Oh, winter is here, okay, thought it wasn't coming

Ever since Worcester got slammed with snow and ice just before Halloween, 2011 was pretty mild. In fact, the month of November felt warmer than October, and by the time I went home at the end of the semester, we didn't have any snow in the 01610.

But about a week into the New Year, we finally got a few inches of snow.

A view of the JC (left) and the AC (right) from Atwood Hall.

And over the past few days, we got a couple inches of snow and ice in small increments.

A view of the AC on Sunday morning.

This snow follows a string of extremely cold days in Worcester, with temperatures in the single digits and teens.

So when I thought winter wasn't coming around this season, I was definitely wrong.

The Zen Garden looks like a mini snow bowl.

Campus is now covered in snow, but we're still well behind the amount of snow we got last year.

But I'm okay with that. Cars have already been struggling to make it up the lame excuse of a hill my road is on due to the snow and ice. I'm pretty sure one of these days a car is going to careen into another, because everyone seems to think it's a great idea to simply floor it when they lack traction on the ice.

While we may get a few warm days in this coming week, we may get two doses of freezing ran. That's something I really don't look forward to.

(Tuesday the 24th update: it rained last night and was in the upper 40's today. All of the snow not piled up is gone. Ha! New England weather!)

October Snow Storm Carnage

Last night on October 29th, central Massachusetts got a fair amount of wet snow. Estimates and measurements vary, but the campus got about 5-6" of snow. The problem with wet snow is that it weighs down trees, especially if the trees still haven't lost all of their leaves yet. The problem is amplified with longer branches as it creates more downward force on the branch (basic physics thank you), causing the branches to snap off.

I've taken a bunch of photographs and have posted two videos, here and here. I'll also embed the main video at the bottom of this post.

A somewhat complete photo album is here.

My tumblr post is here.

A slideshow on the New York Times of some of the damage to the northeast.

Before the storm: Saturday October 28th, 2:30 PM.

After the storm: Sunday October 29th, 12:00 PM.

My favorite post-apocalypse photo.

A sample of the carnage:

A video of the tree carnage on the Clark campus.

Snow: round 5,000

The snow continues to fall in Worcester. But life must go on.

 

Classes have been canceled left and right here on campus, but for the most part I've had every single class thus far. However, that stream came to an awkward close today, when my professor goofed and forgot to attach the class e-mail list when e-mailing us that class was canceled (only one student got the e-mail). No one ended up coming to Conservation Biology, the class I'm auditing, either. Come 2:00, both of my classes were "done" for the day, but I had yet to get any real work done, which was kind of a bummer. I guess next freak storm we have I'll know better to just assume that even I can have classes canceled, and to just to go the library instead.

On Monday I finished making stock solutions for my diatom media. As opposed to a lot of bacteria which can grow off of plain LB broth, I had to make a special media with a specific balance of chemicals to support diatom growth. For the most part, I mixed minute volumes of powders to tubes of water, a total of 10 different solutions. I took only 0.5-1% of each solution and added it to a solution of artificial seawater (water and salts). This solution was then autoclaved separately from an agar solution. When combined, the seawater and agar solution made solidified diatom seawater agar plates, upon which I can grow my diatoms. I'll use these to transform my diatoms on in the near future.

I chronicled these recent efforts in the YouTube post below (be sure to check it out, because there's a really cool bonus video at the end which may or may not include a hawk eating a squirrel).



I hope to continue my forward lab momentum and start spreading diatom cells on my plates soon to let them grow up. From there I hope it's setting up a meeting with some lab folks down in RI about transforming some diatoms. Hey! This project is about to take off!

Outside of the lab, I'm trying to stay on track in Topics in Marine Biology (reading and annotating scientific literature), Ecology (trying to remember how Excel works in order to analyze data) and Animal Behavior (where I hope to start our research projects soon with Three-spined Stickleback). I also need to keep the motion going with ROCU, Clark's radio program which I run with a few of my friends. Today's only Wednesday, which leaves me with a long day of classes on Thursday and a day to catch up in lab and work on Friday before the weekend. Cheers for now!

And more snow: we gots it

We got some more snow here on campus, and yet again I didn't know about it until just before it happened! I think we got another 5 inches of snow or so, which brings our total to over 2 feet since I left campus at the end of the Fall semester. By noon, it appears the snow has stopped and the sun is thinking about coming out to hang out with us. This would be appreciated because we all like the sun. It will be interesting to see what my fellow classmates do tonight for their first weekend back at Clark. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of students stay in to avoid trudging through the snow late at night, but who knows? Apparently LOST is on Netflix instant, so I know what I'm doing tonight.

I originally had an interview for a research assistant position this morning, but my professor couldn't make it in because of the snow. It's rescheduled for next Friday. I don't know what my chances are for landing the job, but if I do, it would make my life a lot more complicated during the week. Either way, my schedule's organization is up in the air for at least another week. I've been trying to juggle classes, labs, and readings the past few days and it's a bit of a hassle.

I finally stopped by the lab today to organize some stuff. I don't know how long it will be until I can start with the actual lab work, but at least I'm starting to get on track with some things. I hope we can start things up next week and it'll be awesome!

 I posted a new video to wrap things up for this week. Below it is: