8 May 2020
0834 sleeping
1702 sequence editing
1950 feeding the critters
2040 setting up for trivia

Food: posole and beans for lunch; chicken wings and calliflower for dinner

Fact: Louisiana is loosing about a football field worth of land every hour due to sea level rise and erosion.  Zac and Ania guessed this right away, Eddie tried really hard to convince them it was Florida by doing some really confusing math.

Woke up, had lunch, and talked with the group about where to spend World Big Day (i decided on Madre de Dios for the main game and outside Cordoba, Argentina for the other game since Intervales sounds like a no go between the parks being closed and a shoot out between illegal miners and government officials last week.  then work on sequence editing.  I am almost 1/4 of the way done.  Then i had to go to the game store and pick up some new trivial persuit cards.  There were a bunch of people there and I was the only one wearing a mask.  It was insane.  I got what I needed and left as quickly as I could.  Did a little bit more work and then we went for a walk.  This time I put a sleeping bag in my backpack so it only weighed about 8 pounds in total. Since it was a really easy 2.5 miles so tomorrow I'll probably go up to 20 tomorrow.  The highlight though was an encounter with the police.  On our last lap I saw him pull in, but then he left.  Turned out he had just moved to the other parking lot and was waiting for us.  He said he thought we were teenagers but i expect he actually thought we were hobos when he saw us (especially because my jeans are ripped to shreds).  We ended up talking to him for a while about mountain lions.  It turns out it was the same officer who watched the transit of Venus with the parentals and Eddie back in 2012.  Once we got home I fed the critters then we ate dinner and played trivia.  As usual there were some great moments of Eddie or Zac talking eachother out of the right answer, and this time around Maria and Kevin actually won.  The west coast team was also in the center but kept missing 1980's sports questions, while our team needed 1 more pie piece.  We got off to an abysmal start so I was impressed it ended up that close.  We also decided we were going to do a tv show about the dome father and I want to build to protect the plants over the winter and call it Under the Dome 2: Catanach edition.

7 May 2020
0118 sequence editing
0344 world of warcraft
0400 world of warcraft
2306 sequence editing


Food: Steak and rice for dinner


Fact: Before the Civil War the area around Malden, WV was the largest producer of salt in the US.  The salt is from the Iapetus Ocean, a former ocean in the Southern Hemisphere and is over 400 million years old.  The ocean itself was around between 600 and 500 MYA.  The ocean was first proposed due to differences in trilobite communities between Scotland and  England and also between eastern and western Newfoundland.  The palentologist, Charles Walcott, figured this was due to some sort of deep water body separating these areas. 

Woke up and had a Zoom meeting with Sami about how to handle her sequence data.  We came up with a pretty good plan that hopefully means we can combine 2019 and 2020 sequencing runs from the same sample.  First though I have to make alignments of all the overlapping genes in each sample and make sure they really are the same and we don't have some sort of contamination issue in the samples that worked poorly.  I also got some on the ground intel about Brazil for the world Big Day this Saturday.  Today was also Dumas's birthday so he and I hung out in the sun for a bit.  When it was time to feed them I added cheese and dog treats to both his and Schubie's dinner to celebrate (you can't eat your cake in front of your friends without sharing, that would just be mean).  The yankees/red soxs game was rained out so no baseball today sadly.  After dinner we watched Harry Potter 5 and I kept working on sequences.