Mailbox

A very rural midwestern epilogue to my very rural midwestern mailbox tale:

I can't believe the DOT is going to make me look at this every day.

The lady at the DOT office told us that they no longer put up "DEAD END" signs after a widow complained.

Chickens

They're doing great, but the raccoons are being very persistent this year. Last summer we lost one of our birds to one and I have no intention of that ever happening again.

I chased one out of the run late last week and patched up the hole, only to find it digging in a different spot a few days ago. Two days ago I saw it had been in the run and last night I caught it in there. So I fetched my wife and she got the gun and we sorted that out pretty fast. Tonight she's like, "I have a feeling, can you check on them" and lo and behold there was another bugger in the run who got out while I went to get the gun. So we set a trap and we'll see what comes of that.

I don't really care for killing animals but I'd rather have my lovely little chickens be safe!

Research

The other grad student in my lab quit the program yesterday. Maybe I will pick up a bit of his project since there have been grants written for it and thus the project needs to make progress.

I recently got reviews back on two papers we'd submitted a couple years ago -- both said "the references are very out of date", which, yes, but it's not my fault they got stale waiting for reviewers to get around to it! One of them is on some research I did and won't be a big deal to update but the other is a survey paper and I'm really not looking forward to figuring out what to do with that. Nobody wants a stale survey paper.