Hello everyone! We’re one week away from Thanksgiving Break, and I can’t tell you how ready I am for it to come. Things are getting nice and busy now, with the end of the semester on the horizon, which has meant both a lot and not a lot of work for me. So, let’s get started.
Monday was alright. I mean, there was a large amount of lab
prep to do this week, and it was a long lab, which wasn’t great. Evo Devo was…
interesting—we talked about butterfly metamorphosis and how they only exist as
living goo in chrysalis’. If you’re curious, go look it up. It’s really gross. On
Sunday, the Governor’s orders came through—which mean we needed to stay at home
as much as possible, which meant we had to cancel our Friendsgiving, and that I’m
going to be teaching lab from home even before I go ‘Home’ home for
Thanksgiving. There wasn’t much else after lab, except Maren and I officially
won the Halloween contest for the server, which got us an entire beacon, some ancient
debris, turtle eggs and free stuff from the soon to be opened nether store that
Emily is working at. That was nice, and really fun, and we even got to see
other people’s builds—but Maren’s siblings can be really annoying when they try
to push each other and the rest of us into lava.
Tuesday was even busier. The members of my morning lab asked
a lot more questions, but I felt prepared for it, so it wasn’t really bad. I
needed to have my EvoDevo reading done earlier this week since I had a lot of student
meetings on Wednesday, and it was fairly interesting. It was about spadefoot tadpoles.
I think spadefoots are cool, and learning about the canabilism carnivore tadpoles
in relation to phenotypic plasticity was really nice. I knew a fair amount of the
information already from Herpetology, so it wasn’t too hard to understand
either. Neuroendo wasn’t necessarily hard to understand either. We’re talking
about stress hormones, which is something I’m familiar with because of the GAD
paper and my animal phys class, so it felt kind of like a review. The seminar
this week was about vaping and the science behind nicotine cravings and its
relation to anxiety, which was… alright? I mean, it was still fairly boring,
but better than stuff on bee ecology or crap like that. After classes, I was
super done with everything, so I just played on Minecraft and worked on my
Temple of Wisdom challenge, and even finished it, which was cool, though I may
add more onto it.
Wednesday had both good and bad in it. I had a lot of
meetings with students to discuss how this week assignments would work. I have
one student who’s never written a lab report which is the weirdest thing ever—how
do you live that long and not write a lab report??? Anyways, outside of the few
hours of meetings, I had the EvoDevo class where we talked more about spadefoots.
I’ll spare you guys the details, since I doubt you guys want to hear anymore
about frogs. But, I think the biggest take away from that day was the fact that
Maren, Emily and I got to play the Harry Potter Scene It, and I got the news
that Hetalia’s coming back next spring!!! I’m super excited to see what kind of
silliness will be in the history anime. Also the Harry Potter Scene It is
awesome and I love it, even if it’s only about the movies.
Thursday was rather relaxed, even if I had three classes and
a lot of emails to answer. I had some time to play Spore later on in the day,
and I’ve been having a lot of fun casually playing it. Intro to Grad Studies
was decent this week. I actually participated more than just listened, and our
guest speaker was nice and took an interesting in everyone. We were talking
about grants and had to look into some we might be able to qualify for, which
was a lot of money—yeesh. Neuroendo was still unsurprising, but it was a nice
review. It was rather ironic that we talked about grants that day, because we
actually read a grant proposal by Sara about her own research. She actually
called us from the coyote research facility after removing their brains, which
is a huge achievement, and the monitor collars are working out as well, which
is exciting.
Friday was… crazy. I founded out when I’ll be teaching labs,
which means I can start making decisions about what classes I will be taking
next semester. I also had a lot of reports to grade (3 to 4 paragraphs each for
the most part) which took up all morning, which also involved my other TA work—lab
prep start up, looking at next week’s materials, sending out announcements,
etc. So, yeah, busy morning. I did take a break to play Spore and read Naruto fanfiction,
though, which is nice. Then I went back to work, I have an elevator speech done
now for next week, and I still needed to look into what classes I’ll sign up
for on the 16th. I narrowed it down to two thanks to my parents, but
I’m still making a decision, which is hard.
And now it’s Saturday. I’ve already got to civilization on
Spore today. We’ve gone shopping, just for the bare essentials and some ‘help’
to survive next week (i.e. some chocolate) since next week is the busy week
before Thanksgiving since all the teachers don’t want to give us a lot of work over
break which means it’s all due or heavy class wise before, which sucks. But
yeah… I’m watching the MCC Championships with Maren and Emily as a write this,
and I still need to do some Neuroendo work for next week sometime today, but it
should be a nice relaxing weekend before everything goes to pot. Anyways, until
next time. Bye!
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