me, chad, and deva) tonight. isn't she sweet? i'm looking forward to it. we were going to watch a movie after dinner, but since carolina has a chance to win the stanley cup tonight, i'm going to change my vote to "let's watch the game." and Go Carolina! since my team was disappointingly eliminated in a pretty decisive fashion (they went down 4 games to 1) in the first round, carolina became the only team left that i felt i could root for. thus, the 'go carolina' attitude that i have adopted for the remainder of the playoffs. if only i were jamie and living in raleigh... but i'm sure that tickets would be impossible to get. but it would be sweet... the stanley cup finals live and in person. world cup? what world cup? well, chad and i actually did watch most of the second half of the england/paraguay game the other day. but only because nothing else was on.

so, what else am i up to this wednesday? well, i got a tetanus shot. it kind of stings. chad tells me it will hurt worse tomorrow (i made him get one when he cut himself pretty deep on a job site after hurricane ivan). i didn't seriously injure myself or anything. this a precautionary tetanus shot. plus, it's been 10 years since my last one, so i'm due. and i'm accident prone, and i cut myself a lot out in the field, and some of those cuts get gross and infected sometimes. and i don't want to die a slow and painful death from tetanus. thus the shot.

i also need to try to find a new way to measure the growth of my seagrasses in the field. the traditional method for doing this involves marking shoots by pricking it with a needle and then weighing all the new tissue below the pinprick after a certain amount of time. the problem is that i can't find the pin holes after i make them. so i have to find a new way to do this. which could be a problem. i intend to bring this up at our weekly lab meeting tomorrow, so maybe dr. v. will have some suggestions. i have to find a usable technique by tuesday (when i leave for psj again to sample from my experiment). wish me luck.

Just My Luck...

i knew it. i so saw this coming. *sigh* yes, my dear friends, it has happened again. the moment i get a field experiment set up in port st. joe, along comes a soon-to-be hurricane churning up the gulf of mexico and tossing around my cages. right now alberto is still a tropical storm, but it's pretty strong and will probably strengthen to a category 1 hurricane before making landfall. the surf is very rough all the way over here in alabama, so i'm sure that it's at least this rough over in port st. joe, just north of where alberto is currently hanging out. psj is not slated to take a direct hit from alberto, but the rough surf will be enough to loosen up my cages and allow some urchins to escape. at least i put them in an area without urchins this year, so i won't have the problem i had last year (urchins getting into the cages and ruining my controls). we shall see how bad it is next tuesday when i head back over there. *fingers crossed*

alberto is not the kind of storm that i would worry about unduly under normal circumstances. it's pretty weak as far as tropical systems go and probably won't be too much of a problem. the real problem i have with alberto is the fact that it's messing up my experiment. dammit. hopefully, this will be the only storm i have to worry about this season. once again, *fingers crossed*

R.I.P. Refractometer

note to self: refractometers are not submersible.

so, meg and i returned from port st. joe last night. i got home around midnight, and i am absolutely exhausted today. we left for PSJ bright and early wednesday morning, and when we arrived at the park (where i'm doing my research) a little before 2 in the afternoon, it was crawling with people. and it was low tide. that meant wading way the hell out in the water to where the sea urchins live instead of snorkeling there. which kind of sucked. because it was kind of a long way. anyway, we finally found some sea urchins, and we did our counts pretty quickly. then it was time to take core samples of the two seagrasses there to count the smaller grazers that live in them (like amphipods [teeny crustaceans that look sort of like way tiny shrimp] and limpets). that was the most time consumng part of wednesday's work, since we had to sieve all the cores and pick out all the tiny critters. well, the few tiny critters we could find. the bad part of this whole thing was that we managed to drown the refractometer (the thing we use to measure the salinity of the water). who knew they weren't submersible? well, now we do. the good part was that we had already taken our salinity measurements when the refractometer met its unfortunate demise.

i also got some new critters for my aquarium while we were there wednesday. i found a little sea hare (a snail without a shell - they look really pretty when they swim), a little snail with a cool striped shell, and this long skinny fish that may or may not be a baby eel. they are now living with me.

after our day of field work, meg and i were starving, so we stopped for dinner at the first place we saw after leaving the park. it's this cute little restaurant right outside st. joseph peninsula state park called coneheads. the building is bright blue on the outside, and the walls inside are pepto bismol pink. they have lots of ice cream varieties, and the food was quite tasty, too. apparently, this place's hours of operation are very sporadic, though. right after meg and i ordered, another group of people came in, and the guy who took our orders told them that they could order drinks but that they weren't taking any more orders for food. that was only at 8 pm, local time (which was 7 pm to me and meg). one of the guys in that group then asked the waiter guy when they were open. apparently, that guy had tried to eat at coneheads several times, but each time, the restaurant was closed.

anyway, after dinner, meg and i made the nearly 2 hour drive to panama city. the house we were staying in is located there. we seriously considered sleeping in the suburban in the park to avoid that drive. but we didn't. the reason that we didn't stay somewhere closer to the park is that the house was free. it belongs to ken's brother (ken is one of my committee members), and he's letting us grad students use it this summer when we have to go to port st. joe or panama city for research. so i have to drive for two hours instead of 30 minutes, just to save a little $. oh well.

anyway, thursday it was up before the sun for us. we woke up at 5 am and headed back to the park for another loooong day in the field. this time we were building cages for my experiment and then getting them all set up. which meant that once again we had to wade way the hell out in the water, this time hauling lots of stuff. it was a very, very long day. we arrived at the park around 7:30 am and didn't leave until nearly 4:30 that afternoon. but we got the experiment set up successfully. then we had to collect some plants to bring back with us for meg's lab experiment. she also needed pinfish, but unfortunately they all died on us. *sniff* so now my legs are a mass of scratches from the edges of the mesh we used on the cages. my arms, too. i even managed to scratch my left armpit when i was putting the leftover mesh back into the suburban. i also have a weird sunburn on my back where meg missed putting sunscreen right along the edge of my swimsuit. but we used lots of sunscreen, and that's the only place i'm burned. i'm getting a pretty righteous tan, though. my once pasty-white legs aren't so pasty white now.

after that long day in the field and showers in the campground, meg and i decided to stop by coneheads again, this time for ice cream. but it was closed. and it wasn't even 6 pm local time. so, yeah, they have very sporadic hours of operation. so we ended up just stopping and buying ice cream bars at a gas station. then we stopped for dinner at a sonic on I-10 on the way home. and a few hours later, we were back at the sea lab and unloading things, then finally i was home and able to sleep. yay.

then today i had to own up to killing the refractometer. al's going to see what he can do to resuscitate it. ok. nap time.

If I Were a Desperate Housewife...

i would be susan. i decided this for myself long ago, and then i got bored and discovered that there is an actual quiz on abc.com. so i took it. and i'm susan. here's what the results have to say about this:

you always mean well, but somehow things don't always work out as you'd planned. it doesn't matter. you take your tumbles with good grace and always come up smiling. but try to remember you're the grown-up in your family.

i can see that. i'm always doing goofy things without meaning to. sure, i'm not exactly like susan. i'm not divorced, and i don't have a kid... and i don't live on wisteria lane... and i've never had my arch-enemy burn down my house... and i've never burned down my arch-enemy's house. wait. i don't even have an arch-enemy.

but that's beside the point. the point is that i see myself as susan. i was just thinking this last night, for some reason. it started out as a thought that i always do things the hard way because i never see the easy way to do something the first time. and it seems like people are always rescuing me. not literally, of course. but like susan, i feel like someone is always having to help me with something, despite my best efforts to be independent. and it's not like i go around begging for assitance. it just seems that people see me fumbling with something and say to themselves, "wow, that chick needs help." do i give off a "damsel in distress" vibe or something? i don't know.

maybe i'm over-thinking this, and i just work and hang out with naturally helpful people with too much time on their hands. yep. that must be it.

Still Here, I Swear

though it has been a while since i've shared thoughts from latina land, i have not fallen out of existence. strangely, i have been busy yet somewhat bored at the same time. i know, that makes no sense.

yesterday, i got the first comments on my prospectus from someone other than dr. v. hopefully, the rest of the committee will come through with their comments soon. so far, i don't think that the revisions will be too traumatizing. but i am only considering one set of comments out of 4. my experiments will push forward, regardless of a lack of opinions from the committee. i had to push things back a couple of days, though. i met with our vehicle check out guru yesterday morning to see what sea lab vehicles are available for when i need them, and nothing was available for next monday and tuesday. damn summer school. so, i'm going to PSJ (that's port st. joe, remember?) next wedensday-thursday instead. i also went ahead and signed out either a suburban or a club cab truck for all the dates i need through august. that was fun.

after my adventures in vehicle-checking-out, one of the directed studies students in dr. v.'s lab for the summer helped me cut the plastic mesh screening that i need to make the cages for my experiments. i was grateful for the help, since it was very hot outside (in the 90's), and things went much faster with two people cutting. he was like, "i have nothing to do, and i hear you need to build cages." so i took him up on his offer of assistance. hey, why not, right?

plans for today aren't as sweaty. i re-typed a protocol for another girl who needs to do some of the chemical analyses that i did last summer and emailed that to her. in a few minutes, i'm going to head down to the island to pick up a permit to take to PSJ next week, and then we have a meeting about the spain trip this afternoon. and that's all for the day.

well... i guess i do have some reading to do, and i need to stop in at the sea lab library for a bit.

okee. gotta run now. until next time...

Flammable Liquids

i have a couple of gripes for you guys today. the first one involves flammable liquids (and no, i did not set anything on fire). as you should know, i have been ordering a ton of supplies for my experiments lately. well, a shipment arrived for me at the sea lab yesterday, and the folks in the administration building gave me a call to let me know (which i'd asked them to do). well, i can't go back over there to pick everything up until tuesday, and the guy who called said that wasn't a big deal. then about an hour later, i got a call from katy telling me that someone else from admin had called the lab saying something about some kind of liquid. well, i ordered lots of liquids - two kinds of alcohol, acetic acid, and liquid phenol. she didn't know which one it was. i told her that i'd already to talked to someone in admin and he said i could pick it up tuesday. then i called admin again to see what the big deal was, and i got a different lady. she was freaking out because the box was marked 'Flammable Liquid.' it was the phenol. so, i had to call katy back at the lab and get her or susan or somebody to run over to admin and put the box in the lab for me.

now, it isn't like the package was going to spontaneously combust or anything. it wasn't sitting near anything hot. it was next to a bunch of mailboxes in an air conditioned building, packaged up in plenty of bubble wrap and styrofoam. now, how many other flammable liquids reside in the admin building? let's see, shall we? hmm... cleaning products, the air freshener in the bathroom, the nail polish remover in someone's desk drawer, the bottle of touch-up hairspray in someone's purse, and a million other little things that could be found in the average person's house. so, what exaclty is the difference between having that package sitting in the admin building and sitting in my lab? nada.

ok. i was really annoyed at the freak-out that the label 'Flammable Liquid' caused, and i just wanted to get that off my chest.

something else that irks me is the mobile botanical gardens people that do a gardening segment on the morning news. i never had a problem with them until yesterday morning, when i saw them promoting the growth of a very destructive invasive plant by local gardeners. most of the plants that i see them selling are natives like azaleas or some sterile hybrid varieties that pose no threat to local wildlife outside someone's garden. but there are no native species of Alternathera in our area (though there is one species native to south florida and several found in the southwestern U.S.), which is the plant that these people were promoting. this plant is a vegetative grower, meaning that if you break off a stem of Alternathera and throw it on the ground somewhere, it will grow into a new plant. many members of this genus are highly invasive and can overgrow native plants quickly, which in turn affects local animal populations, etc., etc. one of the most destructive forms of Alternathera is called alligator weed, and it is clogging drainage ditches and invading waterways throughout the southeast, driving down numbers of local plants. these problems seem small compared to the destruction of crops caused by alligator weed in asia, where rice crops are constantly threatened by this hard to destroy weed. the gardeners touting this plant often say that "it grows like a weed." well, that's because it is a weed, and a very destrcutive one that costs millions of dollars per year to control.

so, my point here is really a recommendation to gardeners everywhere: before you go buying plants for your garden, make sure that they are native plants. yes, the exotic ones might be pretty and attractive because no one else has them and they aren't plants that you can see every day, but you can't do anything to stop them from spreading beyond your garden. and that could have vast detrimental effects on your native flora and fauna. so don't buy invasive plants. and tossing the ones you have into the garbage will only spread them farther.

ok. those are my gripes for the day. everyone have a nice memorial day weekend, k?

A Week in the Life of a Ph.D. Student

so, it's been almost a week since my last post. here's what i've been up to.

every (weekday) morning during the sci-fi channel rerun of Passions i work out on the elliptical machine and sometimes the weight machines, too, over in our little gym thingy by the pool. i am very proud of myself for this, since i've been super lazy for quite a while. then i shower, have some breakfast (not eating is not an option), and finally i turn to the day's work around 10 am. i've decided that early mornings are me time.

the department is footing the bill for my supplies this summer, and they use a totally different purchasing system than the one i learned last summer for the sea lab. so i had to get different purchase orders from our dept secretary, who has really been a huge help to me. then she had to give me a bunch of numbers (account #, tax exempt #, etc) that i needed to buy stuff from lowe's. apparently, the university's purchasing system has changed recently, so buying things has become a big pain in the ass. i had no trouble at lowe's or ordering materials from aquatic ecosystems, but fisher scientific was a different story. the university does have an account with them, but the department of marine sciences is not listed specifically, so i spent half an hour finding all this out before realizing that i wouldn't be able to do anything with it. so i left it to our lovely secretary. it took her a while, too (stupid accounts billing people, not the secretary, she's great), but everything i need has finally been ordered. now i'm just waiting for everything to arrive.

friday i bought a butt load of pvc (among other things) from lowe's, and my labmates kindly helped me put most of it away in our storage cage. that was an adventure. see, when i was planning on putting the 130 sticks of 10 ft pvc in there, i didn't take into account the fact that our cage is not 10 ft tall. so the putting the pipe in a corner was not going to happen. so katy had the bright idea of shoving it all up on the rafters. what a great idea! there was only one small problem. we're short. we searched for a step ladder, but to no avail. so, standing on cinder blocks and buckets, katy, charlie, and i struggled and finally found victory over our vertically challenged-ness and the pvc, but not before i got saw dust in my eyes. which sucked. so 110 sticks of pvc are now residing in the rafters of our storage cage (i went ahead and cut the rest of it into the 0.5 m pieces that i need), never to be retrieved. because we're short. we got it up there, but it is not coming down. i shall have to find a very tall person to help me with that. probably dr. v. he's such a tall advisor, but he has such short students... maybe he likes it that way, towering over his tiny subjects.

anyway, i'm meeting with dr. v. in a couple of hours to discuss the revisions on draft 3 of the prospectus. *sigh* good news, though. draft 4 should be the one that goes to the committee. i'm told that i just need to add a bit of detail on one experiment, and it looks like it's ready to go. yay! i guess four drafts isn't so bad. yep. it could definitely be worse.

Permits Have Taken Over My Life

i sent off my last permit application today, so hopefully i can move on to something else and stop boring everyone with permit talk. i also got my passport application stuff all done today for spain. my picture kind of sucks, but what else can i expect when i get it taken in an office with flattering-to-no-one fluorescent lighting? that was expensive.

speaking of expensive, i also made a list of materials that i need for all of my experiments for the summer and called around and surfed the net to get prices for everything. i need a butt load of PVC and PVC accessories. about $700 worth, to be exact. when i called lowe's this morning asking about 1300 ft of 1/2" PVC, the guy who was running around all over the store checking things out for me was like, "are you with the sea lab?" i guess no one else in town wants impossible to find PVC fittings and mass quantities of PVC. i also gave the guy the website address that was graciously provided to me by charlie where we finally managed to find the aforementioned PVC fitting so that he could direct anyone else who needs those things there. now i'm waiting for dr. v. to find me the money to order about $2100 worth of supplies. when it comes through, i'll get down to ordering stuff.

i'm planning to go to port st. joe to start an experiment the 1st week of june (so much for starting things before hurricane season, eh?), so the permits better come through before then.

some of you may know that monday was chad's and my anniversary. we had dinner at carrabba's, and that was about it. in a couple of years we'll start doing big anniversary celebrations... like going on a cruise.

well, that's about all that's going on in my life right now, so i'm outie.

Permitting Success

so, what have i done today? well, i have filed three permit applications. the number of permits required to do research in a state or national park is utterly ridiculous. i'm doing resesarch in three parks, two are florida state parks, and one is a national park. so, that means i should need three research permits, right?

you guessed it! that's wrong. i need SIX permits to collect seagrass in three parks. why? i have no idea. and it really doesn't make sense to me that i have to file a permit application with the florida department of the army. what does the army have to do with my research? nothing! and the vast majority of the permit application doesn't apply to my study. it sounds like it's more appropriate for someone who wants to build a pier or a jetty or something big and potentially destructive. i want to dig a few holes that will fill in within a week and put some cages out for two weeks. ahh! oh, and i had to fill out two of those stupid army permit thingies, one for each state park. it's a good thing that those applications were short. also, i filed them jointly with another chica here at the sea lab, so it was less work for the two of us. plus, i need permits from the parks themselves so i don't have to pay the entrance fees every time i have to go over there. oh, and then i need a permit from the florida fish and wildlife conservation commission to allow me to do the actual collecting of the organisms. that one at least makes sense.

the permit that has been the biggest pain in my ass is the one to collect at the gulf islands national seashore. that one i had to write a proposal for, and man are they ever picky. they want some serious detail. so i took the relevant parts of my prospectus and added tons of detail, plus all of the additional sections required by the national park service. whew. that was time consuming... but i finally finished it. i got everything submitted today, and hopefully if i keep bugging the contact guy for this area, it won't take forever to push it through.

and that, my friends, is what i have been up to. exciting stuff, eh?

Planning and more planning

that's all i've really done this week. yesterday i finished up draft 3 of the prospectus. i added six pages to draft 2, which had 4 fewer pages than draft 1, so draft 3 was really only 2 pages longer than draft 1. it turns out that i should have included some detail in my methods section, after all. oh well.

today has been spent gathering information on what collecting and resesarch permits we already have for the three areas in the florida panhandle where all of my research will be done, as well as trying to find out whom i need to contact to get the ones we don't already have. oh, and the one for perdido key requires a state and a federal permit. isn't that delightful? bless dottie, who has graciously provided me with most of the contact info i need. she's the permitting guru of the marine ecology lab. i'm sure i'd be pulling my hair out by now without her help.

i've also been trying to construct a timeline for all the stuff i need to accomplish by the end of october while keeping in mind that from the middle of august to the middle of september i can't really do anything. yikes. i don't really know how long a permit application takes to go through, but i hope i won't have a long wait. i'm planning to head over to port st. joe the week after next. i think i'm good for that, though. the permit we were using last summer doesn't expire until the end of the month, so that shouldn't be an issue, at least.

oh yeah. i also did a bit of light shopping while i was waiting to hear from people. i bought a new one piece swim suit (for only $13.86), since it's a little... awkward doing field work in a bikini even though that's what i've always done. i got some new snorkel gear, too. my old fins were full-foot, and that was a pain in the ass. allow me to explain. you cannot simultaneously wear dive booties (to protect your fragile footsies while stomping around a seagrass bed full of urchins, clams, empty shells, snails, crabs, and all sorts of other potentially painful critters) and full-foot fins. the booties must be removed in order to don the fins. so, i was having to wade into the water until it was deep enough to snorkel without my dragging the bottom (i sliced my knee up pretty awesomely last summer when i tried to snorkel in about a foot of water), then take off my booties, put on my fins, snorkel out to where the urchins are, take off the fins and put the booties back on so i could stomp rebar into the sediment to secure our cages, take the booties back off and put the fins back on to snorkel back in to shore, then take the fins off and put the booties back on to walk the rest of the way back to the beach. whew. life would be much easier with fins that you strap on over booties. that way, i won't have to take the booties off to put the fins on, etc., etc. so i bought fins that you strap on over booties. hooray for me.

tomorrow i'll finish up the timeline and hopefully start applying for permits. friday, i'll start gathering things and making sure that we have all of the materials i'll need to start my sampling. if we don't have it, i'll order it. we also have a meeting about the spain trip that day.

it's going to be a busy summer here in latina land, folks. busy, indeed.

Note to Self

substituting popcorn and peanut butter m&m's for real lunch = bad idea.

having microwave sausage biscuit and orange juice at 4:00 in the afternoon to fulfill the need of real of food does not make it better.

eat real food.

Let the Real Work Begin...

i just finished what will quite possibly be my last final exam. ever. i know, i know. i still have the field marine science and anthropogenic impacts on coastal ecosystems classes (that's maine and spain, in case you didn't get that) to go, but i don't foresee final exams for them. presentations, yes. final exams, no. i actually think there will be one exam for the spain class, but it's basically going to be a 'making sure we actually listened at the talks' sort of thing, so no real stress there. i feel so liberated at having finished my last real class exam. but that leaves comps looming over my head. oh well. i'll deal with those when the time comes.

with classes now out of the way, i can concentrate on the real work in getting a Ph.D. - the dissertation (and the project that must be completed for the dissertation to get written... and the prospectus that outlines the project). i'm meeting with dr. v. tomorrow to discuss the plan for the summer and the undergraduate slave i'll have working for me. ok. "slave" is too harsh. she'll actually have her own project (which will most likely actually be a facet of my project - mwhahaha), so she feels like she's not just the hired help. hopefully i'll be able to get something going in the next couple of weeks. let the traveling begin!

oh, and in case anyone was wondering, the second draft of my propectus went over much better than the first (though i still have a few [mostly minor] changes to make). dr. v. even read the entire thing this time. yay! perhaps the third draft will be the charm after all? i hope so, but i'm not holding my breath.

tomorrow, some planning. next week, some doing? perhaps. and maybe the week after that i can get to port st. joe and start an experiment.

i love summer.

Got It Goin' on Like Donkey Kong

hehehe. even reading that line makes me laugh. if you've never heard the song (or if you never listen to country music, which i don't do often though i really have nothing against it), that line comes from trace adkins' "honkey tonk badonkadonk," and it is basically the only reason that i like that song. chad and i first heard the song while scanning the (mostly horrible) local radio stations on the way home from an ice pilot game one night. i left the radio tuned to the country station when i heard the words "donkey kong." i couldn't help it. my interest was piqued. so i kept listening and discovered that the song is pretty funny. and then i downloaded it a couple of days later. just because it says "got it goin' on like donkey kong." i'm such a dork.

anyway, it's raining here. again. it was cloudy all day yesterday, but it didn't actually rain. blah. the good news is that the rain is supposed to end this morning/early afternoon. that's good 'cause chad and i need to go grocery shopping, which is not so much fun in the rain. because we tend to buy a lot of stuff. and then we have to unload it all. so you see how that could be not so fun in the rain. i guess i could go tomorrow, but i have to run over to USA and drop off my final exam then go to dauphin island for a meeting about the spain trip. and i have to start studying for my fisheries oceanography final, which is thursday. then on friday i have a meeting with dr. v. to talk about starting my experiments and the REU student i'm going to have to help me out this summer and all that.

i'm sure you all think that i could start studying today - a rainy sunday, what else am i going to do? but why would i do a silly thing like that when the exam isn't until thursday? plus, today is game 5 in the flyers/sabres eastern conference quarter finals. the flyers tied the series up 2-2 on friday (i was really happy to see r.j. umberger score his 1st NHL playoff goal), and now they're looking to grab the lead for the first time so they'll have a chance to clinch the series at home on tuesday. damn ottawa finished off tampa bay last night, to no one's surprise, but still. i hate ottawa. evgeny artukhin (i refuse to spell it with that silly 'y' stuck in the middle) scored his first NHL playoff goal, too, which i was also really pleased about. too bad his team lost.

i finished up my take-home plant physiological ecology final exam yesterday morning, which i was really proud of myself for. yep. the whole thing is done. the 7 "short answer" questions that turned into half-page answers instead, the power point presentation on a topic we never discussed (which was done on purpose, since "as academics and educators we are often expected to present lectures or even whole courses on topics about which we know very little but are expected to quickly learn"), the editorial responding to this ridiculous article in discover magazine (which claims that we should learn to love invasive species because they aren't as bad as we make them out to be - which is total crap). all of it. completed two whole days before the due date! i really do have it goin' on - like donkey kong.

*laughing* that will always be funny.

OMG, Stop Raining!

i guess the heavens are playing catch-up. that's right. it didn't rain here for damn near two months, and here it is, deciding to rain 24 hours straight. dammit. i have to go out in this ceaseless torrential downpour. what, are we trying to set a new record and make up for our foot or so rain deficit on the year in a single day? i know that i live in mobile, alabama, and it rains here. a lot. but this is nuts. it may rain every day in the summer, but not like this. normal rain for us is a half hour of hellaciously hard rainfall that forces drivers all over to pull to the shoulder and wait it out. then the sun takes over and creates that sauna-esque humidity that we in the south know so well.

you know what makes things better? my car, she is in the shop until friday morning. now, can you guess where my umbrella is? yeah. in the car. which is in daphne. and i am in mobile. in the rain. without my big umbrella. i guess i do have this dinky miniature florida lottery umbrella that will leave my ass exposed that vanessa's mom procured for me at an ice pilot game. damn. all right, dudes. time to go get my ass wet.

The Night Robert Esche Went Psycho

we ice pilots fans all remember The Night Steven Later Went Psycho quite well. well, last night during that fiasco of a flyers game it was robert esche’s turn. after an absolutely stellar performance in game 1 of the eastern conference quarter finals (which, sadly, the flyers lost), i for one expected him to at least be decent in game two. i don’t consider allowing 5 goals on 10 shots in the 1^st period decent. i call that sucking. not that his teammates gave him much help, but come on. he could have stopped at least four of the five goals he allowed. unacceptable, i tell you. the final score last night was buffalo 8, philadelphia 2. pathetic. utterly pathetic. i hope that ken hitchcock gave his team the worst ass-chewing they’ve had all season after that crap.

but anyway. i was going to tell those who didn’t see it for themselves of robert esche’s psychotic break. it happened in the first period, shortly after he allowed the 4^th goal of the game. coach hitchcock opted to pull esche in favor of my boy antero niittymaki after that one, and he was at least okay in goal for the flyers. he only allowed three goals, anyway. but that’s also not the point. the point is that at the next stoppage of play after he was pulled, esche left the bench to attack every buffalo sabre he could get his hands on, steven later style. yeah, this is a goalie i’m talking about here. a very frustrated goalie. it was crazy. flyer captain and Most Overrated Defenseman in the History of Hockey derian hatcher eventually ended up grabbing and holding esche from behind (hatcher was on the bench at the time) and whispering sweet nothings in esche’s ear in an attempt to calm his livid starting goaltender. it seemed to work, so perhaps hatcher’s leadership skills aren’t as deficient as his defending skills. just a note here, but sabres goalie ryan miller wanted to get in on that action, too, but buffalo coach lindy ruff waved him back. i guess he didn’t want to see Patrick Roy vs Chris Osgood: Part Deux. i kinda did. ryan miller may be a better goalie, but i think that esche could kick his ass.

i was quite surprised to see esche back in net for the flyers after all of that. then he allowed his 5^th goal of the first period, so niittymaki relieved esche for good in the second. like i said, he was okay. not great. but he didn’t allow five goals on ten shots. god, that whole game was so unbelievably bad...

oh, and then the stupid guys at TSN, whose feed i was watching on NHL center ice, inexplicably switched over to the rangers/devils game (which was broadcasting on OLN) in the middle of the 2^nd period. WTF??? i’d been saying from the first five minutes of the game that i wasn’t going to watch anymore, but who was i kidding? yeah, the game sucked big ass, but i couldn’t tear myself away. perhaps TSN was trying to do me a favor? i was pissed anyway. about halfway through the third period the good folks at directv realized that TSN just was not going to show anymore of the philly/buffalo game and switched over to the MSG feed... just in time for me to watch the end and witness buffalo’s 8^th goal late in the period. yay. (that was a sarcastic ‘yay’, in case you didn’t get that).

and that, my friends, ends the tale of The Night Robert Esche Went Psycho. it was not a good night for philadelphia fans.

Minor Freak Out(s)

wanna know what i did last night? i had a minor breakdown of the nervous variety... and then i passed it on to chad, so now i feel better. you see, due to the nature of the graduate fellowship, i don't get paid when university classes are not in session. so, i get paid on cinco de mayo then no dinero para mi until the middle of june. then i get to go through all of that again in august, when i won't get any money. allow me to remind you that i'll be heading to maine in august (when i don't have any $$$), and then at the end of the month, i'll be going to spain (when i still don't have any $$$). plus, chad and i have to pay off our pilots tickets by sept 1 (that's about $640-something)... and there are the $346 in university fees that i have to pay out of pocket every semester.

why didn't i freak out about money this way last summer? well, last summer i was working as a TA for summer school classes at the sea lab. this summer, i am not. TAing those two classes provided us with somewhere in the neighborhood of $3,000 that we won't have this summer. why can't i be a TA again, you ask? well, because it kind of got in the way of real research last summer, and by george, i have got to get the bulk of my experiments done this summer. so, no TA position for me... and all of those nasty tropical systems that haunted me last summer/fall had better stay far, far away from the gulf of mexico. they will if they know what's good for them... or they shall face the Wrath of LaTina. it's painful, trust me.

enough about my finances. it is now time for me to enlighten all of you wonderful folks out there in internet land about my current freak out. it is a much more immediate concern than being penniless in a couple of weeks... and then again a couple of months after that. the special guest star in today's episode of The Things That Make LaTina the Nut That We All Know and Love to Bits is my car. i suspect that it has some sort of horrible disease whose only symptoms are pain and discomfort so intense that it makes my poor little kia cry. not tears, mind you. these are more dry sobs. as far as i can tell, the atrocious noises spewing from under the hood aren't having any adverse effects on the actual getting-me-where-i-need-to-go (and back again, even)-even-if-it-is-33miles-from-home power of the car. it's just really noisy. but what the hell do i know about cars? it's probably something really and truly horrible, and when i get around to shuffling it over to a mechanic, he will probably (after asking me the best way to catch red snapper in the gulf - which i don't know) tell me that i shouldn't have driven it all the way to dauphin island and back to mobile with it making that crazy sound. in my defense, the car made that god-awful noise when i cranked her up this morning, continued to sound as if it would explode at any moment for a couple of miles, and then, miraculously, the sound was gone when i started the car after stopping for gas at the BP station down the street. no flashing lights or jumping needles that would indicate a problem presented themselves, so i figured that all was well, and there had just been something stuck somewhere in my engine and had worked its way out between my humble abode and the gas station.

but i was wrong. upon arriving at the sea lab with my lovely little kia making only the normal car sounds, i still thought my gas-station assessment was going to hold up. but like i said, i was wrong. when i got back in my car to leave the sea lab and drive the 33 miles back to mobile, the turn of the key in the ignition was once again greeted by a devilish, howling screech that continued for a while. but eventually it stopped... *sigh*

chad isn't home from work yet, or i would have had him out listening to my car and its kooky sounds already. as it stands, the sounds probably won't manifest for him. because my car, she only likes to freak me out.

Randomness

i've been neglecting the blog a little lately. i know. my deepest apologies to those who check here often to see what bits of my brain matter end up here. nothing much has been going on, really. i went to my mom's house for easter, and we ended up at my grandmother's house, where i've spent every easter for the past 23 years (that's every easter since i was born, in case you didn't catch that). my cousin wendy was in town with her husband and their two children. i haven't seen her in, like... oh my god, i don't even remember the last time i saw her. it's definitely been more than five years. i actually only saw them for about an hour before they headed back to south carolina. oh well. i played about a zillion games of monopoly with my little sis, and we did the regular easter stuff, then chad and i headed back home. i watched the flyers game against the rangers from saturday (in hi def) then the flyers game against the devils from yesterday. the rangers game was awesome (the rookies were shining in that one), but the devils game sucked major ass. i hope the flyers don't end up playing them in the first round of the play-offs. they'd have a better chance against the rangers.

today i had class, as usual. then i went on a marathon grocery shopping trip, and i spent nearly $200 (well, i bought some non-food items, too - like batteries, light bulbs, body wash, tweezers, make-up sponges, etc, etc). chad and i were seriously impoverished in the food department, but now our fridge, freezer, and pantry are once again well-stocked. then i changed all the burnt-out light bulbs in our ceiling fans. the one in the bedroom was down to one working bulb out of 4, and one was burnt out in the fan over the table. i also (finally) called and put down the deposit on our ice pilots tickets for next season. we moved down two rows, so we're in the first row in our section now. yay. we were supposed to move down a row this season, but when i called i was told that row wasn't available, even though the lady who had those seats last year didn't renew them for this year (and that row was empty most games this season). oh well.

i'm looking forward to the NHL play-offs, which start this weekend. i'll know for sure tomorrow whom the flyers will play in the first round. here's hoping it's the rangers... they don't have such a great record against the sabres, and the devils are really hot right now. the last two times the flyers have played the devils, the devils have really burned them. those are the only three teams that it's really likely that the flyers might play. once the play-off schedule is set for the first round, perhaps we can see if anyone would like to join chad and me for some play-off hockey. anyone interested?

The Good Girl

it's been a while since i wrote a good post that actually said something. sorry about that. i've been earning myself an olympic gold medal in the sport of procrastination. i don't know why it seemed so much harder to revise my prospectus than it did to write it in the first place, but it took a whole lot more will power.

i was tempted to shirk responsibility again today and go swimming instead of revising. that's what i did yesterday. it was nice, hanging out at the pool with a couple of old ladies, swimming away. i really wanted to spend this afternoon doing more of the same, but i somehow managed to rope myself into doing actual work, and then i couldn't tear myself away until it was done. it's been two weeks since i met with dr. v. about my prospectus, and yes, i just now finished the revisions. i pruned my prospectus, rearranged a bunch of it, put it back the way it was originally, rearranged it differently, eliminated six references, added a little more info, rewrote the same paragraph about eight times, made frustrated, guttural sounds deep in my throat when i came across sentence after sentence that dr. v. rewrote, about half of which ended up saying something completely different than i'd intended, so i had to change them again so that they said the right thing. it was a grueling process, but draft no. 2 is finally finished. it's been broken down into so many electrons and sent through my phone line to eventually find its way to dr. v.'s computer. here's hoping that draft no. 3 doesn't suck this much out of me.

to more exciting news, spain is a go! all seven students who were interested are getting funded for the trip, so no one has to worry about who won't get to go. i just emailed the prof today to let him know i'm in. the bad news is that the field marine science class is going to maine right before the spain trip. and, yes, i'm also going to maine. it kind of sucks that i'll be gone so much in august, but it's kind of exciting. i'll have one day of rest and packing after i get back from maine and before i leave for spain. so much traveling... chad is going to forget what i look like, only seeing me one day in four weeks. yikes. oh well. those 5 credit hours will fulfill my remaining required course credit hours. yay! no more classes after fall semester! i can't wait.

ok. i'm still a little... woozy, from all the focusing and staring at a computer screen for the past seven hours, so i'm going to tear myself away now so my eyes will stop retaliating. ta ta.

Since I'm Thinking European Thoughts...

You Belong in Paris

You enjoy all that life has to offer, and you can appreciate the fine tastes and sites of Paris. You're the perfect person to wander the streets of Paris aimlessly, enjoying architecture and a crepe.

What European City Do You Belong In?

Roofers

who doesn't love to hear the sound of random pounding while showering at 7:30 am? i certainly don't. i can be a little jumpy, hearing unidentified sounds like that above my head. at first i thought it was the old guy who lives upstairs, but when i got out of the shower, i realized that it was the roofers, finally come to repair the roofs on all of our 50 or so apartment buildings after all these months since they were damaged during hurricane katrina. that's right, folks. our roofs have been blue-tarped for 7 months, and actual repairs are just now being made. and almost two whole months before hurricane season!

there was a notice on our door the other day informing us that the repair work was about to begin and also warning us that the roofers would be starting work very early in the morning every day of the week. even saturday. i so hope that my building is finished by then. i do not look forward to this horrid pounding and banging at 7:30 on a saturday morning, when all normal people are sleeping.

oh, yeah. and who knew that reading two hellalong scientific papers while people are banging away on the roof would be all but impossible? well, now i know.

Lazy Girl

have you ever noticed that when you have a big pile of things that need to be done (that you really have no desire to do), adding something else on top that you want to do even less makes the original pile seem less vile and daunting? i don't blame you. i just realized this myself. none of you have ventured into the dungeon that my apartment has become over the last few weeks, so you have no idea (*random giggle that only one of you gets*) just what a biohazard my living arrangements were until yesterday. trust me, it was truly disgusting.

so, cleaning was part of the original pile-o-stuff, as was studying (which i did, but only because it was either study or bomb, which i refuse to do), doing research for the review paper i'm working on with anne, cleaning the aquarium, and finding more time to exercise (because i am a lazy girl who is gaining weight, which makes me upset). the only task in that pile that was actually completed was studying, 'cause my hands were tied. the solution to my procrastination turned out to be heavy pressure from my inner good grad student to revise my prospectus. hey, i did tell dr. v. i would work on it this week and get it back to him. thus (i like that word, don't you?), prospectus revisions were the task that i least wanted to tackle, which motivated me to do the other things in the pile. well, one thing. clean. thoroughly - something that i haven't done in a really long time. i had this gi-freakin-gantic stack of papers/research articles on, under, and around my coffee table from when i first wrote my prospectus, way back during spring break (ok, that was only a couple of weeks ago), and i don't remember the last time i actually saw my kitchen table... or my desk. so i was a busy little bee, throwing away lots of random old crap (including about 6 pairs of old, worn out flip-flops), organizing, dusting, vacuuming (even the vent thing in front of the closet with the AC unit!), cleaning the bathroom and kitchen floors (even the pantry!) with my nifty new Scotch Brite bathroom floor cleaner thingy, making my desk suitable for work (although i never actually did any work). then i plugged in my new glade plug-ins fan thingy, and now my apartment smells yummy.

so, after my day of cleaning instead of working, what did i find creeping around my bathroom? the biggest freakin' roach i have ever laid eyes on. i swear, it was twice the size of my big toe, and it was actually clicking as it skittered around my nice, freshly cleaned bathroom floor! gross! this was right before i went to bed, and i made chad go kill it. then he kept freaking me out, saying that it was probably trying to swim back up the toilet. so i was a little paranoid about bugs crawling on me, and it took me a while to fall asleep. where does an insect that freakishly humongous come from? i swear, it must have crawled up out of the sewer. ewww.

but there have been no bugs today, and my apartment is clean, and my class today was cancelled, and i really don't have an excuse not to revise the ol' prospectus. but i think i'll go for a walk. then i'll work...

2nd Best Game of the Season

since nessa and deva missed the pilots game saturday night, i've decided to post a nice little game summary for them. as i'm sure they discovered from the echl site, the game was freakin' awesome. i still say that the shootout win against gwinnett earlier in the season was the pilots' best game of the year, but saturday night against columbia was a close second. surprised much? i was. i went into this weekend thinking that the pilots would manage to lose their remaining 4 games. they pulled out one last good effort for me, though.

i'll start out by saying that the pilots actually put the puck in the net 8 times, even though the final score was 6-1. i guess that means that brown is, like, the worst goalie ever. anyway, two pensacola goals were disallowed, both times because the ref said he blew the whistle before the puck crossed the goal line. i was ok with it the 1st time - it did look like brown had the puck covered before a pilot (sorry don't remember who) forced it in the net. but the second time a goal was disallowed was total b.s. there was absolutely no reason for a whistle then, and no one in the building heard one. it was a beautiful goal from steven later, and everyone was hellapissed that it didn't count. we were trying to figure out why the ref would have blown the whistle then, but we couldn't come up with a reason. it wasn't a hand pass, not hit with a high stick, no penalty was called, the puck didn't go anywhere near brown before it went in (so there is no way the ref could have thought he had it covered), as far as we could tell, there was no reason to stop play. but all the same, the goal didn't count. it didn't matter, though. the scoring was plenty abundant all night long. oh, and traylen played his best game since he's been with the team. he only allowed 1 goal on 26 shots, and he made some really great saves. it got him 3rd star credit.

the other guy who had a really big night saturday was little dallas steward. he had two goals, an assist, he punched a guy in the face (took a roughing call for it), and he had the most beautiful open ice hit... and he didn't fall down, but the inferno guy did. after he scored his 1st goal and made that hit at center ice, i pegged him as 1st star of the game. then he scored his second goal to clinch 1st star credit. after stewie scored the 2nd time, they played "all the small things," and chad and i cracked up. he was like, "i can't believe they played that." it was fantastic.

oh, and jacquo finally scored another goal at home. it was the 6th goal, so it was just, like, icing on the cake, but i was still happy. he also had the hardest check of the game... of course. who else hits? well, i guess stewie did that game. but anyway...

sunday's game wasn't nearly as good. it started off ok, but the guys looked tired and slow. the pilots took a 2 goal lead, but it was pretty obvious from the way they were playing that it wasn't going to last. so, late in the 3rd period when they were down 3-2 and on a power play, dupont decided to pull traylen (it seemed like a good idea at the time), and columbia scored a short-handed empty netter. then they put traylen back in, and rankin scored his 2nd goal of the game. maybe if they hadn't pulled the goalie, things could have been different. as they were, the pilots lost 4-3 in regulation. oh, yeah. busniuk got in a fight. not only that, busniuk started the fight (and who could blame him? that guy kept holding him, kept holding his stick, pushed him down, never got called, so buzzy felt he needed to take matters into his own hands). he got his ass kicked, but who would've thought that busniuk would fight? it was entertaining, in any case.