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It's been a while!  Work has been busy - trying to analyze many many water samples from Iceland...some DNA work, measuring phosphorous...sigh.  Jon came back today after a month of field/play...he will be back for a scant week then he and most of the lab are off to Portland for the Ecological Society of America meeting.  So that will leave me holding down the fort for a week alone.  Things are less stressful that way, and I'll have the various girls to keep me company.  

Dan comes home so soon!  19 days!!  Soon it will be August and his return home will speed by like no one's business.  Right now I'm awaiting comments from Brian on my two chapters, and in the meanwhile I've been formatting the thesis and thinking about the presentation when the time finally comes.  It's been hard to figure out what story I want to tell other than "this is just a formality, please just give me my Master's, it's taken way too long."  Presentations are always a little tricky for me.  Sometimes they turn out well, other times they bomb.  The successful ones seem to be the presentations that I am genuinely excited about.  To be excited about it I need a good story that I enjoy telling to others.  Right now there's a bit of staleness surrounding the whole ordeal.  But at some point a light bulb goes off in my head and it'll all come together.  I just have to hope that comes sooner than later.  

So I took my stitches out early last week.  I watched a couple youtube videos and it didn't seem all that difficult - make sure things are sterile, lift the stitch with tweezers, snip between knot and skin, pull out string.  Sometimes with the odd angle of the chin stitches I couldn't easily see where the knot was and so there was a little finessing involved.  But I'm happy to say they all came out without consequence.  That saved me a trip to the ER and a long wait for a nurse to do the same thing.  DIY to the extreme....  So now I just have to contend with scabs.  Do you remember how annoying scabs are?  They get itchy, they get flaky, you try your best not to pick at them, but then you pull on a sweater and half of a crispy cornflake is ripped from your skin.  ouch...and then I stare at my scabs...if there is the tiniest sliver of daylight between scab and skin, guess who's fingernail is fiddling with that...

The scab process is so very slow.  I have a good many of them so I can focus my attention to the various scab islands littering my body...The knee scab is the worst.  How many times have I banged my knee on something just today which smarted like no other??  Well, twice if you must know...it wasn't even a hard bump...just enough for my body to remind me "HEY!!  We're working on this area, please keep away okay?!  This is very delicate work and you've just ruined it all and so now we're back to square one - are you happy?!?"

Sigh...I think it's clear Dan needs to come home soon so I can stop typing out this diarrhea of the mind... 

pictures...mostly of Hannah..no scar pictures yet, accumulating the montage...

For fun, (for me) Hannah dreaming...