Well, late in the day yesterday I did a sample that had almost a dozen things in it (a couple small beetles, a tiny worm, a weevil, and a number of what I think must be diplurans), so I concluded I NEED to go through all the samples, seeing as "a dozen things" might be the sum total that came through the funnel for some samples.

It's still hard on my eyes but I think if I limit myself to one or two samples I day I won't actually do any damage. (My father had a similar experience years back...in a class where they worked with thin sections of geologic samples (Crystallography, maybe? There are so many different classes out there). That's when he discovered he was prone to migraines.)

So this will be my theme song for a while:



Heh. Thomas Dolby. It had probably been ten years since I thought about him. He was steampunk before any of us really knew what that was.

(Edited to add: watching that video the whole way through for the first time in 20-some years - wow, the 80s were even weirder than I remembered. I remember thinking that was a cool, "deep" video as a high school student. I think this quotation from Calvin and Hobbes applies here:

Hobbes: "Maybe I'm just New Wave."
Calvin: "Maybe you're just stupid."

The line between "art" and "stupid random crap" was incredibly thin during that era.)

I really don't mind doing all the samples; I'm getting faster at it as I realize I don't have to be quite so painstakingly precise - if I put enough water on there, everything floats up and I can grab it without having to do too much scraping and digging.

Oh, and I keep getting spam telling me I'm "RECOMMENDED FOR A Ph.D!" or advertising "BUY a degree!" If I had five bucks for every one of those I got, I'd be able to go back to college and take classes in all the stuff that I never had time to the first go-round. (And every day, it seems I find some topic that I'd really like to learn more about. It's really not fair.)