What's New Here at the Homestead

well, not a whole lot. no, actually, there's an entire room full of new stuff, and it's called the floor. chad and his 'rents spent the entire day saturday putting in our brand new spiffy laminate floors ('cause actual hard wood is EXPENSIVE!). they look pretty awesome. what was i doing while all this manual labor was being done, you ask? i was holed up in the guest room with my favorite purple blanket and lots of tissues and drugs and a book that i never actually read sleeping. because i was sick. and it sucked. i pretty much slept for two whole days. now i'm better (aside from the sniffles and some lingering aches), and my living room and hall floors look amazing. when i retrieve my camera from my mom's house this weekend, i'll post pictures. and by then the dining room should be done, too! no more beige berber carpet around here!

i was glad for my stuffy nose yesterday when kelly and i were photographing two week old seagrass with the stench of rotting death surrounding us all day. my fingers are still a little brown from handling it all day. we better get a freakin' publication out of this, dammit!

other than that, not much has been going on. i've been doing the same stuff - spending days and days at the lab, up to my elbows in corrosive chemicals and ground up seagrass samples, or at my computer processing mountains of data. dr. v. and i had a nice long talk yesterday and decided that i WILL be finished with my ph.d. NO LATER than august of 2008 (and i'm actually hoping for may). so that's all good. my comps have been pushed from spring to fall, and i'm not terribly sad about that. dr. v. has a lot of stuff going on this semester, and we're busy prepping for the bahamas in may.

so that's about it. adios, amigos!