Repetition

My current location.

I have been mentioning a couple of our papers that should be coming out from time to time and I am happy to say that last weekend one of them, what we often refer to as "the HEL paper" was published in Ecology about a week ago. It is nice to see some of our things starting to come out, especially after thinking and talking about it for a number of years. One of the fun things about being on this project is starting from close to scratch and seeing our understanding grow. Of course like all things the more you know the more you realize you don't know, but for now at least we can enjoy a tiny victory.

Steve "The Powers" Powers

At the moment I am up in the Wisconsin Northwoods with two of my best friends Lucas and Steve. These guys are both grad student compadres of mine; Lucas is a microbial ecologist and Powers in a biogeochemist. Or put another way Lucas studies bacteria and Steve studies nutrients. We decided to come up here for a few days and have a work retreat at the CFL's Trout Lake Station. I've been here twice before; both times for Iceland Retreats. I also worked in the Northwoods during the summer of 2007 when I worked as a field technician at Notre Dame's UNDERC, which is figuratively, if not literally, just up the road. Things are rather cold up here and we have already done a fair amount of work and have a few more days left. Maybe the sun will pop out eventually.

Page is working up at Trout now as part of the NTL LTER crew.

Others in the lab are also dispersed, but they have gone south. Claudio, along with labmates Kaitlin and Rachel, have all gone down to Sapelo Island for the classic UW-Madison field ecology course "Problems in Oceanography." AKA "Sapelo" or "Sap Flow at Sapelo" if you went in 2009 as I did. Over the course of four decades this class has become legend, and it will be fun to hear the 2011 tales when everybody gets back to Madison at the end of the month.

A dragonfly warming itself on the lab.

Next week David and I will be travelling to my alma mater Hope College where he will be delivering the weekly Friday Biology Seminar. I will be going back with him because Hope is in my hometown and my brother, a Michigan State grad student, and I are working with Hilary and others in the Biology Department to put together a program to pass on some of the wisdom that we have learned in the last few years.

Lucas "The Beaver" Beversdorf

Well, the sun did come out after I originally posted so I went out and snapped a few sunny photos. Much better than the ones I put up earlier this morning.

Bless!

Jamin