Spring Break

     One of my students was surprised and seemed slightly alarmed that I wasn't going anywhere for spring break.  I find this kind of amusing since the reason I love spring break is that there are no students.  They can all go flittering about the country, the world, but I'll stay here where its quiet and peaceful.

     I should really be stressing out right now, but because its the beginning of the week and my open time for working seems endless, that stress hasn't manifested yet.  I spent the morning and early afternoon working in my favorite coffee shop and I was actually pretty productive.  I finished my second draft of my Methods section and informed my advisor that I'd made a calculation error that influences all of my results so far.  That second task was the most nerve wracking thing I've done today.  One little miscalculation and my values were halved.  All the statistics I've done so far weren't affected (the values only increased by a factor of two, none of the trends changed), but I have to remake all of the graphs.  Sometimes when I'm beating myself up over not having enough done I think of these times - if I had killed myself making a ton of graphs based on the old data I would be redoing all of them now.  This way I'll be making some of them for the first time and the data will be right.

Bythotrephes longimanus (Spiny Water Flea).  Picture from Iowa DNR.

This is my study subject, the spiny water flea, an invasive zooplankter species that originated in Europe and Asia.   Below is the range expansion so far of Bythotrephes within the U.S.

Property of the USGS

     I visited with some friends from college yesterday. Cleo, her husband Kris, and married couple Elanore and Justin.  I went to school with Cleo, Elanore, and Justin.  Kris was the only one of the four of them that has also been in grad school.  I felt like the fifth wheel in our group.  They've all been out of school for years now.  They're interests and daily worries are very different from mine.  When I met up with them they were chatting about house sizes and prices in various cities around the U.S.  In their free time they all play board games, something I rarely ever do.  They even brought board games for us all to play.  I participated in one, watched another, but felt like I didn't really fit in anymore.

 Its an odd thing to realize how little you have in common with college friends after a few years.  They asked me how my thesis was going.  I can give answers, but only Kris has the slightest knowledge of what its like here.  They've all settled into their life outside of academia and I'm still here, waiting, working, trying to get past it all.  I hope its all worth it.