Slug Paparazzi

I think I scarred a slug today for life. It's not every day that you crawl out of the grass, roam across the sidewalk at just about 0 mph and find someone waiting for your picture at the end of the long, dry desert. If you want to see the pictures, just follow the sidebar link to my Picasa album's newest pictures. A couple of them turned out very well (these being the only ones you can see on there) but I've post a couple more here too, just snapshots compared with the two I uploaded to the official album.

Slugs and snails have always been something that I found fascinating. You would think for as slowly as they move that they would be some of the easiest living animals for portrait photography that ever were, but that is not the case. The hardest part about shooting photos of them is the fact that they move so slow. You might be stuck staring at them for an eternity, waiting for the scenery or lighting, angle or shadows to change just enough for a good picture. I got a bit lucky with the lighting today and took some different angles to try and find the one that would work best.

You can actually see his eyes looking straight at the camera lens in the photos. Well, I wish you could've seen me taking the photos because I was literally a mere inch away from his head on most of them. My macro lens is touchy at that range for focus, but I got a few decent pictures with appropriate size for enlargement. But I was in his face long enough, that he actually turned 180* and headed back the opposite direction. With him camera shy, I headed to work, just a few minutes late... Take a look at the photos and have a great day! I'm just around the corner from the county fair and photography entries so I welcome any comments on favorites for printing this year. After loading the slug photos up, I can tell they won't be show quality because of the size, but they sure were fun.

Loving Lab Help

I married a saint. Don’t get me wrong, nobody’s perfect, but this woman brings light into the hell that was last week. She stuck with me through the worst I could drag her down into and she helped to get me back up out of it. For that I am grateful. Who knew that pipetting could stir such emotions in my cold, automated heart?

My grad research project officially started the beginning of August. It feels like I’ve been waiting for this forever, but now that It’s here I just can’t wait until it’s over. The way the past three weeks have flown by, I imagine this project will be a blur in my life so I’m going to need to find things like Pelotonia to brighten and accent this high speed pursuit of a couple of letters after my last name. Since I’m doing most of the work by myself without any employees to help me, I would be remiss to not mention those who have volunteered to help me out of a few pickles so far: Lucien, Dare, Dan, Frank and Mike.

Lab work has never been my specialty and I seem to have forgotten that when I wrote the protocol for this experiment. I’ve suddenly been submersed into the dark world of basement labs, working in four different labs and gaining access to BSL2 over at the vet school for culturing of pathogens. The amount I’ve learned in the past week has rivaled all of last year’s classwork, making me question why I ever took classes in the first place because I’m such a hands-on learner. But last week was an extreme baptism into the hellfires of bloodwork.

When Amanda called, I told her to go to her exercise class because I wouldn’t be home for a long time that night. Everything I’d tried to do that day kept dragging out. I’d been at work since 7 am and it was already 6 pm. I still had to do all the hematocrit, plasma and serum spinning and storage, and didn’t even know how long it would take me since I hadn’t done 200 blood samples at once before in my life. I’d memorized protocol and gathered supplies, just starting when the phone rang. Amanda immediately asked if I wanted her help. Her company was more what I wanted, but her help was great too. But I didn’t want to ruin her evening, insisting that she didn’t come down.

She came down anyways, bringing pizza and a hug for the hapless, absent-minded genius who had forgotten to lock down some hematocrit tubes before spinning and was cleaning up broken glass glitter. It’d been over an hour and I’d gone nowhere. We ate and she learned how I wanted samples labeled and pipette and she got straight to work. And we worked, and we worked. This was a bloodwork marathon I don’t intend to duplicate any time soon. Thursday is looming up on me already. Last week we didn’t leave the lab until midnight but it was long before that when I realized I married a saint. Such self-sacrifice doesn’t come easy or often and I really appreciated it. I love you, Amanda.