Trip to North Carolina

A couple of weeks back, my friend Deedra came to DC to stay with Carlos and me.  This was a working trip as she and I are working together on an OTS project assessing how OTS-style courses and research experiences have led to the recruitment and retention of underrepresented groups in scientific careers.  We worked a bit at the apartment (creating a cool Entity Relationship Diagram showing the interconnectivity of our data) before driving down to Durham, North Carolina to meet with people at the OTS North American offices at Duke University.

While in NC, we stayed with some friends of Deedra's (from her grad student days) and they had such a great house out in the country.  We house-sat and kitty-sat while they left for vacation. 


Overall, this was a very productive trip which left us energized and optimistic about the state of the project!

Plummer's Island Shad Bake

A couple of weeks ago, Carlos and I were invited to the Washington Field Biologists' annual shad bake at Plummer's Island by one of his Smithsonian advisors.  A shad is a type of river herring in the genus Alosa and these shad are very freshly caught and brought to this event to be cooked over an open fire.   I've been to Plummer's once before (last fall for an oyster roast) and it is a really beautiful place on the Potomac River, but very close to the city (you can see a freeway bridge in the background of one of the pictures).  We had a really fun time eating tasty roasted fishies, pie, and hanging out with assorted biologists -- we might be back soon for another oyster roast in October!

EarthBound stitching

Last week was a doozy -- I just returned from Duke and am energized and optimistic about the OTS project I am working on.  It was a hectic, but very productive trip.  I will download my pictures from the last few adventures and post about them soon.

In the meantime, I have finished a cross-stitch project that I have been working on for a while.  It is a scene from my favorite video game -- Earthbound.  It depicts a scene with the four heroes (Ness, Paula, Jeff, and Poo) in the Dusty Dunes desert as they meet a lonely black sesame seed.  It sounds weird, but it really makes sense in the context of the story!  This cross-stitch comprises 10,956 stitches and took a few months (of on-and-off stitching) to complete.  I put it in a little IKEA frame and thought that it would be cool to color the mat with colored pencils to extend the scene.  I really like how it turned out and now I have to find a place on the wall to hang it.