I could have dreamt about an amazing adventure in Narnia last night. But no... I dreamt of cat parasites. What prompted this dream? Well actually cat parasites in fact, emerging from the bunghole of my lovely cat yesterday evening before I went to bed.


EDIT:: The cat has roundworm, which is a kind of worm that looks like a long, tapered piece of angel hair pasta. It sticks its head (or tail?) out of the animal's bunghole occasionally to have a look around. Squirmily. It often makes its way to the lungs of the cat, filling them with about 200,000 eggs a day until respiratory problems commence (so maybe my cat didn't have asthma like I thought!) Then it crawls up the bronchial tube to the mouth where it goes down the esophagus to complete more of its life cycle by eating nutrients in the intestine and laying more eggs in the anus. An animal filled with round worms can have lung problems, gastrointestinal problems, and problems getting nutrients. Death is not common, but when it does happen, it is usually due to mechanical blockage of the anus. Yes, meaning that the sheer number of spaghetti-sized worms squirming around in the cat's anus is enough to completely block it until the cat is so full of shit that it dies.


And humans can get it too.

We had already started our spring cleaning, but let us now bleach in earnest.

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I do believe that for most everything in life that goes wrong, you have no one to blame but yourself. You may not be able to control what happens, but you are in control both of how prepared you are and how you react.

You are afraid of losing your job in an unstable job market? Perhaps you should rally to make it legally impossible for your employers to fire you? No. If you are afraid of being fired then you should carefully work to gain more skills to make yourself flexible, useful, and indispensable. Even if your current employer for his or her completely unfathomable reasons decides to let you go, your talent will be easily recognized elsewhere. Are you certain that your current employer will not recommend you to others, because he/she is a "huge jerk" who is "completely irrational"? I recommend turning the magnifying glass upon yourself, and wondering why it is that you find most supervisors difficult or irrational. No matter the odious nature of your supervisor, no matter the way your personalities "clash", each and every interaction with another person is an opportunity for self improvement. Your supervisor may be exceedingly dull, but excellent at networking. Your adviser may be very smart but lacking in social skills. Your coworkers may disgust you at the way they gossip about others. Anyone could use improvement in networking skills or book smarts. Coworkers can be a very stunning reminder of how bad you look when you continually speak badly about others; this situation also serves as a way to practice diffusing such "negativity tornadoes".

In this day and age, we are more likely to build an enormous fence around the swimming pool than to teach our children how to swim. We would rather keep all knives away from children rather than to teach them to use these knives safely. However, some day children will grow up, and they will have to swim, they will have to use knives, and they will have to experience pain, rejection, and disappointment. Worse, they will be unprepared to deal with these dangers, leaving them especially vulnerable and making the damage that much worse.

People who have not experienced much change are vulnerable to change. People who are not continually gaining skills are vulnerable to having their skills become obsolete. People who allow their fear to affect what they accomplish will continuously be disabled by their fears. Additionally, people who blame others for their failures will consistently avoid success, because whether or not you are to blame, the only person's behavior that you can change to make the situation better is your own. If you constantly look beyond what happens today, your frustration and short temper will be modulated by your long term goals, to which neither of these things is helpful.

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Everything is due tomorrow. It is the end of all things. All I have left is a Geophysics project. How can I describe this Geophysics project?

If J=(loss of complexity/time), both J and dJ/dt are positive.

On another note, this summer is quite the summer for traveling. They've just announced an all-expenses paid field camp in Hawaii for graduate students who are studying volcanism, focus on Mars, look at a lot of orbital images, and haven't had much field experience. So... pretty much, a field camp for exactly me. I'm totally going to apply. "Lots of hiking... we're looking for people who won't complain." Hahaha.

With France, Washington DC, Hawaii, Colorado, Iceland and Germany on the horizon, I'd say this summer is going to turn out to be pretty sweet. Plus I just filled out the paperwork to get my juicy advance on my Iceland expenses.

Next: Moscow? Antarctica? Stay tuned. Apart from all the work I have to do, I have a pretty sweet job.

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Are forms of Earth's oscillation
But I'll postpone this recitation
Of this orbital excitation
Until I receive some resuscitation

Because I'm falling asleep.

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I made this mosaic for the Mercury people:



Sweeeeet!

For more information, go here.

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So I have a fluid mechanics final tomorrow from 9-12. From 12-1, I present all the research I've done so far at grad school to my entire building. In the afternoon, I must complete my entire volcanology semester project, since it's due on Friday. [Ascent and eruption of explosive magma on the surface of Mercury, what is the likely eruption velocity and what is the maximum expected range of pyroclasts? Compare to volcano recently discovered there.] On Friday I have class and meetings all day, then I have to study for my Geophysics final, which is take-home but with a 1.5 hour time limit.

I intend to take it on Saturday night.

Sunday I go to a gorgeous island off the southern coast and live like it's going out of style.

Next week I have to revise my master's thesis (due to the powers that be on the 15th, to my advisor earlier than that), Geophysics exam due on the 15th, Geophysics project due on the 15th, which I haven't even started... 5-10 pages, independent calculations on the precession of the planet Mars and how it may have changed through time.

And then I'm going SHOPPING!.

Plus Thalweg and I have to decide where to plant our vegetables, and the only way we can know which places get enough sun to plant each type is to sit out in our backyard for an entire day in lawn chairs and mark hourly where the shadow of our house is.

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