A Whole New Sort of Adventure

*Side notes- I believe I fixed the problem of not being able to post comments without a Blogger account. Anyone should be able to post now, so comment away! Also, the blog has a fancy (and easy) new mobile interface if anyone feels like reading it on a smart phone or iPad! Yay!

After a couple of years cavorting around the world I'm settling in for the long haul and have officially moved to Los Angeles, where I'm starting my PhD at UCLA in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology program!  The move itself was very successful thanks, in large part, to my parents for being such good sports about driving me down and spending the better part of the weekend assembling Ikea furniture.  I love the stuff, but they sure make you work for it!  We got my room set up in record time though, and it feels great to be all moved in and able to focus on other things (like the 5 chapters of statistics programming homework I am procrastinating about!).

The campus is just a 20 minute bus ride from my apartment.  I brought my bike in case, but am totally intimidated by the streets around here! LA drivers are FAST!  I think the bike will wait for weekend cruises, or maybe when I know the streets better and am braver (or crazier).

Sunday night I went out to the field to help with the release of 50 Stephen's Kangaroo Rats, an endangered species that were being translocated from an area that is about to be bulldozed and developed to protected habitat.  The little guys have been in acclimation cages on site for a week, and we simply lifted the wire cages off the top and pulled out the plugs of their cardboard tube burrows.  Now it is up to them if they want to stay or go, but we're hoping they hang out and make that field their home!  They are adorable little guys!

Since I've had some free time before classes start, I went to the LA Natural History Museum on their free Tuesday (can't beat that!) to check out the brand new Dinosaur Hall, which was excellent.  The fossils were in bright, uncluttered rooms with lots of interactive touch screen activities, which was all very modern and grand.  But I can't help being drawn to the classic natural history displays like the giant dioramas in dark, wood paneled rooms which are both morbid and fascinating.  It brings you back to a day when science was really about collecting, and I'm glad we have moved beyond that but there is something about those displays that is still totally captivating.

I took more iPhone photos which I've been a little obsessed with lately, so I'll share a few of those here.