Too amusing...

To do:
Term paper
Fisheries Presentation
Retreat talk
Re-organize Data
Submit Proposal
Study for finals
Start thesis

or play on this website hmmmm....
http://www.elfyourself.com/?id=1456049921

Hmmm, the pact is challenged.

At the beginning of the semester, I made a pact with myself that I would ride my bike to work every day until the end of the semester (not including weekends). While I have managed to do this everyday with the exception of one (I had a flat tire and ended up having to get a ride to the bike shop by my office) this upcoming Monday's weather may make my pact obsolete. With freezing rain being forecast for tonight and continuing through to Tuesday, I might have to just carry my bike seat with me on the buss to signify my dedication to self propulsion. Below is a picture taken after the last ice storm.

My study species is cooler than your study species.

One of the great things about being a marine scientist is that the organisms you study are different than the typical laboratory mouse (usually). While my lab is limited to invertebrates (clams, oysters and lobsters) Phill is fortunate enough to make it out of the lab and into the field where he gets to study a slightly larger vertebrate. Below is a picture of him with one of his test subjects.

Happy halloween!

I invited three friends over to carve pumpkins. Ten came. Being that I had only bought 2 bottles of wine, we ended up depending more on caramel apples and chocolate for inspiration. Apparently it worked better for everyone else. My pumpkin is the fish (see if you can find it).

Oh, no! Halloween costumes are required?

Okay, it is a bit late But I have a total of three Halloween parties to attend. One is in the city and I am going as the yellow ghost in PacMan, so that is covered. But, I need two more costumes. The ones I was considering are: Lederhosen (slightly feminized), a mime, or pippi longstockings. Being that I actually have two parties, I only really need to eliminate one, and I have most of the stuff for all three costumes, but which one should go?

The parental units

A couple of weeks ago "the parents" came to visit. Being that this was their first time visiting me in Long Island, and I believe their first visit to the non-city portion of Long Island we had to visit the North and South forks (otherwise known as the Hamptons and the wine country). Being that my dad tends to be a shutter bug (and I somehow did not inherit this gene). I don't have any pictures of their visit, but here is a couple that my dad sent me.

One of the many roosters roaming the grounds of the Old Field vineyard (my favorite so far)

Dad and me at the Pelligrini Vineyards.

Where have I been?

Wow! Has it really been that long since I last updated this thing?

I don't think I even have been up to that much... oh wait!, proposals and procrastinating. Here is a picture of what has been taking my time.



Not the lobster, we dissected him about three minutes after this candid photo. The stuff that is causing the lobster's shell to look less than appetizing has been taking all my time. Okay, the lobster too.

Don't worry though, this weekend is home brew Oktoberfest, New York city wine tasting and the Rum Cocktail festival. Even if I don't go to any of these, I will surely have some great pictures of those who did.

Ahoy me hearty!

Tis' international Talk like a pirate day!!!!

I don't know about you, but since I am working on my thesis proposal this leads to great potential.

Click on the picture for a list of nautical terms.

Death of a cell phone

a haiku (corrected):
A trip in the rain
Ended its three years abuse
No longer of use.




I still like the seven-five-seven scheme more.
But what should I get a chocolate or a razor?

oops!

Study: Wrong fish used to save species

--- they are even different colors!http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070906/ap_on_sc/wrong_fish

The never been baked club.

http://news.aol.com/newsbloggers/bloggers/mo-rocca/

The glory of Science

Where have you been? While "the lab" is where I spend most of my day most days, last week I was fortunate enough to be able to join the Seawolf as crew for one of their trawl series and work in the glorious outdoors. Granted, I now am very sore, very tired, and very behind in the lab, I still had a blast.

So- what is a trawl? Well, it is a giant weighted net that you drag behind a big powerful boat and capture everything that happens to be unfortunate enough to be in front of it but behind the boat. I would equate it to clear cutting a swath of forest to figure out what birds, mammals and insects live there or removing the top of a mountain to mine its minerals.

That sounds destructive? Well yes, it is, but theoretically we are only taking a small sample of what is out there.

What is out there? Lots of cool things,

silver strip anchovy

Sharks and sea robins

Rays

Some fish...

oooo! I itch!!!

Long Island has many incredibly beautiful beaches. Sadly enough the beaches tend to be lined with poison ivy. While my legs are the worst off, I found that acrylic paint works best when trying to relieve the itch and am not willing to wash it off to take a picture, so you must just guess what my legs look like from this picture of my hand.

So why does Colorado still have the highest melanoma rate?

While listening to this weeks Wait, wait, don't tell me!, I heard that scientists at Rutgers University have found that rats that had a combination of regular exercise and caffeine intake also displayed increased destruction of precancerous cells that had been damaged by the sun's ultraviolet-B radiation (A.K.A. fewer cancerous cells actually made it past the rats normal defense system). Being a grad student (What! The coffee cart is only open till 11:30pm!, but what happens if the expresso machine in my office dies?), and a regular at the gym, this excited me. Maybe all those summers working long hours at the pool, undergrad in Hawaii, and a youth spent in the state with the highest melanoma rate won't mean that I will have skin cancer after all! Then I started thinking. If exercise and caffeine help prevent skin cancer (Aloha Boulder residents), why does Colorado still have the highest melanoma rate?

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2007/07/rutgers_caffeine_exercise_help.html

We have Moths...

While upon initial comparison to the cockroaches and termites in Hawaii, moths seem benign and even -dare I say- welcome, I have recently learned that moths hatch IN your food.
This sole factoid concerning the moth life cycle makes them oh so much worse than the termites- who only come inside one hour a night during the month of May, to die- or cockroaches -who hide and try avoiding you all together.
Knowing that the great majority of you will disagree, I must point out that cockroaches have been proven to be trainable and of high intelligence, while nothing ruins a post-early morning jog bowl-o-crunchy goodness than instead of biting into a crunchy-nugget thingy you get a squishy-larval thingy. Blagh!

Fish Tales

The weekend before last I went upstate for the fourth and to take a break from Long Island (if I were a doctor, I wouldn't recommend staying more than two weeks at a time here). Between beer brewing sessions, Phill and I took to the waters and tried our luck at fly fishing (a.k.a. Phill fished while I scared the fish away). The first night I won the contest for the biggest fish with a four inch chub (we were in a pond on Phill's property), and the next day Phill won the contest for the biggest fish with a seventeen inch brown trout!!!! Too bad we didn't have the camera. It was definitely the largest fish I had ever seen anybody catch in freshwater, let alone on a fly line!














<- Not a seventeen inch brown trout.

the edgefeild

The more and more I go to school, the more and more I realize that my dream job would be to own a bed and breakfast/brew pub/ ecology awareness resort. Partly because I hear of all of these incredible places scientists go to for their conferences, partly because I have gone to lots of bed and breakfasts in my travels and always felt more than at home, and partly because I find myself wanting to go kayaking or hiking instead of sitting in the lab.

One location, I can blame my father for introducing me to, is the Edgefeild outside of Portland Oregon. It consists of a brew pub, and winery, a distillery and -for the more sober ones of us- a gulf course (hippie style), a glasshouse, and ceramics center, a movie theatre, and many other great attractions. I especially like how their brew kettles are painted rather than the traditional stainless steel. Below is a link.

http://www.mcmenamins.com/index.php?loc=3

( The title is supposed to read: First harvest) Well actually my first MASS harvest;) I have been stealing green beans whenever I walk by, in addition to the mint, basil, lettuce and collard greens. Yummmm.

oceanographer?

Today on NPR they announced the top ten worst jobs in Science. I am glad to announce that oceanographer was number two on the list, behind hazmat diver. This of course makes me happy because people are now recognizing that marine scientists don't always get to go swimming with dolphins. I am also excited because I found that I am more than qualified for job numbers 10,5, 2,and 1. http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/0203101256a23110vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html

My Sunday Ritual

Sunday ritual? My Sunday ritual lately has been to sleep in past my alarm (I still don't turn it off, even on the weekends). Wake up around 9 and lay in bed until 10. Then sit on the front stoop while I read the New York Times and bake bread. While this isn't a bad ritual in any sense, I decided today would be different. I would continue with the Sunday ritual I had in Hawaii. That is, wake up at 9 and get out of bed by 9:15. Eat a PB&J with orange juice, pack a bottle of orange juice and another PB&J and ride my bike to the beach. A much better ritual. In Hawaii, I would bring the newspaper with me to read at the beach (it was only 30 or so pages), but the New York Times is actually heavy, so I'll stick to the summer novels (or the dorky scientist definition of summer books- Micheal Crichton here I come!). The only thing I need now is some tropical fish and a tolerance for cold water.

Pictured is White Beach. It is several miles long and the parking lot is for residents only, being that it is Long Island that means the beach is nearly empty. I saw three other people. The only problem is that despite the fact it is one of the beaches closer to my house the road I have to ride to get to it is called Mount Misery, for a reason.

Dope!

Today, like many of the days on Long Island in June, it was raining. Being that tomorrow was a processing day (a.k.a twelve plus hours) and my most important job of the day was staying out of peoples' way, I decided to work from home.
Having slyly waited until after 9 to go for a run so my advisor (who lives unbelievably close by) would have already left for school and therefor have no chance of seeing me enjoying a relaxing day, I slipped on my running shoes and took to the road. After hearing six songs of bouncy music from my ipod I was just finishing my workout and starting my cool down when who else happens to drive by? My advisor! And he doesn't do the cool non-chalant glance. No, it was much more of a look, scratch head, glance a watch, turn head look, turn to look and make sure he wasn't going to hit anybody and turn again to make sure it was me (who I might add, was now a brighter shade of red and even more wet and pathetic looking than before). Good grief!

Lots of rain, and then more rain.

The drive from the caverns all the way up to Port Jefferson was dominated by rain, and then it rained in Port Jefferson. Taking a break from the indoors, Phill and I decided to take a trip on one of the fishing party boats that departs from the boat launch close to my house (the Celtic Quest II). It is a seven hour fishing trip in which around fifty people stand at a rail and wait for something to bite their line. When something bites (which is surprisingly often), you get to reel in the fish and the crew (two high school aged guys) come and unhook your fish and tell you whether you can keep it. I caught several fish, but only kept one 20 inch flounder and one 12 inch porgy (how much fish can a vegetarian eat/ give away?), and Phill kept a larger porgy. While I prefer to fly fish, it was an entertaining ordeal. Especially when we would float over a large school of fish and the two crew members were expected to unhook fifty fish instantaneously.

Somewhere in Virginia...

Stretching from Shenandoah National Park to the Great Smoky Mountains is the Blue Ridge Parkway, off the Parkway (among many other tourist attractions) is the Caverns of Luray. The most popular cave system on the East coast.

Atlanta Aquarium

Okay, I have fallen behind and now have about ten backlogged entries, but next on the stop was the Atlanta Aquarium in Georgia. One of the private investigators on my grant is currently the aquarium vet, so I had a great excuse to stop by and visit (of course, he wasn't able to meet with me when I was there, so I have a great excuse to go down there again, and visit Savannah.).

Everglades

When it is windy out in Florida, go to the Everglades. There will be fewer mosquitos/tourists that way.

Road Trippin

The last week I spent driving from the Florida Keys to Long Island. Not necessarily my dream vacation, but a break from the lab. The first stop was of course the beach. It was windy and raining, but the water was warm!

Almost as bad as Bush.

Run for good.

Fight childhood obesity while you fight your own. Lace up your running shoes with red laces (purchased through saucony's run for good program), and read more at the link below.

http://sauconyrunforgood.com/

A vegan conundrum

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117669276713570908.html?mod=us_business_whats_news

Gyotaku (excuse not to work)

Yesterday was take your child to work day. While my Thursdays are usually filled with lab work, I decided to take the day and introduce some of my advisor's children to things we do not do at work (a.k.a. use the animals we work with as giant smelly stamps). While the activity itself only took an hour, I decided to make it into an afternoon event and made several prints for myself (umm, if any of these appear in frames at your doorstep around your birthday, you have never seen them before).

Angry Calamari Blushing squid

Black Yellow perch and stinker

Cool postcard of the month!

Notice that says month, which means that I am expecting a lot more postcards from cool places (hello people in Hawaii, and London, and the middle east). Of course if you aren't in a "cool" place , you can still send me post cards (I am after all living in the suburbs of New York, any where is exotic-even Kansas).

This month's postcard comes from Micheal Dorsher in Beppu, Kyushu Japan. Apparently it is famous for its hydrothermal activity. The postcard (above) is of a painting by Hokusai Katsushika and is titled Mt. Fuji on Fine Day with wind.

To celebrate the arrival of spring I decided to plant a garden. Although this took me several hours, all there is to show for it is a large strip of dirt. While I hope it doesn't stay a strip of dirt for long, the pictures of it are not that attractive. So, to provide you with a sample of my inherited green thumb (thanks dad), I provide you with pictures of flowers I planted last fall.

Warmth!

Today it was warm (and I don't mean if I bundle up, I can go outside and not freeze -as long as my hands are in my pockets or around a cup of coffee warm). To add to this enjoyable weather, I was actually aloud to be outside, a.k.a I worked on the boat. I failed to bring my camera so here are some pictures from when I went out last semester.

A seaward view of the Montauk light house

"Keith" and a striped Bass.

I am sorry prius fans, but you should read this.

http://www.investors.com/editorial/editorialcontent.asp?secid=1501&status=article&id=259455997533377

When the going gets tough, I get...

Well, lets see here the answer must be something along the the lines of "When the going gets tough, I get a blog.". While starting a blog is the last thing I should be doing right now, the other thing I do when school work piles up to the ceiling (figuratively speaking, I usually have to split the stack several times in order to keep it from tipping over) is go for a run. Right now it is raining outside, so why not start a blog?