I’ve heard of April showers bringing May flowers, but what do April snows bring? On Friday, I awoke to a white world with about an inch of snow covering everything. It was kind of a shock considering only a week before, there were promising signs of Spring. Of course, after the snow, the temperatures are back up and the weekend’s forecast is quite pleasant.
This semester, one of my classes has required me to turn in all of my assignments in LaTeX. LaTeX (la-tek) is built on TeX, a typesetting language meant to produce beautiful documents reminiscent of the days when papers were printed from engraved plates. Typesetting was an art that got lost in the digital age. When I first got the news that assignments were to be handed in using LaTeX, I admit I was a bit worried. The assignments were already going to be difficult enough since it is a bioinformatics class working with data types I have not…
Where has time gone? It’s already October, which means I missed out on September. Well, I didn’t really miss it. I was busy with a graduate school ritual known as the preliminary examination. Prelims are, without a doubt, the most stressful event for a graduate student. You might think it’s writing the dissertation or even giving your final defense. The truth is, by that time, you know your subject inside and out. Writing takes time, and the stress is making the deadlines, but overall, unless you slept through your graduate student experience, writing up the dissertation isn’t that difficult. The…
Foliage, originally uploaded by Matthew Singer. With the sudden drop in temperatures, Fall has officially begun in the northwest. This is the first time I’ve spent fall in a predominantly evergreen forest. While there is color to be found in the west, I suspect that the immediate area won’t be the place to find it. But, as fall rolls in, I provide a tribute to the spectacular display before the forest retires for winter.
I went up to Freezeout Saddle with some photo club people to pick huckleberries. As I expected, they were still ripe, and very plentiful. But the problem with huckleberries is that you can pick for an hour and still not get very much. I think I came home with maybe a pint of berries. I brought my camera up as well to get some photos of the area and of us picking only to find out that I left my card in the card reader and my extra card in the sack that I take backpacking. oops.
In May we bought a new tent to accommodate our growing family on camping trips. I guess the two-person backpacking tent just won’t do it anymore for thee people and two large dogs. So after we bought it, we took it out for its maiden test at a nearby campground. This summer was dubbed the summer of no fun. I was busy writing and Erin was working an internship. To make the summer a bit more bearable, we thought we’d go camping for a night or two once a month just to get out of the house and have some…
I just realized that August has come and gone and I have yet to write about anything that happened during this month. It’s not as though I haven’t done anything. In fact, I was quite busy every weekend. So, let’s see, what happened in August? It got really hot. In fact, it got so hot, that doing things became unpleasant. Nevertheless, we took Clara out to Elk River to beat the heat. At first, she didn’t like sitting in the cool water, but by the end, I got her to tolerate it. We also took Clara up to Kamiak Butte….
