Words and Dirt
A bright and mostly sunny day. We made it to 89˚F. It is currently, 87˚F, with a heat index of 92˚F. I am watching with horror what is happening in the Pacific Northwest. In Portland, it's currently 111˚F. That shit is brutal for Alabama.
I might have slept four and a half hours last night.
And yet I was quasi-productive today. A big chunk of it was spent reading old field journal entries from the summers of 1981 and 1982, trying to pin down when and where a particular fossil turtle (one of the new taxa I'm describing with Drew Gentry) was found. It's a spectacular turtle, but somehow the time and place of its discovery has become a mystery, one that I am doing my best to solve (with the help of Gorden Bell, who may have collected it - but even that is uncertain). Anyway, reading through those forty-year-old entries, that was a big chunk of the day. I also did a little with one of the cave samples. Oh, I forgot to mention in yesterday's entry that, yesterday, I discovered the freaky little hour-glass shaped humerus of an Eastern mole, Scalopus aquaticus, only the second mole I've turned up in all the many months I've been picking through these Late Pleistocene samples.
Well, I thought it was cool.
I read most of "A review of Pachyvaranus crassispondylus Arambourg, 1952, a pachyostotic marine squamate from the latest Cretaceous phosphates of Morocco and Syria."
And I really am about to start a novel. No, really. I swear.
I went Outside for the second day in a row. Go me.
But I kind of need some fucking sleep first. I leave you with a gorgeous photograph of the moon that Spooky took on her birthday.
Later,
Aunt Beast, Finder of Lost Moles
9:39 p.m. (Thursday)
I might have slept four and a half hours last night.
And yet I was quasi-productive today. A big chunk of it was spent reading old field journal entries from the summers of 1981 and 1982, trying to pin down when and where a particular fossil turtle (one of the new taxa I'm describing with Drew Gentry) was found. It's a spectacular turtle, but somehow the time and place of its discovery has become a mystery, one that I am doing my best to solve (with the help of Gorden Bell, who may have collected it - but even that is uncertain). Anyway, reading through those forty-year-old entries, that was a big chunk of the day. I also did a little with one of the cave samples. Oh, I forgot to mention in yesterday's entry that, yesterday, I discovered the freaky little hour-glass shaped humerus of an Eastern mole, Scalopus aquaticus, only the second mole I've turned up in all the many months I've been picking through these Late Pleistocene samples.
Well, I thought it was cool.
I read most of "A review of Pachyvaranus crassispondylus Arambourg, 1952, a pachyostotic marine squamate from the latest Cretaceous phosphates of Morocco and Syria."
And I really am about to start a novel. No, really. I swear.
I went Outside for the second day in a row. Go me.
But I kind of need some fucking sleep first. I leave you with a gorgeous photograph of the moon that Spooky took on her birthday.
Later,
Aunt Beast, Finder of Lost Moles
9:39 p.m. (Thursday)