Old tobacco barn

I visited my family’s farm while in North Carolina earlier this summer.  It’s always emotionally difficult to go back – I have so many good memories of playing with my siblings and exploring, but so many bad memories involving religion and painfully insane relatives.  I’m irritable and restless the entire time I’m there.  To try to calm myself while I was there, I took a lot of long walks, taking pictures of decaying farm equipment and interesting old buildings scattered across the farm, and hanging on to the good memories.

One of the places my siblings and I loved was an old tobacco barn.  Once the door is closed, the inside seems magical (at least to an 8 year old me).  It’s cool inside, and dim.  The comforting smell of curing tobacco still lingers.  The light filters through a thousand tiny holes and cracks, illuminating the dust that’s forever suspended in the air.  A staggered series of beams stretches from about head height to the ceiling (these were used to hang the tobacco).  We’d climb and scramble through the beams playing all sorts of games.

There’s an inscription scored into the side of the barn that we’ve never been able to interpret.  We think “H.T.R.” are the initials of whoever built the barn or owned the land at that time and that “Febery” is a just phonetic spelling of how everyone in this part of N.C. says February.  But the number sequence “91.33.23″ is a mystery.  I’ve always wondered if it had something to do with the tobacco allotment.  Any ideas?

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When most people talk about Impatiens, they’re referring to Impatiens walleriana hybrids, which are popular shade annuals.  I didn’t know of any wild Impatiens until I came across this plant a few weeks ago on a walk in Pennsylvania:

Impatiens capensis

The flowers are quite different from any other Impatiens I’ve seen, but the leaves and watery, almost translucent stems along with the wet, shaded habitat immediately made me think of Impatiens.  My plant ecologist host confirmed that it was indeed an Impatiens and that the common name was Orange Jewelweed.  I was quite thrilled with my botanical prowess for the rest of the day.

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From Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog:

Colombe Josse is . . . a sort of tall blond leek who dresses like a penniless Bohemian.  If there is one thing I despise, it is the perverse affectation of rich people who go around dressing as if they were poor, in second-hand clothes, ill fitting gray wool bonnets, socks full of holes, and flowered shirts under threadbare sweaters.  Not only is it ugly, it is also insulting: nothing is more despicable than a rich man’s scorn for a poor man’s longing.

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Every summer since 2008, I’ve gone to a big scientific meeting.  Meetings are one of my favorite parts of being a scientist.  It’s exciting to see all the newest ideas in my particular subfield and to learn more about subfields I’m interested in, but don’t have time to teach myself about.  I’m becoming more and more involved with ecoinformatics and attended a great panel on some recent work in that field.  Transient Theorist has some great thoughts on the panel and the field in general.

Meetings are also important for networking – it’s much easier to email a potential advisor for graduate school when you’ve been introduced to them at a meeting, seen one of their talks, or gone to dinner with their grad students.

The best part about meetings, though, is catching up with all my science friends and being surrounded by people eager to talk about science.  I always come to the meeting tired and frustrated and leave rejuvenated and full of new approaches and ideas for my work.

I also love how the meetings give me an opportunity to get out of my teeny college town and spend some time in a city.

View from convention center roof

There’s time for a little exploration of the city, but for the most part, I spend most of my time inside the convention center.  The convention center for this year’s meeting was big, bright, and airy.  There were even little birds that lived inside.  For pictures, check out Karina’s post.

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Despite brushing and flossing and using foul tasting leave on re-calcifying paste and fancy mouthwash, I’m always getting cavities.  I end up spending about 7% of my income at the dentist every year. Based on the prognosis at my last dentist’s appointment, I’ll spend about $300 at the dentist in the next month or so.  In an ideal world, I’d spend that money on gorgeous and ridiculously impractical shoes.

Miranda Back Zip by Frye

In a world where I didn’t get so many cavities, I’d use that money to pay for a couple of grad school applications, to knock back my student loans a bit, or to start saving for a new computer.

Instead, I’ll be spending $300 for a few hours of torture.

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Frida Kahlo - The Dream

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You may have noticed the new buttons at the end of my posts and wondered what on earth is flattr?  Flattr is a way to pay people quickly, easily, and in reasonable amounts for content that you think is awesome.

When you’re registered to flattr, you pay a small monthly fee. You set the amount yourself. At the end of the month, that fee is divided between all the things you flattered. You’re always logged in to the account. That means that giving someone some flattr-love is just a button away. And you should! Clicking one more button doesn’t add to your fee, it just divides the fee between more people!

I’ve been looking for a micropayment service like this for a really long time.  Hopefully all the newspapers and bloggers I love will start using it so I can start paying them for great work.  And I imagine I’ll find out just how much you all actually like my posts!

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This month’s Scientiae is going to be hosted by Karina at Ruminations of an Aspiring Ecologist and she’s picked an awesome theme: “school” supplies!  That is,

What things do you love in the lab? What are you lost without in the field? What computer programs make your life easier every day? What tools are indispensable? What is tried and true?

Ecologists routinely measure things that have never been measured before or measure things in harsh field environments that quickly destroy typical lab devices.  That means we get to design the methods – and often even the tools to get these measurements.  Even if a tool exists to do the thing you need to do, ecologists are very poor and can’t always afford such fancy things.

One of the recent creations from my lab has been dubbed “The Cone Guillotine.”

THE CONE GUILLOTINE

I think it’s awesome.

We use it to chop open pinyon pine cones to determine how many of the seeds at a certain developmental stage haven’t been aborted or killed.

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August’s Berry Go Round is now up at Seeds Aside.  I love Seeds Aside. Botanical content and pun-filled writing – two of my favorite things!  Some of the great posts in this particular carnival are this one on botanizing in the Bighorn Mountains and another on an adorable little Sedum.

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