Dinesh my lab mentor leaves for India on Friday so I have to take over caring for the mouse colony (colony, as if they are some offshoot of the great mouse empire) earlier than I would've thought. Or wished, really, since it's all very confusing mendelian genetics and backcrossing and crossbreeding and genotyping. Choosing how to maintain a mouse colony with the least number of cages while not necessarily knowing what genotypes the mice are is like one of those optimization calc problems, minus the calculus. I don't envy being the one to start a colony. In fact, being a post-doc appears to be incredibly time-consuming and brain space consuming-- Dinesh was telling me how he hasn't seen full daylight in the past four days or so and wasn't aware the trees had budded.
Speaking of which! I biked past allen centennial gardens to get to soil sci this morning and saw that the magnolia tree by Kronshage was in full bloom! The tulips by the gardens have not only budded but are similarly blooming. All along lakeshore the trees are unfurling green tips which are fast turning into pre-leaves. While this is all very beautiful and life-affirming, it has given me the most godawful allergies I would like to say that are known to mankind. They only briefly abated in our lab room deep beneath MSC. Curses upon you, pollen!! For turning me into what seems like a plague vehicle! Or more accurately, curses upon you, overactive mast cells. Also, it is worrisome because these flowers/plants should not be at this stage of their life in March, on the day after the first day of spring. This whole month has been an exercise in what is wonderful to experience (80 degrees) but disturbing in what it implies about our climate and ecosystem. The lakewater is really low this year. I think it's due to the sparse snowfall we had, so we didn't get a lot of meltwater in the spring. That's pretty worrisome. Also the fact that we had warm temperatures which melted the snow away but didn't necessarily melt the frozen water held in the soil at that time is worrisome as well, since it means that we might not have recharged our water reservoir in the soil.
After studying with Athavi and Emily for four hours in Grainger I accepted that I needed to take a break or my brain would expel information out of both ears like a physiological teakettle. I took my dinner to the lake and sat on the steps there. It was pretty much fully dark out by then. Side note: I'm gaining an alarming fondness for ducks. I used to think they were so common just like squirrels. But now I fixate on them when I'm by the lake and observe things such as how they list to one side when they stand on one foot, or how their feet must be paddling very fast to move them quickly across the water, how they sometimes do this weird head-bobbing thing from side to side that looks quite deliberate...yeah. See. It may just be because they lend themselves to observation well, being the only animals on the lake most of the time and often the only animals we people can observe continuously without them running away. I saw the muskrat very close again tonight. Hello Grandmother Muskrat.
I think it would be cool to have a kind of teach-for-your-friends thing, where you have a group of people get together and teach each other stuff you learn in class, or life, or what have you. When I notice all the random things I've learned, like micropore recharge, I wonder what things other people have learned in class. Stuff like that doesn't really come up in day to day conversation, and so we never really know what others know. Everyone is such a wealth of information, I just wish we could access it. Instead of a book club, an ideas club, or a discussion club...Ben Fox would join. That's such a fantastic name. Ben Wolf! In my imaginary world, Ben Fox and Ben Wolf would meet each other and Chris Han and Crystal Han would get married. And there would be trees that grew cereal and libraries would have all the books in the world.
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