Prairie dog vacuum

Apparently, a lot of people are familiar with this:



I was not familiar. I am in love with it.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4182/is_19960912/ai_n10094665/?tag=content;col1

My officemate tells me that prairie dogs are really vocal and that they sort of scream as they're going into the truck. Also, apparently, they're really happy when they find one another inside the truck. Hillarious. I think that Wallace and Gromit did something similar in the Were-rabbit.

Trying to think of something interesting...

I find that, sometimes, if I just start typing, I come up with something good. We'll see how it goes. I'm learning about fungi and oomycetes (which are not fungi but used to be classified that way until people learned that their hyphae are coenocytic, their cytoplasm is granular (?), and "the apex is devoid of organelles other than numerous secretory vesicles." Geez, how could you overlook that obvious difference? Here's a picture of one that is very closely related to mine:

(http://www.uoguelph.ca/~gbarron/2008/pythiu1.jpg)

There are some good pictures of mine but they're not on this computer. Culturing fungus/oomycetes, it turns out, is only a little bit similar to culturing bacteria. This makes things fun. Culturing plankton is even less like culturing bacteria. Here's something else I've learned: If you want something to be infectious, you have to make it into a spore. If you want to make something into a spore, you need yet another protocol, meaning that, if your organism is new, you have to develop a new protocol. So, it's not just about culturing, kids. Oh, hey, Janet, maybe you know some good references about sporulation in eukaryotes. I'm a little bit unsure. P.S. To be considered a "spore" in a fungus or oomycete, you pretty much have to be nothing except sort of wandering around aimlessly, no requirement for a spore coat or heat resistence or whatever. Furthermore, people who are used to eukaryotes will constantly refer to "spores" in bacterial species. They do not like for you to stop them and point out that, if they're not heat resistant and don't have a spore coat, bacteriologists don't call them spores.

Married to a meat-a-holic

So, my husband loves to cook giant cuts of meat (see below). I enjoy cooking experiments and I enjoy being the test audience for cooking experiments. I myself made the lemon tart that Kevin mentions below, complete with homemade crust. In fact, this is my second time to make the lemon tart and the first time I stayed up later than I intended because I didn't realize that the dough has to rest for 30 minutes before you roll it out. All of that said, these giant cuts of meat are a problem. I met Kevin at the first annual "Pig Pickin'" so I can't say I didn't know, but being married to someone who enjoys staying up all night poking a thermometer into a hunk of meat can be trying. Take this Easter ham for instance. It's not a cured ham, mind you. As you can see below, it's a big raw hunk of pig. It brined for three days in a giant gatorade cooler in our shower (this was a request of mine...heaven forbid I hadn't asked him to put the cooler in the shower...I don't even want to think...). After that, the grilling and the constant temperature taking. He doesn't do the math for you in his entry so it might be hard for you to realize that this "finishing it up on the counter" occurred at about midnight the night before my big Easter church music thing, for which I had to be up at 6am. Aluminum tenting is loud, just, for future reference. Giant sheets of aluminum foil. Also, barbecued pork smells delicious at noon or 6pm. It does not smell delicious at midnight. Okay, I'm done. In the end, the pork really was delicious. I have some for lunch today, with some leftover squash casserole and broccoli (he forgot to mention the broccoli). The maple dijon glaze is also very good. I might say it was worth it...but I might not...

Kevin's Easter Ham

Kevin here. This Easter, we decided to do a smoked fresh ham. This particular ham weighed in right at 22lb - a big hunk of meat. The fun started on Thursday evening when I prepped the ham and set it in the brine. As you can see, I left the skin on, scoring a crosshatch pattern across the meat and then setting it in a brine solution in a water cooler with ice, where it would sit until Saturday morning.













Saturday morning, I set my Webber Kettle for an indirect heat and slapped the meat on. I didn't know how long this was going to take. I was shooting for a final temperature of around 160, so I was hoping to get there in 8 hours or so.








After 10 hours, we were still only up to around 135 degrees. So, I had to take matters into my own hands and move the ham inside to the oven - which I had set at 325 degrees.





After another 2.5 hours in the oven, the ham had finally reached 152 degrees. So I pulled it out and let it rest for another hour or so on the counter where it got above 160.




After a night in foil in the fridge, I put it back in the oven at 350 for 1.5 hours with a good bit of maple mustard glaze. Served with pea salad, squash casserole, and a lemon tart - it was perfect.

(Tomorrow, maybe I'll write about how he kept me up all night rattling aluminum foil and taking the ham's temperature. -Sara)

My first youtube movie

This is the sort of thing I spend my time looking at these days:



It's Asplanchna. They're rotifers. We try to infect them with oomycetes. Fascinating, right? I find them cute but it's hard to see in this movie. There's another one that someone else made...



They actually pretty much suck at catching food so I'm surprised (1) that they survive at all and (2) that this person was able to catch one eating. The food pretty much has to swim into their mouths, or whatever you call their corona hole thing. Here are some Asplanchna fun facts:

Female Asplanchna have no designated hole for receiving the sexual reproductive matter from male Asplanchna, which are small and triangular and don't do anything but fertilize the female Asplanchna. The male pretty much just picks a place on the soft body of the female.

If you try to open up an Asplanchna with a pair of dissecting pins, it's pretty much like trying to dissect a jell-o mold to access the fruit...

Asplanchna do not preserve as well as other zooplankton, probably because they don't have a carapace, so it's good to count them the same day you catch them.

When an Asplanchna runs into a Dapnia or Copepod, it pretty much just sits there and gets its ass kicked with the antennules, resembling a fat kid on a playground. I'm going to try to make a movie of this phenomenon because I find it hillarious.