20 June 2020

0239 reading with the critters
0257 working on Accipiter
0759 sleeping
1126 sleeping

Food: Chicken enchiladas, beans, and cucumber for a late lunch

Fact: Rugby, ND was named in 1886 as a junction in the Great Northern Railway.  It was named this because there is a railroad junction in Rugby, England where 5 major railroad lines met.  A bunch of towns in that part of the Great Northern Railway were named after towns in England.  This town is famous for being the geographic center of North America (although its hotly debated) between a number of North Dakota towns.

Woke up and spend basically all day doing Accipiter stuff.  Got the mt alignment finished.  I'm hoping Julie can run it on her cluster so she can deal with that while I work on the UCEs themselves.  We also put on the last Yankees/Rays game before the all star break.  We lost 2 to 1, but favorite yankee hit a homer.  After our late lunch mother and I walked the puppies and then went on a walk down at the high school.  When we got back I did some work then we ate brownies and fruit for dinner and mother and I watched some House Hunters while father went to bed.

19 June 2020

0258 working on Accipiter
0422 trying to go to sleep
2205 trivial pursuit
2231 trivial pursuit

Food: the rest of the pizza for a late lunch

Fact:  John Wilkes Booth slept in the same bed where Lincoln died a few weeks before the assassination.  When Lincoln was shot he was taken to Petersen House across the street from the theater.  This was also the boarding house where a lot of the actors rented rooms.

Woke up and spent the day checking the louse names on the south Texas trees.  Once those were done I sent them to the rest of the group.  So happy to finally get that off my desk.  We put on the baseball game from last Friday which was a lot of fun since we won in extras.  Mother and I took the puppies for a walk (Dumas has been super energetic today, i think the daily walks are helping his arthritis), and then since we ran into the annoying dogs we drove down to the high school for our walk instead of walking down again.  Then it was trivia time.  This week we all got stuck on the orange pie piece.  Twice father actually knew the answer but we went with a different answer instead (including one about what a bottle of Chianti is wrapped in (he said straw but mother really thought twine).  Eventually the west coasters won, but it was a close game- we had all the pie pieces and were trying to land in the circle while maria and kevin only needed 1 more pie piece.  Surprisingly eddie even knew that a fireman was a relief pitcher.  We were all impressed (got some points back for thinking
Knute Rockne played in the 1920s and that the Edmund Fitzgerald sank in September).  The game wrapped up right around 0130. 

18 June 2020

1000 sleeping
1021 sleeping
1554 working on Accipiter
2005 working on Accipiter

Food: fruit, veggies, and ham for lunch salmon for dinner

Fact: Locoweed is estimated to cause 300 million dollars of livestock losses each year in the US making it one of the most economically important of the poisonous plants.  There are many species that fall into this group depending upon region and they live in a variety of habitats and reach as high as 10,000 feet.  Symptoms of locoweed poisoning include weight loss and erratic behavior.  Horses are more susceptible than other grazing animals.

Got to sleep to a normal time so that was amazing.  I spent the majority of the day working on Accipiter mitochondrial genomes.  Mother finished up checking all the bird names in the south Texas louse trees so now I just need to do a final check of the louse names and then that's finally done.  I took a break from working to lift some milkjugs.  Mother and I watched a bunch of House Hunters (since we hit the All Star break we are only watching baseball tomorrow and Saturday since we had a couple games from last week that we skipped).

17 June 2020

1021 sleeping
1247 quick nap between two zoom gatherings
2218 trivia
2218 still trivia

Food: cottage cheese for lunch, tacos for dinner

Fact: There are actually multiple places that claim to have the world's largest ball of twine.  The largest community rolled ball weighs around 20,000 pounds and lives in Cawker City, KS.  However, the largest rolled by a single person is in Darwin, MN and weighs 17,400 pounds.  That ball took its creator 29 years to complete (at 4 hours a day).

Woke up for the ANSP zoom lunch.  Got to meet Dan's new puppy Echo who is absolutely adorable.  Then I took a short nap before having another zoom meeting, this time with Jason and a couple of algae

people.  They are putting a grant in to do some algae taxonomy and were wondering about next gen sequencing.  I took that zoom call on the porch which was really lovely.  After that was finished I spent the rest of the day working on the south Texas louse stuff and Accipiters.  Then I took the puppies for a walk and it was time for trivia.  Today's bonus was really fun- how far are each of these locations for Lawrence.  Between Ron and us we had driven to a lot of the general areas listed from LFK and then could guess based on how long the trip took.  We only missed points on 3 of them out of them.  Since SpaceBallz the trivia team (who always wins) skipped this week we came in 5th (SpaceBallz came in 6th).  But there were only 3 or so points separating all the teams so it really did go down to the wire.  The worst was I completely forgot Smaug's name.  I even knew there was a special edition Dragon's Milk named after him and that Drew and I spent weeks trying to find it without luck in Urbana but couldn't think of the name.  If I'd have come up with that we would have been in the 4 way tie for 2nd.