Yeah, the migraine got better. Going home and eating a nutritious lunch helped. They also got the air conditioning back on, so hopefully I'll be able to work in my office tomorrow. (I have a little research to do and also want to complete a couple more chapters of the "new" prep for the gen bio class - we have a new textbook so it's essentially like doing a new prep).

Apparently it was more than a thrown switch; there was a guy over there rooting around in the mechanical room where the controls were, and he had one of those testers hooked up to the circuit breaker for the A/C.

Part of the research I'm working on is breaking down the germination experiment I'm doing, recording the times to germination and percent germination, and measuring the radicle and coleoptile/shoot lengths.

A couple species did nothing at all. (And are now in cold storage to see if a few weeks of cold treatment causes anything to happen).

The Scarlet Winecup was one. (I don't know if it needs a cold treatment - the seed seller claimed the seeds were not "dormant.")

But I actually wound up writing in my data notebook:

"Winecup: 'They tried to make me do germination; I said no, no, no.'"

Sometimes you have to do stuff like that to make it through the day, research-wise.

I also graded the first half (the in-class portion) of the Biostats test tonight after my evening class. I didn't WANT to, but the way my week's shaping up, I figured it would be better if I DID.

But I still found time to do this:



"I Can Has Eyes?"

Yeah, I'm still working on the pillow front. Only the nose, mouth, whiskers, and inside of an ear is left at this point. It took me a while to figure out what I wanted to do for the eyes - on the original, they are just sort of outlined, and I didn't know if I wanted to just outline, or to do an iris plus pupil, or just an iris, or what. I finally decided on satin stitch in the iris color, with a simple backstitch outline.

(At first I was afraid the just-the-iris would look kind of zombified and creepy, but it doesn't - I think it works really well given the 1930s-esque nature of the design, kind of like some of the old cartoons where the characters had the "pie wedge" eyes, like the really early Mickey Mouse cartoons).

You can't tell with the lighting, but the eyes are a gold color, like the original inspiration.

A little "treat" I bought myself also came today:



(I promise, that's my hand. It just doesn't look much like it to me. I guess it's time to start using moisturizing lotion again and make an effort to drink more water).

There's an online merchant called the Weekend Store that features these: jewelry made from old typewriter keys. The semicolon is my favorite punctuation mark (if it's not too odd to have a favorite punctuation mark), so I bought myself a ring of it.

I like the idea of old, unused manual typewriters being recycled into jewelry. My parents have an old one - in fact, the typewriter I tried to learn to type on - that belonged to my grandfather. I told my dad (after I bought the ring) never to throw that typewriter out without first checking to see if someone might want it for the keys. (Or heck, to check to see if one of the local museums might want it; I think it's probably twenties vintage. It's a nice old typewriter but I have no room for it and frankly it takes more wrist-strength to type on than I care to exert these days.)