ecology – Imaginary Sunshine

I want sunshine!

Michelle — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 01:59:53 +0000

It’s been busy in my world lately, what with a midterm (Wednesday), working on a few new patterns for Chelle-Chelle.com (and I’m working on opening up a pattern store!), life in general. So it’s felt busy, at least to me! It’s still winter and the weather’s been utter crap. There was snow. And then there was hurricane-strength winds hitting the entire coastline of British Columbia on Wednesday. Power went out everywhere (and briefly out for me!). And then it’s been raining on and off, fantastic. I look outside and it’ll be absolutely pouring rain. A few minutes later there will be sunshine and no rain. Mother Nature, please make up your mind (and stick with the sunshine!)

I still have… 2 midterms left until the end of the term (I’ve finished 5 so far – I only have 4 classes, by the way). I have a handful of assignments left, one stats lab report to do (haven’t done the lab yet), one ecology lab report (haven’t done the lab yet) and then, you know, 4 finals before I’m done for the term. I’ve decided against taking summer classes mostly because I’ve done a summer course before and I’m just not fond of it (time constraints) and I only have 7 (seven!!!!) courses left between after this term and graduation, so I’ll be taking 4 in term 1 and 3 in term 2. 7 classes, zomfg. Heh, of course I’m applying for programs for after graduation, but still.

I’ll be done, briefly.

I picked up a vintage (ish) needlecrafts book last week that I’m so excited about. It was only $2 (from the thrift store) but in such amazing condition and has such great instructions for some fun stitch patterns (knit and crochet) and has a huge in-depth section on embroidery, cross-stitching, punch-needle, how to make rugs and so much more stuff. It’s amazing and has been a great inspiration for me lately as I’ve taken to sketching out more stuff that I want to make and have the inspiration to make. So I’ve just been drawing everything. I sketched out a crochet lace shawl that I want to make. Not that I wear shawls, of course, but I just enjoy a challenge!

But in the mean time, I’ve made these two outfits (knitted headband + knitted dress & crocheted hat + crocheted dress) as donation sets for 4alissia.com! Please check out the website if you haven’t already yet!

Thoughts for Thursday

Michelle — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 05:51:21 +0000

Hello everyone! I’m alive! I seem to keep on feeling the need to write that, I’m not sure why.

I’ve had three out of four midterms so far, just had one of those three today. The other four are after my midterm break, so I get an entire work to do a lab report, work on a term paper, do a few assignments, catch up on writing notes and study for a few midterms that are happening after my break. So I have a few things planned to do, mostly school related. But it’s Valentine’s Day on Monday! In case you all forgotten what February 14th is. While I think that there should be more than just one day out of a year for celebrating love, but I do like chocolate and thus so it’s an acceptable ‘holiday’ to take part in.

Plus I like myself in red. And that’s all that really matters, right? Looking good in things that are colour-appropriate and lots of chocolate?

Oh, I also did my second field lab for the term. I went hiking into a forest/park again. I also tripped off of a rotting log and landed (with my face, by the way) into a holly bush (holly hell is more like it, to be perfectly honest). It was a relatively quick lab (did not take the full three hours that the lab is scheduled for!) but it was still a lot of work. We measured trees again. It was good fun. Especially the falling into holly part. And the rotting logs. Very fun, I highly recommend it to anyone who feels like torturing themselves or going for miniature adventures.

But I do promise to blog over the next week that I have off. My exam schedule came out, it’s pretty spread out, which I like. But I also have two exams at 8:30am, which I’m not terribly fond of.

Year of the Rabbit and other exciting news

Michelle — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 06:25:04 +0000

I’m a few hours early for my time zone, but happy new year to everyone who celebrates it. It’s the Year of the Rabbit and a lot of stores have been capitalizing on that with ads that are all red and gold with white fluffy bunny images on them. So there’s just been a huge lead up to it. I don’t actually do much for the New Year with my family when it falls on a weekday. When it falls on the weekend, I sometimes go see parades or out for tea with extended family. We don’t really do that when it falls on a weekday because everyone’s busy. But apparently being busy and such doesn’t exempt me from taking part in a intensive house cleaning. Dust bunnies were inhaled and destroyed, I feel that this bodes well for the new year.

School’s going fairly well. I have my second midterm of the term tomorrow (for ecology). So far the course seems alright, a lot of it has been review so I’ve mainly focused on what little new material that there has been. I’m hoping that the midterm will be fairly straight forward. The professors had fairly ambiguous wording on the practice midterm and a lot of the questions were fairly open ended.

In addition to schoolwork, this week I’ve helped a few online friends set up a website, 4alissia.com. It’s a website that’s dedicated to raising funds for the cancer treatment needed for a 3 year old girl living in the USA. Right now the plan is to hold an auction on eBay via the site, a bunch of us in the Blythe/doll community are making things or coming up with things to donate for auctioning off. I’m working on a few knitted and crocheted Blythe items to donate for the auction. But if you’re interested in learning more, please check out 4alissia.com.

My other web projects are going well right now. I’ve been moderating myself for the amount of time I spend on all my other projects and blogs – school work does have to come first, especially since the month-plus of hellish midterms on a weekly basis has begun. In other words, I limited myself to checking email addresses that get a lot of incoming email only once a day. It’s horrible, I know. But I still mostly get a 24 hour turn around time which I think is pretty darn good. Most of my email is related to school (study groups, profs – I tend to answer those ASAP) and the doll community (because I run BlytheLife.com). And I’m practically always on Twitter anyways… I have a lot of stuff planned for all my sites, including updates for the ones that haven’t gotten one in a while. So pretty happy with the pace that I’m keeping for all of my websites right now, for the most part.

And now… I’m off to sleep. Happy New Year!

One down, six more to go!

Michelle — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 02:32:09 +0000

I’ve completed one midterm so far, yay! It was the first (of three) oceanography midterm that I had.

Between now and the end of the term I have:

6 more midterms
1 major term paper
2 ecology lab reports
2 statistics lab reports
1 week off (!!!) for reading break
Many stats and oceanography assignments
Many ecology quizzes and assignments
Not enough sleep

Today was an alright day though. I slept in a little (until around 8am, which is later than my usual 5:30am!), I went and got awful passport photos taken (heh) and got the forms. I went to a thrift store with my sister and didn’t find anything I wanted (they had some nice old sewing machines, but they were $50 each and were super heavy and not near outlets at all for trying them out – and I had no car with me). I also went to the grocery store and bought several bags of bagels ($1/ea, most of them went into my freezer), some lunch meat (chicken), brown sugar (for baking) and Crispers. Everything was sold at a dollar, mmm, I love it when stores have sales!

So now that I have food for lunch purposes (yay) and snack foods (for studying aids), I’m set for at least a couple of weeks (at least until my mid-term break).

I’ve been subjected to my sister’s home-buying related rants (and raves) as my father’s gone off his rocker regarding the fact that his daughter is invest in real estate and he doesn’t like that because… it means that she’s not moving back home. Which I think is fine, because why else did she move out to begin with? (Beyond the fact that she moved out to e closer to her work place…)

But regardless… Life’s been good so far. I finished one midterm, I didn’t have a feeling of impending doom of failure in my stomach when I was done (I always feel like this is a very important thing). Next week I need to get a stats lab report, a stats assignment and ecology assignments done… As well as studying for an ecology midterm, so I’ll probably be rather productive while at school all of next week! Plus I’m going to be starting to lay out the groundwork for my term paper (due late February) and I’m hoping to get most of it done before my mid-term break, let’s cross my fingers there! But Saturday was my ‘day of rest’ and tomorrow is when I plan on really kick-starting my week where a lot of things are due.

Complaints already…

Michelle — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 04:42:57 +0000

It’s just at the end of Week 3 of the term and I’m already predicting that I’m going to hate Advanced Ecology.

Which really disappoints me because I loved the Introduction to Ecology course that I took last term (the two professors were fantastic, I even enjoyed my field labs, now that I think about it). The issues with my professors for this term stem from the fact that they have some sort of ‘aide’ in the class. Now she’s not a Teaching Assistant (my TA for the term is fantastic and super friendly and he was super helpful and quick in answering my questions and emails so far and he has office hours that work well for me), she actually has a doctorate, so she should be (in her own right) a professor. But she’s not. She helps the profs with operating the clicker system (one prof is technology inept, the other is new to the school – but not to teaching – so she’s unfamiliar with the systems) and she puts up the practice problem sets and learning activities.

Last term, we had 3 field labs (in total), 4 learning activities (in total) and about 3-4 practice problem sets (for completion marks, not accuracy) per week.

This term, it’s the same woman who put together the practice problem sets (but last term, the learning activities were put together by the professors), we have: 3 field labs (in total, put together by one of the professors from the previous term, thank goodness), 1 learning activity per week and 5-6 practice problem sets (for completion, not accuracy) per week.

Last term, we only had to complete half of the practice problem sets to get full credit.

This term, we only have to complete half of them, but half of 5-6 would be the same as doing all of the practice problems we had assigned last term (and last term, I did all of them, because it wasn’t as time consuming).

For example, I opened up a practice problem set last night. On the page prior to beginning the problem set, it said it was out of 6. Now this usually means that there are only 6 problems, at most it would be 12 (0.5/question). I opened it up and it there were 30 questions and there was no prior indicator of the extensive amount of questions. All of them include a lot of reading, reading graphs or tables and doing a lot of math.

Also, learning activities that are put together by the hack of a teaching aide are not helpful. At. All. We end up taking a full lecture to go over the learning activity and I only get that class twice a week, so we only really get one real lecture per week.

Maybe if this were my only class, I would think that it’s okay. It’s not a required course for me (as in that I would have to take this specific class) but it’s too late to drop it without having it show up on my transcript and I need upper-level biology credits anyways, so I might as well take it. I’m just fully disappointed that the aide is getting so much more say in the assignments that we have assigned and that we’re getting so much more work to do for a course that has the same amount of credits. Also, I can’t transfer into a different section because both of them are taught by the same professors with the same damn woman handling the work load.

I am, however, considering emailing the professors (the two that teach the course and the one that handles the lab component, he was one of my ecology profs last term). I’m not complaining for the sake of complaining, I’m complaining because I feel that it’s really just not in the students’ best interest to be given so much work and for the assignments to take away from actual lecture time (because it’s pretty damn ridiculous). Also, the amount of time we’re getting for the assignments has been lowered from a month to a week, and the amount of questions have gone up… and I just don’t like her attitude when she’s “lecturing” while we go over the learning activities in class.

And… thanks for reading!

I’ve got a routine, bonus points for me

Michelle — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 03:30:01 +0000

I’ve been preoccupied with school lately, it’s basically my life at the moment. That and job searching. Speaking of which, if you know anyone who’s willing to hire a BSc student, currently in 3rd year, that has some some lab experience working with both living and dead animal and plant tissues; handling chemicals in a lab setting; and oodles of data entry experience and is a quick learner for most things computer related, let me know! Bonus points if the job is located in British Columbia, by the way.

I have weekly assignments and online quizzes and labs for oceanography (assignments + quizzes), ecology (assignments + quizzes) and biostatistics (assignments + labs). Plant geography blissfully doesn’t have any of that, but that also means that my grade is based solely on a single term paper, midterm and final exam. Peachy, isn’t it? (Reminds me of Animal Mechanics all over again.) But I’ve been keeping up with all of my classes thus far – it does help that I have two 3-hour breaks each day where I just sit in a comfy chair with my biostatistics textbook or read over notes for oceanography. Because I really am that much of a keener. It’s good though, right? Getting into a good study habit? I still have friends who complain about still being in holiday mode because they only had 3.5 weeks of winter vacation (yeah, you read that right, three and a half! I thought I lucked out with 2.5!).

Needless to say, I’m not feeling overwhelmed (yet), like I did at about the same time in first term. School’s exhausting sometimes, and it’s difficult to get a lot of sleep and time in for things for me. When it’s all school, school, school and study, study, study, I end up losing sight of what’s really important to me. Which includes things like watching a movie or hanging out with people that who’s mugs I don’t have to see every single day (I kid, I kid, I heart my school buds, even if they drive me insane with their constant “Why are you always studying?”)

This weekend has so far been doing assignments (oceanography, ecology) as well as doing online quizzes (oceanography, ecology), some review of already taught material (plant geography) and reading (and taking notes) for chapter 4 (biostats).

I plan on taking a little bit of time tomorrow to get some baking in because I really want cupcakes… Plus I need to do some grocery shopping for bagels (breakfast for the week!) and some more juice (someone keeps on drinking all my orange juice). I’m currently on a goal not to spend money on campus unless absolutely necessary. Necessary spending (in my mind) includes course materials (i.e. my biostatistics textbook was a necessity, lunch during first week on campus wasn’t really one and could have been prevented). So in other words, my goal is just to really not buy food on campus. Which means I either bring something to eat (due to a few ‘short’ days, my idea of bringing something to eat is usually an apple and a few granola bars and a bottle of water; for my longer days, with large breaks, I’ll bring another bagel, hah, with cream cheese along with fruit, granola bars, water). Trying to save money and eat remotely healthy… Interesting combination, no? I’m trying my best to cut out junk food right now, exceptions are things that are at home (i.e. cookies, cupcakes, ice cream – I deem these as okay as I can only eat them at home, and I spend more time outside of home than in, and I eat them in moderation, as opposed to when I’m studying and food just disappears…). So it’s really like, anything goes, as long as it came from my house. And that was a long-winded blurb about food.

I really try not to dwell too much on food and intake of food too much. Me getting too obsessed with checking my weight has led to incredibly bad things in the past that I would very much like to not revisit, but my craptastic eating habits during first term (a lot of buying food on campus = both disgustingly expensive and disgusting for my body) are not to be repeated.

I hope everyone had a lovely week, I should be getting back to my studies for the weekend!

First Impressions x4

Michelle — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 06:34:57 +0000

I’m about to bore you all and talk about first impressions of my classes. I’ve had 2 lectures of each class so far.

Class #1: Plant Geography
Prof comes highly recommended, he’s good and so far the class has been interesting! It’s my first 4th year class, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect. Apparently the class is supposed to have nearly 80 students but from the numbers that actually attend, this is not the case. I already have an assigned term paper topic (well, I got to choose, but he has to okay it). The material is fascinating and (the most important thing) I know someone in the class!

Class #2: Ecology (the continuation)
Profs are new-to-me (and one of them is new to the school). I know what to expect from the class (higher concept learning, weekly reading assignments and practice problems). The people I sat with in the first course (as this is the continuation) decided they were going to take it in the summer (note: I’ve already called them all traitors. To their faces.) but I know some people who are in my class and I’ve found people to sit with (yay).

Class #3: Biostatistics
Not just any regular old statistics class, it’s biostatistics (which means I’m going to flipping die of formula usage by the end of the term). Meaning we talk a lot about rate of births and rate of deaths. Because what’s essentially what you study in biology – sex and mortality. Survivorship and death rates. Whoot. Prof seems okay thus far, I have 2 friends in this class to sit with (yay) but there’s a lab component for my stats class. A lab. For stats. Holy hell in a handbasket.

Class #4: Oceanography (the continuation)
Profs are old to me and one of them is new-to-me. He’s old, reminds me of a professor from the Harry Potter film franchise (like a rounder Lupin, which is unfortunately because I used to like Lupin). And he’s from France and has a horribly thick French accent. So far it’s okay, I have a grand total of 4 friends in this class – I’m really happy about that. So far it’s okay.

So four classes. My schedule isn’t that bad… I do, however, have a 3 hour break every Tuesday and Thursday which makes me want to take a pencil to my eyeballs (but I haven’t gotten around to that yet). And I have an atrocious amount of breaks all throughout my schedule but I’ve been using my breaks to study and review material, so that’s always a good thing. My problem so far is that I have no one to hang out with during my 3 hour breaks, so I need to figure out a way to entertain myself with school work or something. There’s only so many Sudoku puzzles I can do before I get tired of numbers.

That time of year…

Michelle — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 05:20:27 +0000

And I don’t mean the winter holidays (although I so wish I was talking about that!). In just under a week, I’ll be writing my first final exam for the term (for my ecology course). At this point, I’m usually in some kind of weird head space, just trying to go over everything and remember everything. It’s so helpful when I have professors that put together practice problems that reflect the difficulty of the kinds of questions that will be on the final exam. It’s also so helpful that my ecology profs will be doing a combined total of six review sessions. I’ll be avoiding the ones that are occuring the day before the final – I cannot deal with crazed and panicking people who didn’t bother to start studying until a night before. But I’m definitely going to at least one review session per professor (both go by a Q&A style, which I like).

For my other classes, they all just have extended office hours, so perhaps I’ll make a day out of it (going to campus to ask questions and such). I’ll be certainly making use of the office hours for my Oceanography class – beginning to doubt myself in that case, although I can recall the most oddest (but useful) facts in that class. Like the entire Redfield Ratio (106 mols of Carbon : 16 mols of Nitrogen : 15 mols of Silicone : 1 mol of Phosphorus) or how to calculate N* (N* = [N] – 16*[P]). Which is actually a good thing, seeing as those are some of the things not available on the formula sheet… Have you noticed that I’m a complete science geek sometimes? I have (noticed).

I wish I could just think about sugarplums dancing in my head but I just… can’t. My brain’s all wrapped up in how animals swim, fly, walk and run (animal mechanics), how species richness changes with changes in the environment and human destruction (ecology), the beautiful and not-so-beautiful insects of the world (entomology ) and plankton and why they exist where they do (oceanography). Just, such a geek overall.

But… this geek did take a stop by the bookstore at school today! They were having a sale so obviously I went to take a look. There was a lot of crap to dig through, as well as a lot of classics that I would have been interested if I didn’t already own them in one cover type or another (seriously, there’s only so many copies of a Dickens or Austen novel I can have before people start thinking that I’m a complete nutcase). I got Holy Sh*t: The World’s Weirdest Comic Books by Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury and a package of Jones Soda Co. Carbonated Sours (candy). Delicious. And I always love reading about comic books – it’s a full colour, glossy-paged, hardcover book that’s absolutely gorgeous when I flipped through it. Not recommended for the children though, as some of the world’s weirdest comic books includes ones with covers that feature scantily clad (or completely naked) women. Oddly enough, they don’t have naked men anywhere (or at least that I’ve seen so far).

And now… I’m just going to go and watch television for a bit, seeing as how I’ve spent over 4 hours today studying (since getting home – I studied on the bus and at school before class…).

I hope everyone had a fantastic day and that your life is so much better now that you know what the Redfield Ratio is!

Whoosh!

Michelle — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 02:43:29 +0000

I made the decision to go private on Twitter recently (erm, today) after getting more and more spammy-types of accounts following me and then sending me messages with spammy-type of messages. I could go through and block ’em all, but it was just so much easier to just go private all in one fell swoop (accounts that *I* don’t follow can’t send me messages). But if you wanted to follow me (and maybe I’d follow back, if you’re not a spammy-type of person), you can find me at @chelleshocks.

This weekend I’ve been working on my insect collection (due on Thursday, December 2nd) – just finishing up a few small things like gluing teeny tiny insects onto little triangles cut from index cards (I’m using light purple) and typing up all the information I’ll need for the tags that will be cut out and pinned as well. It’s going well though, I’m nearly completely done with a few days go about finishing it and putting down the final touches.

I have, at the time of writing, 3 more Oceanography assignments to do and 3 more online Oceanography quizzes. I also have maybe 2-3 more Ecology online assignments/quizzes to complete. There’s 5 more days of lectures, since I go to school Monday to Friday. I have one more project to hand in (my Entomology project that takes the place of a lab final, yay). After this week I have 4 finals before I get my Christmas/winter break!

I got really sad today because one of my stick insects had died. She was the one who moulted nearly a month after the other one and had a lot of issues with moulting (wasn’t able to pull free by herself) so I think in my heart, I knew she wasn’t ever going to really ‘make’ it because of that, as she had a lot of issues. She was the one that started off with the remaining egg casing stuck on her foot. The other one is still doing well, very much alive and eating and drinking whenever it wants (it’s fun to watch her eat because she eats a lot in one sitting). So while I’m really sad that one of them died in my care (although with all her issues, it’s possible that it was just nature taking it’s course), I’m quite happy that one of them is still doing well. This particular species is supposed to live for about 8 months, so we shall see how long I can keep her alive for (hopefully for the full 8 months, because then she’ll start producing eggs – no males/mating required).

I hope everyone had a lovely weekend!

What’s the size of your footprint?

Michelle — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 03:16:41 +0000

In my ecology class, we talked about ecological footprint. It’s the number of ‘earths’ you’d need to support everyone on the planet if everyone lived the same sort of lifestyle as you.

The size of my footprint?

2.67 Earths to support my lifestyle for the total human population on the planet, if everyone lived like me.

You can check out my results page and take the quiz yourself to see how you measure up – in terms of the number of earths it takes to support your lifestyle and how you compare to your country’s average.