It's raining great buckets here. Might even hail later.

But that doesn't matter, as I did the necessary grocery shopping yesterday, my car is garaged, and I brought home what I want to work on (mainly a paper on allelopathy in Lespedeza that I will hopefully be presenting at this year's Prairie Conference) with me.

And I finished reading another book!

This one is "work reading" or "professional development" or whatever you want to call it. But it was fun, too.

It's called "Fresh Water" by E. C. Pielou (who is sort of a minor heroine of mine - she is an ecologist who started her career at a time when relatively few women did that sort of thing. And she writes well).

It is, as you might guess, about water, the water cycle, groundwater, organisms that live in water, flooding, dams, etc., etc. I learned a lot from the book because I never had a limnology course, and my geology background was limited to one semester of economic geology and what bits and pieces I picked up from being my dad's daughter (which were mainly about groundwater and aquifers, as that has long been his research interest).

My favorite chapters were two near the end of the book - the one on wetlands and the one on aquatic life. I liked the wetlands chapter partly because there are so many weird and wonderful terms applied to wetlands and stuff that happens in them:

paludification
lagg
muskeg
strangmoor


also, from another chapter, but can apply to wetlands: aufeis.

(It seems many of the terms used came from German - which used to be the default scientific language; my parents, even in the 60s, learned "reading German" because of the possibility of papers being in that language - or the various Scandinavian languages [probably because there are so many wetlands there]).

I also liked the chapter on aquatic life because there are so many weird and wonderful things that live in water. Purple bacteria that make hydrogen as a by-product! (and which are, incidentally, being examined as a possible source of hydrogen for hydrogen fuel cells - a source which wouldn't actually TAKE more energy to produce than the cell would store, as these things are photosynthetic). Methanogens, which make methane - the methane that causes the will-o'-the-wisp phenomenon. Diatoms, with their fancy little cases and the "wings" of protoplasm they use for locomotion.

It's a fairly easy read (though I found some difficulty in visualizing some of the things in the chapter on motion of water - some of the things dealing with subsurface seiches and Langmuir cells - but that may be a function of my having grown up in a pretty landlocked state, where the most water I ever observed were a few semi-intermittent streams, and then when I was, my main focus was trying to catch frogs.) You don't need to be a scientist to understand it. And Pielou writes very clearly.


I have also discovered that my cable modem connection is fast enough for me to listen to Internet radio - and surprisingly, the little speakers on my Winbook laptop are nicer than the speakers on the Dell computer in my university Office.