Ok...so....

Wow. It has been a while, hasn't it? And I mean that in the "months" sense of the phrase, not the "weeks" sense of it. And even after I promised to keep up posting! Alas, I feel I have let my small readership down, I must admit. But today I'll change that. Today is my birthday, first of all, and turning 18 should endow a certain degree of responsibility in me, blogging included.

So, let me fill you in, should you care to listen. I'm a student at UC Davis now. Not "going to be" or even "just about to be", I flat out am ladies and gentlemen. And it's great! The quarter is nearing its end, and I've had a blast along the way. Let me summarize:

Classes:
Geology has been fun, though most of the material we've covered isn't exactly new, I tightened up alot of the things I vaguely recall about basic geoscience, and its been really interesting studying it in a class to be sure.

Wildlife Ecology has been without a doubt my favorite class. We have guest lecturers on everything from zebra stripes to great white sharks, and I have yet to attend a class where I don;t feel totally engaged. I've learned alot about conservation as well, which is pretty awesome. Also, I got to meet Peter Klimley, author of my favorite shark book, and professional shark nut. It was great!

Calculus. Oh Calculus. Calculus is that great invention of Newton's, passed down over the centuries as a noble application of numbers and theory to the heavens. Calculus is central to many things in physics, it is a true scientific innovation. And here, in the 17A lecture series for this class...I despise it. It has been brutal. I've been barely getting by, and frankly, I'm a little worried if I mess up the final, I may have to retake the class. But at the same time, I am glad I'm taking it, in a funny way. It's a challenge, but I'm going to feel so much more accomplished having finished this one up than any of my other classes.

Communism. Basically, it was a reiteration of Dr. Reti's history class from last year. With donuts and a kindly Romanian lady. But I enjoyed it.

Research:

Ah-ha! The fun stuff! Well, research here has gone, if you'll pardon the partially appropriate pun, swimmingly. I'm currently involved in work under two labs: The Wainwright Fish Lab and the Shaffer Herpetology Lab. For the Wainwright lab, I work for a great gut named Chris Martin, and I measure African cichlid skull features on a computer! They're undergoing speciation in the wild, see, and in order to determine just when and where this happening, its important to collect appropriate measurements of their phenotypes...and that's where I come in!

In the herp lab, I get to have even more fun! On rainy days, I get to go out to Jepson Prairie Reserve and check salamander traps for the elusive and adorable California Tiger Salamander! We use drift fences, which are essentially staked tarps running along the ground with gaps filled by buckets. Salamanders are migrating this time of year as it gets wetter and wetter. The adults are moving to the growing vernal pools for breeding, while the freshly metamorphosed juveniles are dispersing outwards from their summer homes on the pools' fringes. They hit our fences, find the gaps, and fall in the buckets. Fun stuff!

Whew...so that's my brief summary, here to assure you that I'm back, and I'll begin to post again.