I'm watching the expanded coverage of the Tour de France on Versus. I had forgotten how much I love the Tour, since I've been in the field for the Tour the past several years. There are several Americans currently doing well, with the potential to take the overall win, and several others helping to control the race, including heroes from my childhood through high school days - George Hincappie and Lance Armstrong among them. Plus, one of the best sprinters the cycling world has ever seen, Mark Cavendish, is racing on a very strong Team Columbia with George Hincappie.

I love watching the way the peleton moves through the countryside, the attacks, the drama of the race.

Before tonight's coverage of today's stage, Versus showed stage 13 from 2001, the stage they called "the Lookback." It was one of my favorite races when I first watched it happen 8 years ago, and I was reminded how exciting it was again. Lance was duking it out with Jan Ulrich on one of the early mountain stages, and just left him behind.

I've been working on a side project on some bird fossils from the site in the Bahamas I went to over spring break. These bones are amazing. I'm holding in my hand the ulna (wing bone) of a meadowlark that lived 2,000 years ago. I can see each point where a secondary (flight feather of the wing) attached. On many of the other bones, I can see and feel the indentations of scars on the bones from where muscles attached. The Burrowing Owls from this site have the same muscle scarring on their femura, and I can trace the path the tendons controlling the toes took to get from the muscles, located on the thigh, along the tarsometatarsi, to the toes. These birds were going about their lives, eating, singing, reproducing, and ultimately being eaten by a larger owl thousands of years ago, and I am the first person ever to study them. How incredible is that?

.... at least in my house today.

Cast of characters:
Lucy, my roomie's cat
Darwin, my budgie
Hermione, my cockatiel
Chirpee, a cat we're babysitting for my friend Jess

I was cleaning Darwin's cage today on the back porch, and foolishly opened the door wide enough for my arm to reach in and clean his mirrors, which get covered in budgie spit from all the kisses he gives them. Lucy, who loves to sit on the porch and watch the wildlife of our yard, was watching half-heartedly. Until Darwin made a run for it. Out he flew, into the porch screen, bounced off, turned around, and flew into the screen on the opposite side of the porch. After repeating this several times (his aim is not so good), he finally landed on a potted plant. Said plant happened to be right next to Lucy, who became instantly on alert. As she was pouncing, mere inches from little Darwin, I grabbed her with my left hand and Darwin with my right. Lucy looked up at me, all innocence, wondering why I had just yelled her name. Darwin nearly gave himself a budgie heart attack, but seems to be fine now that he's back in his cage. I thought the excitement was over, but Chirpee is now watching Hermione with a very predatory look. As if she has figured out that Hermione is a feathered chicken nugget.

I can't handle any more excitement today. None.

The tattoo I got yesterday. It doesn't really look like any particular hummingbird species, but the artist designed it from Amazilia tobaci, one of my study species for my master's thesis.

Today Alex asked me what the rest of my week looked like. My response? Happiness. Sunshine and daisies.

It's amazing how much better the world seems now that I've passed my defense.

My defense is at 2 pm today. To say I'm nervous is an understatement. I was so jittery while practicing my talk yesterday that I couldn't finish a simple sentence about my birds. I keep thinking about all the little things and big things that are wrong with my thesis, that I know I will have to revise. And I worry that combined, all the little things will be enough to keep my committee from passing me. And I think that if only I had spent less time bird watching, or on being a better teacher, or sleeping, and more time working on my thesis over the past 3 years, it would be so much better... I imagine almost everyone feels this way when they go up for a defense or an oral exam. And I have heard one of my committee members express the opinion that it's the committee's job to know if the student is ready to pass her defense / orals, and if the student won't pass, delay the exam and help fix the problem. I know Dave and Rebecca wouldn't let me defend if they thought there would be a problem. Logically, I know I'm going to be fine. So why I am still so terrified????

Holy crap, I've only got 4 hours until the defense. *hides under the kitchen table*

I've been stressing out a lot lately about my defense. It's a big, scary, oral exam of how well I know and can defend my thesis and any related topic. People keep telling me I'll be fine, but, like every grad student before me, I'm still terrified.

I realized something yesterday, though, that I keep trying to remind myself of when I start to get nervous: Rebecca, one of my committee members, just announced that next Thursday, she's throwing a celebratory party for me and another lab member, Jordan, who just passed her defense. Let me rephrase. My committee member is planning a party to celebrate me passing my defense. This makes me feel much better:-)

I sent the thesis to my committee Saturday evening. Yay! :-) Now all I have to do is defend it, revise it, and submit it.... The defense is a week from today. I'm not thinking about it yet.

I celebrated submitting my thesis by going to see Up (the new Pixar movie) in 3D with Alex. Awesome. It features a fabulous bird named Kevin, talking dogs, and typical Pixar visual brilliance. Of course I loved it. Sunday we went to FLMNH butterfly rainforest to enjoy the butterflies and then drove to the middle of nowhere to look at Burrowing Owls. They were adorable, especially the fledglings. I'll post pictures once I load them from camera to computer.

My goal: get through the the next week, which includes setting up and proctoring a practical exam, grading said exam, preparing a 15-min talk for my defense, and actually defending my thesis; without killing, maiming, or seriously bitching out anyone* and without giving myself a panic attack or otherwise freaking out.


*unless they really deserve it.

I appear to be allergic to everything in the state of Florida right now. No idea what's in the air, but everyone (including me) is sneezing and sniffling and looks like they've been crying a lot. Awesome funness.

Back to writing about genetic divergence in island birds... almost done... I must submit this to my committee by Monday, and I've got a goal of 6pm tomorrow, so I can go see Up tomorrow night with Alex, and spend Sunday laying in bed and then watching Burrowing Owls. It's nice to have a fabulous reward planned for myself once this hellish paper is (kinda) finished.

Dear neighbor Blue Jays,

While I love that you have adorably young offspring, enjoy watching you care for them in my backyard most of the day, and appreciate the difficulty of trying to keep them fed and teaching them to fly and forage for themselves, could you please not park them in the tree directly outside my bedroom window at dawn? Their incessant begging wakes me up an hour before my alarm goes off. I must gently remind you that I include your favorite food, peanuts, in the bird seed mix I offer to all the neighborhood granivores. If I don't get some sleep, I won't be functional enough to purchase more peanuts.

Thank you for your consideration.

My friends/labmates just published a paper in PNAS demonstrating, for the first published time in a non-lab setting, that wild birds recognize individual people. What's incredible is that they do so after only 2 30-second exposures to a person, and they pick the person out from among the ~15,000 people walking by their nest each day. They think this ability to quickly recognize individuals and categorize them as threat vs. harmless is one of the reasons mockingbirds do so well in urban areas. It's part of my friend's on-going research into what makes a bird an "urban winner."

a NY Times article on the study

a video of mockingbirds attacking someone they recognize, but ignoring four other people walking close by their nest

There's a Greater Sand-plover in Jacksonville

I went with my friend Seabird to see it yesterday, and it was well worth the drive. It's a beautiful bird, with striking markings on the face, a salmon-colored collar, and long, elegant legs. We watched it running around eating fiddler crabs on the beach, surrounded by Ruddy Turnstones and Wilson's Plovers. This is only the second time one has been recorded in the Western Hemisphere, so the twitchers are coming out of the woodworks for it.

Today I went with a group of paleontologists from the museum to a river fossil site. We used SCUBA gear to collect the fossils, even though the river was only about 5 feet deep at that point. It. Was. Awesome.

The river was teaming with life. Huge numbers of small freshwater clams, sunfish, mosquitofish, other fish I couldn't ID, invertebrates, and plants. It was so neat to be finding several million year old fossils among such a diversity of life. I would be digging up matrix, and among the piles of dark brown clams shells, spot a dark brown object that was not clam shell shaped, and realize that I was looking at a snake vertebrae, or part of a turtle shell, or an armadillo scute, or a shark tooth. Meanwhile, a sunfish would come very close to my mask (within a foot) to investigate what exactly was going on in his territory. He'd surprise me, and I'd look up to see that there were dozens of fish nearby, all checking us out.

When I was above water, the area was filled with bird song. Ospreys flew over, calling, parulas, wrens, and cardinals were singing, several species of woodpeckers were woodpecking and calling.

I loved the entire experience, and I can't wait to go out again next week.

The committee member in whose lab I conduct my molecular research, Rebecca, and her husband, Ed, share combined lab space, lab meetings, students, etc. Together, their lab probably has the most fun of any lab I've seen. At the end of each semester, we have a lab party in place of our weekly lab meeting. In the past, in addition to great food, such lab parties have involved activities like "blindfolded-ly stick the tape on the X on the inflatable dinosaur (named Penelope) while Ed holds it and talks like a pirate," chair races down the hallway (inviting other labs to join us), play dough sculpting (all of our creations are on display on the lab windowsill), and "guess how many microliters of water are in this pipette".

This semester, we held our lab potluck party outside in the courtyard, as the weather was gorgeous. Our main activity, other than stuffing ourselves with food, was leaf rubbings. You know, you put a piece of paper on top of leaves and then rub with a crayon to create an imprint of the leaves. We all made beautiful crayon-leaf artwork, which we then hung on the wall in the hallway outside the lab. Other labs display posters of their research; we show off our crayon drawings.

These lab parties are great for fostering a friendly, non-threatening lab environment. They encourage lab members to help one another and become each other's emotional support systems. In the museum, our weekly B&B's (Birds & Beer, where we all prepare bird specimens and drink beer) function in a similar way. They're stress relief, allow lab members to get to know one another better, help each other with research problems, and produce specimens for the collection (and thus are scientifically productive). When I have my own lab, I plan to organize similar activities. Not just because they're fun, although that's a part of it, but because they're good for the entire lab:-)

My samples are almost done centrifuging, so I'm going to go finish getting them ready for sequencing (my pcr conditions are finally optimized and working!!!)

I just finished measuring all of the bones of the flightless rail from Abaco that Dave gave me. I know he's got more that are not yet cataloged, but he's out of town until Friday. I'm going to have a difficult time waiting that long... boo.

Completely off topic: know what I love? The feeling of riding my bike in the sun while wearing a t-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. It makes me feel so carefree, like I'm a kid and it's summer vacation, even as I'm on my way to do hours of labwork. I start my day feeling so lightweight and stress-free when I ride to school in nice weather wearing flip-flops. I don't know why, but the flip-flops are essential to the feeling. It's not the same when I wear my hiking shoes.

Back to working while I wait for my PCR to finish so I can see if attempt #4726 worked...

exam questions written = 0
presentations made = 0
samples PCR-ed = 0
DNA analyses performed = 0
bones measured = 0
dishes washed = 1 sinkload
miles ran = 3
push-ups = 30
sit-ups = 120
pages of thesis written = 4
thesis chapters finished and ready for my committee = 1

I win!

Rewarding myself with some fabulous zocial fun:-)

Hermione is making adorable chirps and whistles. In the past hour, I've heard her give 3 new whistles. For whatever reason, today she's really into imitating me. It's fun:-) Right now we're "singing" along to my iTunes playlist together.

My newest favorite song is "Gentle Arms of Eden," by Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer. It's fabulous. It's kind of folky, with a bouncing rhythm, and the lyrics are a celebration of both home and the courage it takes to leave home. Or that's my interpretation of them, anyway. Given my current life stage, that really speaks to me.

I've got most of the first chapter of my thesis written. I started the second chapter of my thesis today. This is about how it's going: