scrottie

The past week has been rather people-full, most especially the last 2 days, and today will also be very people-full.

I tend to lose track of my internal monologue in the midst of too much people time, and then I get kind of frustrated/discouraged in the moments in-between because I feel like I should be doing something with that time, but I really can't.

Martha the cat also thought I should really get up early this morning. Eventually I'll have a cup of coffee and be on my way.

Today: National Learn to Row Day in the morning, then bike valet at Art on Lark in the afternoon. At least the forecast thunderstorms have moved into the later afternoon/early evening.

For the past year, I've had students helping me with two projects to characterize leafcutter ant worker size variation. The first project involved working with ants from a larger experiment where I fed colonies diets that contained different amounts of protein, carbohydrate, and phosphorus, and was partly motivated by a preliminary finding that the amount of cellulose in the food used to provision the leafcutter fungus can cause colonies to produce smaller workers.

Anyway, the challenge with the first project is that my overall sample size is ~80 leafcutter ant colonies. If I want to characterize worker size variation, I need to measure some number of ants from each of those 80 colonies. For a fairly arbitrary reason, I've mostly been measuring ~96 worker ants per colony. Now, do the math: 80 x 96 is 7,680 ants. If it takes around 3 minutes to measure each ant (rough estimate), that's 384 hours of work, or 9.6 weeks of measuring ants for 40 hours a week, without any breaks.

For that reason, I put off attempting measurements until I had a crew of students in need of a straightforward research project. I had that crew last summer, for a month. In that time period, we got through around 50 out of the 80 colonies.

Yesterday, I finally managed to finish the first stage of the measurement process for the last 16 colonies, weighing the ants, one by one.

Here's my little corner weighing station:


And a close-up of a small dish of the ants. Probably around 200 ants, in this case.


Manipulating individual dried, brittle ants without damaging them requires some good fine-motor skills. After I weigh each ant, I've been putting her into her own well in a 96-well plate (to the right in the photo), which now helps you understand where the number 96 comes from.

But body weight is only half of the equation. The other half of the equation involves measuring each ant's head width - the general proxy for an ant's overall body size.

The materials needed to measure ant head widths are far more portable than the ant weighing station, however, so it's likely I'll be carting these ants along with me to Arizona this summer!

Oh - the second ant measurement project is a smaller one, and also nearly finished, hurrah!

Originally, this weekend would have been Yet Another Long Bike Ride, but since I decided to stop doing that, instead I had time to go boating! Yippee!

Small boat sail-camping is called "dinghy cruising," but I think if I'm rowing and not sailing to and from my destination, it's more like RowCamping for me. Plus, it would be really tricky to create some sort of boom tent setup aboard Petrichor to be a more proper dinghy cruiser.

In any case, I really wanted to do a RowCamping trial sometime this summer: see how far I could go in Petrichor, see what it's like to try and stow camping gear aboard, et cetera. I even managed to talk scrottie into joining me for the first leg, at least*.

We managed to get ourselves down to the boathouse in a fairly timely fashion, departing a bit after 9 am. The only real issue was a very strong northerly headwind - unusual for our stretch of the Hudson. Thanks to the extra rowing practice this past Monday, S and I were able to do a lot of tandem rowing as we worked our way north towards Troy. That was necessary; if just one of us was rowing, the boat could barely make forward progress.

You can see some evidence of our desperation to get out of the wind in this map of our journey:


We tried crossing over to the opposite shore several times, to see if that side was more sheltered. The first time, we found some shelter and relief, but once we rounded the corner after the Menands Bridge, relief was hard to come by as the wind ripped right down along the river channel.

We were pleased to find that Petrichor dealt well with the swells and whitecaps. There was less than a centimeter of water in the bilge by the time we arrived at the public dock in Troy.



I also learned a few lessons about trying to use a pee funnel while aboard a rowing vessel. Let's just say these lessons ultimately resulted in S deciding to purchase a pee bucket from the hardware store in Troy (with any luck, he will also use the bucket on an upcoming actual dinghy cruise).

Upon reaching Troy, we were thrilled to discovered that a beloved vegan burrito shop, Burrito Burrito, has reopened! It's now attached to/associated with a neighboring bar and music venue, in a quite lovely spot with quite lovely eclectic decor.



It looks to me like the kitchen in the new space is more minuscule than in the prior location, but it's just so good to have a vegan burrito option again even if they can't deep-fry entire cauliflower heads anymore.

The farmer's market was pretty bustling. No 30-pound bags of carrots, but at least one place had decent bundles of rhubarb, and another stall had grapevines for sale.

That's the greenery tucked in behind me while I'm sitting in the bow, a grapevine:


Later on I made S trade seats with me as an experiment.



In the bow seat he could row away without triggering as much commentary from me about various aspects of rowing technique. Probably for the best!

Based on the ferocity of the wind, and the fact the forecast indicated it would continue until at least 5 pm, I decided I'd had enough of fighting the conditions and would just aim for home after Troy, instead of trying to fight further north up through the lock and towards Peebles Island.

Besides, that meant we could actually enjoy the wind as it pushed us back to Albany. We hardly even had to do any rowing at all!

Here's the boat back at home, with all the stowed gear:


All told, I learned a lot from the trip. Stowing the gear wasn't that complicated by itself, but I do think I should get a couple more proper drybags for everything, since it does seem I can basically guarantee there will always be some water in the bottom of the boat. Stowing the kayak dolly on the stern deck wasn't too bad, either. When we brought the boat back up to the yard, however, we did learn that the kayak dolly needs to be minded, or it can wind up slipping out from under the boat (or in this instance, getting flipped upside-down).

I do still think I need to get a good folding cane seat for a passenger, too.

I think now I'll generally be satisfied with just daytrips in Petrichor for the rest of this year. I already have plenty of camping experience, so I'm now feeling fairly well-prepared for the RowCamping adventure I have planned for next summer.


*He has a lot of work tasks and homework to attend to, so was prudent enough to only commit to a day trip.

I suppose it's at least progress to notice that trying to get myself to work on manuscripts triggers an itch to work on tangible projects and get various other things sorted out.

I *did* make some actual progress on two of the current manuscripts yesterday, yay. One is a project on seed harvester ant queens that I worked on with a graduate student and some undergrads back in the summer of 2021. The grad student (now a postdoc) and I have a standing weekly meeting to help ensure we make slow but relentless forward motion on the paper. Right now I am mostly refining the Introduction and Methods, but I do also need to review the Results again so we can then start working on drafting the Discussion.

The other manuscript is an unpublished dissertation chapter where I just can't stop collecting more data. That's a project where over the past year I've had a whole team of undergraduates help me to weigh and measure the head widths of thousands of leafcutter ants. We made good progress overall, but there are still ~15 colonies to finish up out of the 80 or so. Slow but steady progress, but perhaps it's some small consolation that it's a project that doesn't require too much thinking at the moment?

Anyway, brains working the way that they do, I have to allow for some daydreaming in the midst of attempting to write. Hence the travel planning and whatnot. But the daydreaming was also motivation to get the next oars sanded and primed, and to think about actually working on a solar-powered bike parts chandelier I want to make, and about getting back to work on various sewing projects, too. Soon.

But then I missed rowing practice this morning because allergies really got me down, so instead I finally got the soaker hose set up on the garden. This was becoming a rather urgent project, because the strawberry plants are all showing signs of wanting to produce a rather sizeable strawberry crop, but if the plants aren't well-hydrated the berries will be tiny and disappointing.

See what I mean?


So, soaker hose deployed!

I also planted a bunch of marigold seeds in among the chaos of the driveway garden:


This isn't the best photo of the driveway garden, but this year S dug out one of the burning bushes and replaced it with Brandi Glanville, the apricot tree that tried to kill me earlier this spring. He also added a strawberry plant, and I added a newer Dark Dahlia, which is already putting out lovely blooms. The hosta in the lower left of the photo and the rhubarb in the center were planted previously, and the back end of the bed has been taken over by some sort of lily. So, lots of random things going on in this garden bed, which is totally fine and fun.

Anyway, it's nice to have a part of the yard be experimental. The driveway bed could definitely use a bunch of soil amendment, though. It's just compacted clay right now, as a result of years of neglect.

Martha would have liked to help me, but she was forced to remain inside the catio, much to her dismay.


George also would have liked to help me, but he requires direct supervision on the catio, so since he was not permitted out he instead decided to inspect our freezer magnet Scrabble game.

This past weekend, our team went to the Pittsford Regatta on the Erie Canal just outside Rochester. It's a favorite regatta, which is a little funny because just a few years back it was hard to convince my masters teammates to participate, and now we have a big crew that goes. This year the regatta weather didn't fully cooperate; when we arrived it was warmish, then it started to sprinkle, the sprinkle turned to rain and blowing wind, and temperatures dropped through the day. It has been a while since I've had such a rainy regatta experience, and I've definitely forgotten how to manage myself in the midst of it all. Being out in the elements all day is different from being out in the elements for just a rowing practice. Overall our spirits weren't too dampened; boats had decent races and we didn't have any serious misadventures (this time!).

I've started to think of my singles races as "scouting" opportunities.

( lots of photos in this post... )

It has been quite the weekend, to the point where today will likely largely be devoted to just trying to remember who I am, where I am, what I'm doing. I mean, yes, I have some sense of things, but I also have a big photo backlog from the past week, and need to sit down and rewrite my to-do lists.

Yesterday featured some of those moments of, "Do I sit down and think and write about things, or do I just get up and DO some of the particular things on the to-do list?"

I went with doing the things, most particularly getting the dahlias planted, but also tackling the next set of oar repairs and sanding, and tending to the most urgent laundry items. (so much laundry. too much laundry. but better than moldy clothes.)

Ultimately, though, I'm "working" from home today, so today will be a mix of thinking and doing. Sooner or later I need to get the soaker hose installed, and there are also several herbs that need to be repotted. It is another rather rainy day, however, so I might put off the soaker hose work until later in the week.

And now that I'm clear of the week of faculty development workshops, maybe I can finally structure and prioritize progress on research? Maybe?