Not so bad

I'm in a better mental place than I was earlier this week.

Part of it is that I've had time to do some research reading. I'm learning a lot about Colony Collapse Disorder (interesting small fact: honeybees lack the same pesticide detoxifying enzymes some other bees have. No, pesticides are not the sole cause or even a major cause of CCD, but I think that fact is interesting. Also that bumblebees are the only wild species of social bees in North America. (Well, some bumblebees. I'm pretty sure there are solitary species as well.)

It strikes me funny that I'm so interested in bees now; I was terrified of them as a child. But I find them pretty fascinating now and have learned that with honeybees and bumblebees, if you don't harass them, you can stand and watch them and they won't come after you. (Wasps, that's not so true of. I still don't like wasps and yellow jackets all that much).

Actually, what I'm going to do is more of a pollinator-activity study; determining what species of pollinators are abundant and active around here. There was some publication I read that said that there was little known about pollinators in this part of the country, how their activity or abundances compared with elsewhere. So I'm going to see what I can do. At the very least, I can probably get a Academy of Sciences publication out of it.

Also, for the heck of it, I Google-Scholared myself to see if there were publications of mine up there. (I stopped counting at 7). And some are apparently widely available as .pdf files:

I think this is one of the better papers I've written; it was for the Prairie Conference a few years back.
(There is a MAJOR typo in the title of that one: it should be 1998, not 1988. I think that was the year they decided not to do galley proofs of the papers. At least, I never received one.)

And here's my dissertation publication! (There's actually a bunch more stuff from that I never did publish but I don't feel like going back and messing with it now; there are other things I'd rather be working towards publishing).

Also interesting: my first-ever publication and the publication of my dissertation were 10 years apart. And I had my first publication  16 years ago now. (Wow, was it that long? And I had total beginners luck on that one: got it accepted with minor revisions the first time. That's a real slam-dunk in academic publishing, and I think it did set me up for disappointment when I had later publications rejected or sent back for major revision and "then maybe we'll consider it")

The part of me that was brought up never to brag is recoiling a little bit at this post. But then again, I need to remind myself from time to time that I'm not exactly chopped liver. 

There's also someone out there (apparently an astronomer) that has the same last name and first two initials as I do. (No idea if that person is a man or a woman.)