patagonia

A few throwback photos from the trip to Patagonia my junior year, in 2005.  Evidence that the subject, not the camera, makes the photo (taken with an ancient bricklike Sony point-and-shoot that I thought was cutting edge at the time).

lucky

A weird talent of mine is finding four-leaf clovers.  I am strangely adept at spotting them in clover patches, and I always pluck and press them in books, only to find them years later.  I found three today while exploring the patches in my yard.

If only this luck would translate to real life.  I could put it on my resume: "Good at finding four-leaf clovers and turning that luck into efficiency in the workplace."

Tiny garden slug, about half an inch long.

Leaf miner trails.  You can see the tiny droppings left by the caterpillars living between the two epidermal leaf layers.  As they eat their way through the leaf, feeding on the chloroplast-containing palisade cells, they remove the green tissue, leaving only clear surface layers behind.  Definitely click and enlarge this one--you can see minuscule beads of condensation on the inner side of the leaf epidermis.

gibbous

Taken with a 55-200mm lens on a clear night.

pollination

A honeybee on my friend's boardshorts at the beach.

palmetto

South Carolina's state tree, the palmetto, at dusk.

candlelight vigil

Students light each others' candles at a vigil I attended for a classmate who recently passed away.

tug for the town

A few candids taken at a tug-of-war tournament I participated (and made it to 2nd place!) in.

Relay For Life

At Relay For Life, the all-night walkathon for the American Cancer Society.  Many of those energy drinks were consumed through the night.  The second photo is of us on the field, holding glowsticks up to form a glowing cancer ribbon for a photo shot from above.

the reason for my hiatus

These past two weeks have been spent frantically running trials for my thesis research and writing the damn thing up.  Here's a bit of what I do in the lab (it's a psychology lab, and a blood glucose/cognition experiment).

Taking a blood sample in a glucometer cuvette.

Placing the sample in the Hemocue meter.

Relatively high--I think I had just eaten before this and was mapping out how fast my glucose levels would spike.

budding ginkgo

Ginkgos are my favorite trees, and I can't tell you how delighted I am that their little larval leaves are finally coming in.  The top two photos are of the Pratt Ginkgo, a rather famous tree around UVa grounds due to its age and size.  It's a male, and you can see the cone-shaped "flowers" (but of course, these aren't really flowers because ginkgos are gymnosperms and developed before plants evolved flowering structures!).  The bottom two photos are of a female tree, and its little leaves are probably no bigger than a quarter of an inch across.

Ginkgos are considered "living fossils" because they are the last remaining species in their entire phylum (which is kind of a big deal).  Also, they were around during dinosaur times, which is pretty cool too.

miami

nested

scenes from Jamaica

thatched

Back from spring break--I went on a cruise to Jamaica (where this photo was taken).  Returning from the tropics to dreary Charlottesville was less than desirable, but I can feel the stirrings of spring!

inky

This looks pretty cool in color too--shot at dusk, so the sky was a deep saturated blue.

wink

Those of you who read this blog may think that Jimmy is my only friend.  Luckily, only Jimmy reads this blog.

red ladder

I love blue and orange together (good thing I go to UVA).  I hope those beams aren't completely rusted, though, and that it's just paint (although it makes so much sense to paint steel beams rust-colored, so that when they do actually rust no one can tell).

lamppost

 Pictures taken at dusk always have such a delicious, dreamy look.  Actually, dusk in general rocks, from a lighting standpoint and just as a time of day.

Also, random biology fact--the term for organisms active at dawn and dusk, these in-betweeny times: crepuscular (think deer, or rabbits).  Yeah, I hadn't heard it either.

brunch

Whole wheat rotini and Earl Grey with lemon.

unkempt

One of the graveyards at UVa.  This shot is so melodramatically literal, but hey, I didn't stage the shot. 

This is the less well-kept cemetery at UVa, and you almost wonder if it was meant to look mysterious and tangled.  Of course it would have headstones hidden in wild thorny rosebushes, and faded bouquets surviving in the melted snow.  Or maybe I shouldn't be so cynical about these things.  Faked or not, the cemetery is a charming place, full of dead University presidents and names that we have on our classroom buildings today.

budding

excited for spring...

hotlips

When I'm home alone for the afternoon, I have a bad habit of picking out a particularly lurid lipstick and slathering it on--maybe thinking that since I use these colors so rarely, putting on several layers will make them worth the money.  A downside of this is that I generally forget about this and then go out about my business with fuschia lips.  So that's why the UPS guy gave me such a weird look...

in the chapel

Surreptitious snap during a wedding ceremony.

frosting

My house after 24 inches of snow.  I tried shoveling it with my dad, but then our mini snowplow broke, and there was no way we'd finish the 0.1 mile driveway (almost the length of two football fields) before next week.

corgi

My friend's Welsh Corgi, taken in Arizona.

By rights I should be posting pictures of the 12+ inches of snow we've gotten so far in Virginia (and it's still snowing!)  It's a little cold to be venturing out though, but maybe when it stops falling I'll take a  few snaps of what it looks like.