Greg and Kat's blog

Today was very strange. It started off with me deciding to go to work late. These days late is 7:45. Craziness! Anyways, I walk out the door of our townhouse, which happens to be by the complex’s recycling containers and one of the dumpsters. There they were… two practically new chairs and a slightly worn large end table. When people move out here and they have “extra” furniture, they leave it “by” the dumpster. So, I got 2 new chairs and an end table! I think the table is read wood too! Yippee! And, I wasn’t even late for the bus after hauling the stuff back in to the apartment.

For the last half week I’ve been working hard trying to catch birds. After all of those early mornings and 13 mosquito bites later (Total bite count: 43; mostly around my ankles because I wore capris one day and forgot the bug spray), we got 3 adult females. For some reason there were tons of birds out, but none were going in the traps! Tomorrow we put 12 potter traps out, and if these damned birds want any seed, they HAVE to go into the traps to get it. Anyways, we put up traps at a new location, and were watching them for a while. We we were looking for the ideal spot, we came across the LARGEST beetle I’ve ever seen! It was like the big slow beetle in The Lion King. I freaked a bit because I thought maybe all of the beetles around here looked like that. No, turns out Adam, who has lived here all his life (well, about an hour west of here) has never seen a beetle like this. Whew! Anyways, there’s a picture in the gallery. On our way back to the lab I found a dollar on the ground! Yippee again!

HPLC is going well. I’ve got peaks, and I know which peaks are which! One of my compounds is missing and so I have to tweak the solutions to pull it out from the “junk” peak that comes out first. That’ll be this week’s HPLC mission. I could have started that today except that when I went in on Sunday to do what I ended up doing today, I found out that the swipe card that the PI gave me didn’t actually work. So, even though I wanted to do HPLC on a sunny Sunday, I couldn’t get onto the floor where the lab is! Oh well!

Oh, and I bussed to the mall on Saturday. Even with the car I don’t feel entirely comfortable driving to the only decent mall here. You need to take the highway to get there. While I can drive on the highway, I don’t like the cloverleaf on- and off-ramps, and the off-ramp from the mall is a cloverleaf. So, I forked over $4 for the bus (all-day pass) and went shopping. I’d forgotten how cheap things are here (in the states) when they go one sale. I got a Pottery Barn silver clock for the office for only $5. It was regularly $30! I definitely felt good after that. And we NEEDED it (have to say that or else Greg will have a fit).