...and spring is back! YES!

I've been taking some pictures over the last few days since the nice weather has finally come back. Since it looks like we'll be having nice weather all week, I hope to get a lot more pictures taken. Here are a few so far.

The Geography Building from Main St.

Red Square from just inside the gate.

The main part of campus from just outside the gate.

Yeah, I've done this shot to death over the past year, I know.

This one too.

Here's another take on the artwork on Downing Street.

The corner of Jefferson along the corner of Downing and Main St.

Clark Spring (where have you gone?)

Awesome weather.

March 30th, 2012 – Jonas Clark, Red Square, Jefferson.

So we were super lucky to get about 10 days of awesome early spring weather.

Our normal spring weather.

I mean, some of the weather we got felt like early summer. But, living in New England we should have known it wasn't going to stick around forever.

Unfortunately, our glorious spring weather has disappeared and no traces of its existence have been seen since. Aside from the early budding and flower blooming (which has been slowed down considerably during this "cold snap"), one wouldn't have known about our nice early spring.

This week the weather should return to sunny weather with highs around the 50s which is much more tolerable. The sun has returned as seen in the above picture of Red Square, and that is always appreciated. But now that things are going to be getting really crazy work-wise on the Clark campus, I'm not so sure I'm going to be able to welcome the spring weather once it returns for good.

I've now tacked on a draft of a post I was supposed to post about two weeks after this original post:

In practicing for my upcoming presentations this month, I have simultaneous powerpoint presentations running to mimic an actual presentation where I have Presenter Tools running on my laptop and the "presentation screen" running on my desktop computer. I'm pretty silly/nerdy.

A panning shot of the first floor to the third floor of Lasry (the bio building) late at night.

Planning out some science (with my undergraduate students).

Downing Street will be soon turned into walking plaza (and is now closed to traffic), so a Clark student spray painted a sweet mural.

(The view from Wright Hall; Atwood Hall is in the background.)

While the weather has been kinda crappy recently in Worcester, we have had a few nice sunsets.

Oh hai Spring

We've been seeing weather
like this in Worcester for
the past two weeks.

We're starting to see spring weather and it's such a nice feeling. Granted since our first snowstorm, it's been a really mild winter for the most part. Nonetheless, we've been enjoying some warm temperatures over the past few weeks.

Right now it's 44°F with a forecast of highs in the 60's all week. Aside from one day of rain, it looks like sunshine all week.

Clark has a tradition of getting serious snow just before spring break--the first week of March--only for the snow to melt by the time the students return. We got 4 or 5 inches of snow in the days leading up to spring break. Below you can see what campus looked like after some of the snow started to melt.

March 5th.

With some rain and warmer weather, the snow has since left campus.

March 7th. Within a day the rest of the snow had melted.

For the most part, Spring Semester at Clark can hardly compare to Fall Semester in terms of good weather. If we're lucky, Clark can usually have great weather from the start of the semester until mid October or later. In the Spring, we're lucky to have a good April.  This is one of the reasons why I decided to go abroad my junior spring rather than in the fall. By going to Australia, I traded a northern hemisphere winter for a southern hemisphere summer. Not a bad trade in my book.

I'm glad tradition has continued this year. While Worcester could certainly get another big snowstorm before the end of April, I really hope spring has decided to come and stay early. Unfortunately, we've had a pretty dry winter which means we will be in a drought once the trees try to break their winter fast. I guess this means if we have a rainy spring I can't complain, since we need the rain.

It's Getting Colder Out... And Exams Are Heating Up? or something like that >_>

It's early December and we're without a significant snowfall. It's cold and campus is winding down, while the library and the Academic Commons are getting more full every night with students studying and meeting up for group projects. I'll admit that with finals and without any snow and the trees without leaves, campus is a little dreary.

But campus is always prettier (if not much colder) when it snows. Even though we can't appreciate it much because we're busy wrapping up the end of the semester, it's always nice when the first major snow hits. It's been a little longer than usual for me since I last saw snow because I went to Australia, but I feel like it'll be normal for me to crunch through the snow once it falls again.

My work in lab is still ongoing. I'm working on collecting my "control" plasmid for the expression experiments, and I'll be prepping everything for the transformation process. Hopefully I'll be able to start those experiments at the beginning of the spring semester if I can transform the diatoms before winter break.

In the midst of trying to get everything wrapped up at the end of the semester, which has me a little more anxious than normal already, I'm all of the sudden in the middle of signing a lease on an off campus apartment for next year. Just a block and a half from where I used to live my first year on the edge of campus, I might be living on the first floor of an apartment filled with people I know and like. I'm really nervous though, because I've never signed a lease before and things are not finalized with 5th year.

Anyway, I'll be posting a few posts here and there, some related to lab and others not, so be sure to check back!