Blogspot's a little slow this morning, I don't know why.

Well the latest news on the home front is that my glasses have now faded to the point where I am physically having trouble: dry eyes, headaches, no depth perception, stomach problems, sleep problems, etc. The situation has not deteriorated anywhere near the point I hit about 2-3 years ago with this fortunately, and my backups are already mailed to my father in CA where he will take them to the Irlen clinic and get them to boost the tint back up. I'm still safe driving and work is still possible (though more difficult of course), but why did my glasses have to go while I'm trying to finish my tastebud counts?! Its already hard enough looking through a microscope for 3+ hours in a row. *pbbbt*

Last night Danny, Luke, Kendrick and I went out to dinner/dessert to celebrate Kendrick traveling to Germany tomorrow. He's going as part of an Intervarsity outreach program there and I'm happy to say he reached his funding goals so he can go sooner rather than later. I'm really looking forward to what the Lord is going to do over there through him and how he's going to grow. He's been waiting a long time for this opportunity. 'Course we're all going to miss him horribly, but right now I'm just feeling more excited than bummed. Knock 'em dead, General! ^_^

My big bay window has started leaking again and this time Chris and I are serious about getting it fixed for good, so it looks like an adventure is beginning. I don't know how long its going to take before the problem is finally solved, but I'm getting really tired of having water dripping on my desk and computer. Ah household problems.

I uploaded some new pictures on Photobucket from the Mexico caving trip this past March so I can share some of the trip with everyone. Sorry its so late.


This is the team that went down to central Mexico in front of the hotel we used as our base. From the left front is Masato, me, Dan from American University and Spela. Behind Masato is Ed, Jon, Megan, Katarina, my boss Bill, and Jack. Ed, Masato, and Spela are my labmates and none of us have much if any caving experience. Everyone else are fellow collaborators and cavers from the Caving and Drinking Club Bill is a member of here in D.C. and they are all very experienced in difficult cave climbs and rescues. They all research some cave animal or insect. But most of all, they are all a lot of fun!


This here is a cavefish in its natural habitat. I forget which cave this is from at the moment, unfortunately. Being blind, these fish are naturally attracted to disturbances in the water which usually for them means that something they can eat has dropped in. They come investigating on their own, which makes them a lot easier to catch then their surface cousins. Ah, the best bait we've found so far for either fish is fresh corn tortillas. ^_^


This is Dan, Megan, and Katarina working with cavefish in one of the caves we visited. Our goal this trip was not to bring any fish back to the US with us, but rather to take fin clips to extract DNA from when we got home. Kat and Megan are part of a project working on dating the age of the earth from the different points of view of several science disciplines. Their part of it is to construct a molecular clock using the divergence of the various cavefish in Mexico from the surface fish ancestors as a base. But to do that, we needed a lot more DNA samples from a lot more caves than we had available here in the US, hence the need for a trip.


This pic is probably going to scare my parents (sorry!) but here's me in a cave. I didn't go down very far into this one since we had a couple of other amateurs with us at the time and I didn't want to slow the team down even more. The ladder is one of several ways you can descend into a cave, but is usually the one that requires the least equipment and so is the easiest for newbies to use. The drop was only about 20 feet so it wasn't that high at all. I stayed up at the top lip and took pictures. Or rather, Dan took this one of me. ^_^ He's threatening to make a caver out of me yet. I'm fine with that as long as he doesn't mind that I'm timid when I don't have experience with something. I get over it soon enough.