Thursday, June 13, 2013

THURSDAY morning random

Sorry, y'all. I had a long meeting at church last night. (The bad thing: most of our air conditioning units are borked, possibly from a power surge. The good thing: I am not the new board moderator. People wanted me to be but I really did not want it. I am vice-moderator, however, which means I fill in when the moderator is absent....)

* The quilt shop I had the bad dream about? They're fine. I just received an e-mail mailing from them about upcoming classes and such.

* The Marshall book I referred to yesterday is excellent. The key makes identifying Hymenoptera to family (That's the best I can do at this point) much easier. I'm also getting better at spotting shortcut key characters (like the vein weirdness in halictid bees) that mean I don't have to go through the entire key.

* There are lots and lots of halictid bees in my samples. Far more than I actually see visiting flowers. The trap data and the flower-visit data show different patterns and I am not sure what to do about that.

*Another odd bee thing, courtesy of Charles: How the Changelings (in the Pony Universe) are eerily like social bees. Yeah, there are some things about bees that aren't so wonderful. (The fact that colonies will allegedly go to war and parasitize each other....)

* The other day, out in the field, I got to thinking: Equestria doesn't seem to have air conditioning, I wonder if it gets hot in Ponyville in the summer? Like, southern Oklahoma hot? (Canterlot, being on a mountainside, I would expect to have a much more moderate temperature - which is probably why mainly rich unicorns live there). Or do the weather ponies have control over things like high and low pressures? (And then I pictured Rainbow Dash saying, "We're kicking heck out of this dome of high pressure, and we just can't get it to budge! We need more pony power.")

* Because yeah, our dome of high pressure has arrived. (Heh. Apparently they've made a miniseries of "Under the Dome," where an odd glasslike covering descends over a town, trapping it. That's actually a bit what the dome of high pressure seems like to me). It might bobble a bit early next week - there's a weak chance of thunderstorms. But man, it got hot FAST. I could have done with a few more weeks in the 70s or even the 80s.

* Did I hear right on the radio news this morning? That people are traveling from, like, the coasts, to come to Oklahoma to loot in the areas that the tornadoes wiped out? I hope I misheard. Even for a criminal, that's LOW. That's really, really low. I hope they wind up being punished "with extreme prejudice" - if not by the justice system, but karma or "what goes around comes around" or whatever you want to call it.

Also, that just.....there's really no way to make an honest living where you live in California, so you have to drive halfway across the country to steal copper from a damaged home? The profit in that is high enough that you're willing to make the trip, and also risk meeting up with a homeowner with a CCW license and good aim? That seems just nuts to me. Surely McDonald's is hiring? (I'd rather flip a million burgers to earn my bread than rip someone else off, especially someone who had suffered a tragedy. Then again, I'm not a criminal.)

1 comment:

CGHill said...

It's my understanding that the pegasi control the weather in limited areas: the southern deserts and the Frozen North are right out. We've seen that Ponyville gets snow -- they wouldn't need Winter Wrap-Up otherwise -- but it doesn't seem to get particularly hot in the summer, at least not to the extent where it might discourage the Summer Sun Celebration.

(Oh, and there's the Everfree. I figure it's so named because it's out of control.)