Happy Hallowe'en!

Seems a lot of people are posting photos of their pets all dressed up for Hallowe'en, so I thought I'd do the same.


This is Paul's favourite holiday (even more than Christmas, and he really likes Christmas!). He had a party at work on Wednesday, and found his costume in New York last week. In case you don't know, he's the Phantom of the Opera... We decided to avoid the pint-sized protection rackets tonight, and went to see "Quantum Of Solace". Damn, it's good. I have no costume, unless you count "slightly fat girl in gardening gear" as a costume. And it's not even really a proper female Hallowe'en outfit, because then it would have to be "SEXY slightly fat girl in gardening gear", and that ain't happening after I ate a large popcorn serving all by myself.

My favourite holiday comes next week - Burn-The-Catholics Night

Bathroom - Check!

Right. The bathroom is back to normal, and looks very nice. I have new fixings and am contemplating reprising my "Driller Killer" role of over 20 years ago, when as a six-year-old I was quite handy with a power drill, or just letting Paul put the towel rails up. So where was I?

This year, being in the north-east, Paul and I saved up almost all our holiday allowance to have a break before and after SVP. Before SVP we rented a car from JFK Airport, and did CT, RI, MA, ME, NH, VT and upstate NY. By which I mean, we drove to New Haven in time to look at Yale's campus, and then on to Providence for the first night. We spent a lot of time quoting the first verse from the Eagles' "The Last Resort" at each other, and saw many old world shadows. I adored this old house (which didn't appear to be part of Brown), and want it when we win the EuroMillions lottery.


Then we hit the Cape briefly, where the satnav failed to find Spanky's Clam Shack TWICE, until we gave up and went to Seafood Sam's instead. And then we had a more scenic tour of Boston than we expected thanks to one-way systems and road closures, but had a look at Harvard (not as pretty as Brown) before heading to the Midwest Grill, where I was determined to make some happy memories this time around (and I did).

We clipped the edge of Maine purely to go to Kittery Outlets, but we fulfilled the requirements of the Visit Every State game by taking in some fluid and leaving some fluid, and I even bought a new winter jacket from Old Navy. Then through New Hampshire, where we saw Dartmouth at night, and on to our hotel in Killington, VT.

Paul hates Vermont. From the truck driver who tailgated him all the way from the NH-VT border to the hotel, to the hotel that hadn't considered that it might need as many parking spaces as rooms, or indeed vending machines and more than one individual serving of coffee per room. Not only that, but Killington, a large-ish town geared up for the tourist industry, did not have a single restaurant open until 2pm that afternoon. The state was saved by a small town with a general store serving a breakfast calling itself a Green Mountain Special (or similar - Paul must learn to avoid breakfasts that call themselves after local rock masses...), the Ben & Jerry's factory and getting to meet Amanda. But even the mothership of ice cream disappointed. Here is Paul, weeping at the grave of CoffeeCoffeeBuzzBuzzBuzz, his favourite flavour ever.


And after a quick ice cream, it was time for a long-ass drive to Ithaca to see my bestest friend Usch, who for some reason decided to work on Cenozoic snails for her PhD.


She took us to Lucifer Falls, where Paul got this funny look on his face - the sort of look where I knew he was plotting something... I guess we'll have to wait for the second book of The Long Watch though (have you subscribed yet? He starts serialising the first book on Saturday!).


And an excellent visit to the Museum of the Earth followed, with a gorgeous exhibit of petrified wood and artwork inspired by it (which I'll probably post on the other blog).


And while this Dunkleosteus was at the Museum of the Earth rather than the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, this seems like a nice segué into SVP. In the next post...

I'm Back, But...

I'm not at home. We got in at about 8:30am to discover the workmen who were meant to have spent the last fortnight redecorating the bathroom still there. We have no toilet. Well, we do. It's sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor totally not attached to anything. Our bath is just about useable but I bet the shower can't be used for a bit (and in any case the shower head is in the bedroom).

What could I do but grab a change of clothes and my washing tackle and accompany Paul into work to use his showers? So having joined the human race again, I'm esconced in a West End Starbucks, charging both laptop and mobile phone. I'm dangerously close to finishing my venti non-fat latte, and I'm wishing Starbucks did table service, because I really don't want to give up my plush seat.

So until about five hours ago, we'd had a wonderful holiday and felt very rested. We were looking forward to a nice hot shower in our own home as the youth hostel bathrooms weren't great, but they're doing better than our own bathroom at the moment!

I'll probably hold out here until I've finished editing all the photos, then I'll head home as the workmen have assured me that they'll have finished by this evening. I could do with getting in the garden anyway as there have been a couple of casualties in my absence (nothing a brutal haircut and some time in the growhouse won't fix though!).

But grrr, grrr and double grrr! Why can't things just go smoothly once in a while? From the moment we arrived at JFK it was an uphill struggle, from Paul making it onto some watch list (!!!) to me having to wait 10 minutes for someone to be arsed to serve me (I was trying to buy $50 of tequila - you'd think they'd be keen to have the sale) to a massive group of exchange students holding up the flight because they were incapable of doing such simple a task as handing their boarding passes to the ground staff. Yet all this would have been bearable if I'd been able to come home and shower in my own bathroom.

Gaaah!

Too much holiday fun to blog! But everyone else is getting in there and writing about SVP! Arrrrrgggghhh!

Gimme a week to enjoy New York, fly home, get over the jetlag and start the laundry, yes? Then normal service will be resumed, promise.

First!

We had our first bloggers' lunch today, and it was awesome. I shall attach names later, but I'm trying to win the challenge issued by Matt, that the first person to post this wins.

I haven't seen it appear in anyone else's feed yet, so do I win the internet?

Are We Dead Or Are We In Ohio?

I guess the only people who will get that reference will be the ones who watched a lot of Animaniacs as a child... Anyway, I made it to SVP! Teh interwebs are either bloody expensive or sporadic, so maybe I won't be able to update the old blog as often as I hoped. I've taken well over 400 photos of our roadtrip so far, and seen much geology. Paul hates Vermont, but Ben & Jerry did manage to repair the state's reputation a little.

Today is a busy day for me with committee meetings and a few talks I want to see this afternoon. Oh yes, and I bought a spiffy new little laptop that weighs less than my handbag and could probably fit in it, so I want to try THAT out.

Sadly the bloggers' lunch DOES look like it’s going to clash with the Open Executive Committee meeting, but we can always string out lunch long enough for people to make it to as much of both as possible. Grrrr. Looks like we might be getting towards 20 people though, which will be AWESOME.

I'll ask the restaurant for a table for 12:30pm, and suggest those of us who want to meet beforehand assemble somewhere meaningful in the hotel at about 12:15pm. I'm going to put up a notice on the messageboard for y'all and if you're nice to me I might draw you a map...

Sauropods Rule

See? They're even being used to advertise train fares...

Roadtrip!!

One thing I love to do is to plan a roadtrip in and around SVP each year, and Paul and I have decided to do New England. I know there is an awful lot to do north of the Mason-Dixon, but damnit, you Americans do the whole of Europe in a week so don't judge!

Now, for safety purposes (not that I think I'd get stalked by any of my readers but you never know), here are the states we will be visiting in alphabetical rather than chronological order:

Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont. We will also clip the edges of Maine and West Virginia, mainly to buy a coffee and use the bathroom, thus fulfilling the rules of the Visit Every State game. And if you're at an Ivy League university, there is a significant possibility that we will be round your way.

Sadly, (((Billy))), we won't be passing through your part of PA. I looked at every possible way of doing it, but the only thing I can think of is that once we're in NYC we take a Greyhound out to Scranton. But that's later in the trip, so we can always talk through it while I'm at SVP.

As this post is going out, I am hopefully 38,000 feet above the northern Atlantic Ocean, on the earliest flight I have ever taken to the US. I have brought my favourite red coat to wear in Boston to unnerve the Americans (I suppose I have no chance of getting a decent cup of tea?). And in direct contravention of the Ohio state law banning women from wearing patent leather shoes in public, I have a VERY shiny pair of patent shoes for the SVP banquet. Mwa-ha-ha-haaa!

The Me Meme

That sadist Chris tagged me for perhaps the WORST meme ever...

1. Take a picture of yourself right now.
   
2. Don't change your clothes, don't fix your hair...just take a picture.
   
3. Post that picture with NO editing.
   
4. Post these instructions with your picture.

Grrr.

So here's me, taken two minutes after reading Chris' post, lounging on my sofa.


And I tag Amanda (because I suspect she looks gorgeous any time of the day) and Paul (because with any luck this won't appear on his RSS feed until after he's gone to bed, so he'll read it at 5am when we have to get up to go on holiday...).

Dead Bird Update

So it's been nearly a month since the wood pigeon met its grizzly end on our lawn. And it's been sitting in a bucket of bio washing powder solution ever since, while I try to acquire a decent isopod colony (thank you to Leigh Van Valen for sending me his paper on the subject). As of last week I still only had two or three woodlice, because the little buggers seem to be hiding from me. They don't mind going mental when I need to repot something, but it's as though they know I'm after them this time.

But, as anyone who watches CSI regularly will know, sooner or later a body in a bucket is pretty much only able to be transported in a bucket. So to avoid it liquifying, I wanted to get it a bit drier, and a bit less meaty.


Here was my kit. A job lot of rubber gloves, some old newspapers (this may be the most useful thing the Hounslow Guardian has ever done...), my trusty dissection kit, and a large jar of Vicks Vapo-Rub. I've heard that the latter is used in forensic circles when the smell of decomposition might be overpowering, to basically bombard the nostrils with something as pungent but less revolting.

It doesn't really work. Month-old decomposing bird is disgusting. Really gross. Fortunately the smell seems to have dissipated and the police haven't sent round the cadavre dogs. And dissecting outside poses its own set of hazards of the sort not usually seen in the lab. For one thing, you share your dissection with every fly, wasp, bug and beetle that gets wind of the decomp. And heaven help you if the wind suddenly changes and you're downwind of the stinky corpse.


This was everything before I started good and proper on it. The body is on the left, and the head is towards the right. I'm afraid, without a willing lab assistant, it wasn't really feasible to take lots of photos during the dissection (plus I also made a bit of a pig's ear of it, so I don't really want to share the details...).

But things I noted:

• There is one helluva lot of flight muscle in the breast of a pigeon. Once you get through that, there's hardly anything left of them.
  
• It's really difficult to sex a pigeon. In fact, Dave Hone and I were talking about this. I am sure I remember reading that pigeons can change sex, in that an ovary can become a testis, and/or vice versa. Paul says that sounds familiar too. But neither Dave nor I could find anything on the internet (and I recommend putting SafeSearch on if you google "hermaphroditic bird"...). Does anyone know the truth behind this?
  
• The hyoid is blooming delicate. I think I managed to shatter it in between locating it and cutting off the scalp.
  
• The ribs are blooming delicate too. Although in my defence, the ribs were crushed before I got to it, courtesy of Tiddles.
  
• The tongue is soooo cuuuute! Such a tiny little thing in the birds, and doesn't appear to be as flexible as human tongues.
  
• This particular pigeon has lost a toe, but it was lost quite some time ago and the skin healed over pretty well. I want to take a closer look, but it could even have been congenital.

But other than that, I think the most interesting bits will still be the osteology.


Now that I've removed all the organs and most of the muscles, and separated the wings and legs (I'm seriously going to have problems eating buffalo wings for a couple of weeks), there's not a lot left of the old bird. So I might be allowed to use an old pan and heat it a bit. Although Paul may prefer for me to use my trusty camping stove and do it all outside...

SVP Bloggers' Lunch Instead

Okay. I've been looking at the SVP schedule for possible open times for us all to meet up. It's a very full timetable this year. I'm used to there being a bit more time between poster sessions and evening events (or maybe it just feels that way).

Anyway, it appears that there is a massive blank spot over lunchtime on Friday 17th October, unless you are all interested in going to the open executive committee meeting (this is where Kerin comments and tells me that I have to go to that one...).

This would be between 12:15pm and 1:30pm. So just over an hour for lunch somewhere, yes? What do you all think about the 4th Street Bar & Grill? Shall I try to get us a table there?

Thoughts please (and any objections to the time, place, price of the menu etc)!