Last one! I'mma incorporate the last 24 hours. And also the future. Because I DO WHAT I WANT.

THING ONE! Yesterday was Forrest's birthday, so I met him and a bunch of his friends at Hilo Burger Joint for beers and burgers for lunch. Later in the afternoon I picked up a bunch of food to-go from his favorite restaurant, Tina's Garden Gourmet Cafe (it's only open for dinner on weekends), and then later we went and had a brief Thai fusion evening picnic at Onomea Bay. And we had a successful dance class and then we went to his place and ate leftover mango sticky rice and did our homework, and he opened his presents from me and Mom and he liked them. :)

THING TWO! The visiting Cornell Ph.D that my lab is hosting had his talk yesterday afternoon. I got there a bit late because my order at Tina's took longer to fill than I was expecting, but the bit I did see was super fascinating, and there was a loooooong period of question-asking afterwards, and when I asked my question he perked up and was like, "Aha, yes, I was hoping someone would ask that!!" and I practically wiggled in academic joy. And he's super intelligent and knowledgeable and enthusiastic and I don't think he's ever been to Hawai‘i, and I'm taking him on a couple of field trips tomorrow and Friday, so that will be fun.

THING THREE! This weekend I'm taking a bit of a break and only going up to Hakalau for the day on Friday. Saturday afternoon Forrest and I are driving over to Waikoloa for an America concert, and we're staying in a fancy hotel, and spending Sunday doing relaxing beach stuff on the Kona side of the island. I'm so excited to kick back a little, I've been working so hard. @_@

And that is all the positivity you're getting out of me. You know me, I'm so negative. :P

I know I haven't made a real post in about ten years but before we talk about me LET'S TALK ABOUT BATMAN, or rather, let's talk about this very nice French girl, and how you should help her with her research project about Batman fanfiction!

Here, I'll just copy the post she made on batfic the other day.

batmanstudies:

French research work: Batman fanfic writers/readers wanted!

Hi everybody!

A French student in American media, I am currently writing a research paper on Batman as a cultural icon. This survey will help me focus on different aspects of Batman fandom ; it targets fanfiction writers and readers related to the Batman universe.

Here is the survey (it should take about 5 minutes to complete)

If you are willing to do a more extended interview on your activities, or if you're simply curious about by my work, you are very welcome to get in touch with me. Thank you so much !

And here is a more general survey (again a very short one) on your general attitude as a Batman fan. :)

Please do consider taking her surveys and/or contacting her for a more extended interview. For me, Sociology + Batman + Talking About Fanfic = AWESOME, so I've been interviewing with her via email and having a blast talking her figurative ear off. She asked if I wouldn't mind signal-boosting so here I am. GO GO GO, YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO, spread the word etc. ♥

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RANCH... I know, I've been pretty scarce lately. Or, I haven't been posting, but I'm definitely still here, lurking on my Flist every day. The new year thus far has been super busy; I spent all of January and half of February studying for and taking the GRE and applying to grad school and applying for a fellowship that could give me money for grad school and basically not allowing myself to have any fun at all while I did those things. Now I am attempting to resurrect my life from the shambles it fell into while I was busy elsehow. Like, maybe I'll send people their Christmas presents one of these days.

Oh, but I did get into grad school. Yay me!

...That's pretty much all I have to say for myself. HI, HOW ARE Y'ALL? ♥♥

Gearing up for four-day trip to Lupea next week. Lupea being a remote, montane, dry forest area in Kona that I've been hearing about, that I've never been to and not a lot of people get to visit. I'll be doing some vegetation monitoring stuff with Three Mountain Alliance. I am excite!

Despite living in a constant state of baffled confusion due to a lack of organization on the part of my immediate superior, I am LOVING THIS JOB SO HARD ALREADY. ♥

So Tuesday-Thursday this week and next I'm volunteering back with my old job, NPS RM Veg. And 'tis the season to run transects in KW, so I'm enjoying the nostalgia. Wasser's having me do tagged shrubs, which means I work by myself while the new kids do cover, biomass, and shrub density transects. It's kind of fun, using GPS and a compass to orienteer around the kīpuka. Wish the weather was better lately, though... it's been kinda soggy. :\

Today was the All Park meeting and annual photo, which I infiltrated like a baby cuckoo. I'm in the picture and everything, haha. There was free coffee and malasadas at the meeting, too... score!

Yesterday evening I went to the 4th of July party at Mahilani, so that was fun, seeing all the old familiar faces and eating tasty food and drinking beer and wine and champagne and dancing and talking story. Had a fun moment when someone said the words "Higgs boson" and all of us science nerds in the vicinity went "HIGGS BOSON!" and raised our drinks, and everyone else just looked confused. And then me and Dad tried to explain it to them.

The weather was nice until just as it was turning dark, of course, at which point it socked in completely, hiding the view of town and Hilo Bay and the county fireworks show. We could here the distant explosions, but we couldn't see a damn thing. Tragic!

But it was fun, there was delicious cake and I talked Star Trek with Chris and Juliana is trying to fix me up with her brother, so... ahaha that should be interesting? ^_^;

So a bunch of stuff happened in the last couple weeks. Had fun going to the Kamehameha Day Festival and seeing Prometheus. ...The movie was awesome, by the way... definitely very Ridley Scott, if you like Ridley Scott. Creepy Android!Michael Fassbender was, as I fully expected, my favorite. ...Now I feel like I need to marathon the Alien movies. (Tried to watch Blade Runner the other night... BORED ME TO TEARS.)

The last couple of weeks have been pretty nice at work... exploring Kahuku, mist-netting at ‘Ainahou... I like ‘Ainahou, I mean, it's pretty weedy and there's lower bird diversity and I'm pretty biased towards the rainforest (‘Ainahou's a lot drier than Nauhi), but... it's just a really nice place to hang out. It's sunny and warm and the birds come in at just the right pace... and I'm lounging in the grass under a blue sky, writing, and getting up occasionally to go for a walk under the trees and check nets, and play with birds for a few minutes before going back to lounging and writing and just... how awesome is my life?? Other people work in cubicles. (I told my mom this and she pointed out that other people get paid more than $20 a day. THANKS MOM. ...It's still the best job ever, so there. XP)

And then Friday before last Jackie and I were going to go to Na‘alehu to meet with her friend John from The Nature Conservancy and pore over maps and get his opinions on the best ways to access remote parts of the Ka‘u Forest Reserve, but he absolutely had to go into the field that day... so we went with him! We met up with him and this-younger-guy-whose-name-I-forget in Pahala and drove up to TNC's Kaiholena Preserve, which was AWESOME because I've never ever been up there before. It's way up in the Ninole Hills, which is this really awesome and interesting and (I think) kinda creepy area in Ka‘u, where a massive fault-slip and subsequent erosion created these hills that look completely out of place with the rest of the island's geology (most hills in Hawai‘i are cinder cones), and they're all green and mysterious with their heads in the clouds and I've always wanted to go up there. And the forest in Kaiholena is beautiful, really pristine and full of all my favorite plants, and we took a nice walk along the fence line marking out where the helicopter needed to drop fence-repair materials and I had a lot of trouble keeping up because I kept stopping to geek out at the botany. ^_^;; And we had lunch TNC's little pavilion at the bottom of the preserve with a gorgeous view down to the coast, and on the way down we took a side trip to one of the hills to see this plant called nuku ‘i‘iwi (‘i‘iwi bill) because I'd never seen it/heard of it before and Jackie thought I'd enjoy it, which is... really kind of sweet, actually. It's this really cool vine with beautiful flowers that, yes, do resemble ‘i‘iwi bills in color and shape, and as;hgkalhskfakjshdfls NEW PLANT. *geeks out some more* And all of the lower hills had, mixed in with the native plants, ti and kukui and one of the old Hawaiian varieties of bananas, the name of which I forget, but John told me it was one of the few varieties that women were allowed to eat, and also that it was one of the varieties of bananas that the Hawaiians brought with them in their very first voyage, which makes sense because we're so close to that very first settlement down there. Looking at those ti and kukui and bananas that were probably descendants of plants planted around the very oldest Hawaiian settlements gave me a kind of chicken-skin feeling. ...Anyway, IT WAS A COOL TRIP and it made me very happy. Fuck $20 a day, I CAN'T BELIEVE I GET PAID FOR THIS AT ALL.

On Saturdays I've been doing a bunch of chores for Mom, since her arm's in a cast and she can't do a lot. Father's Day Dad came up to Volcano, and we had a really excellent afternoon: lunch at Lava Rock Cafe, wine tasting at the Volcano Winery, a trip to Jaggar to watch the steam come out of Halema‘uma‘u, and a trip down to ‘Ainahou so I could show him my work site and the historic ranch buildings.

Last week has been more netting at ‘Ainahou mostly, although Thursday and Friday I was on-loan to Mark Kupono trying to catch ‘i‘iwi up Mauna Loa Strip Road. No ‘i‘iwi in the net, just ‘amakihi and ‘apapane and white-eyes, but one of the ‘apapane was this really pretty hatch year bird that was in between fledgling and adult plumage... mostly red with gray and tawny bits and a red racing stripe on the back of its head. SO CUTE. And it was just a really nice day up there, lounging on the rocks and reading. ...Boss Jackie is taking off for Bali for three weeks, so I expect to be doing a lot more of this, along with fun things like data entry and organizing the supply closet. :P

Another major thing is I moved into my boss Dennis' house Thursday before last. He and his family are on vacation for over a month, traveling on the Mainland and in Italy, and I'm house-sitting for them. (Thus the adventure with the can opener the other day.) It's... a bit of an adjustment for me, because they have two dogs and three cats and two bunnies and two turtles and some fish, and it's weird having dependents. And the dogs need to be walked every day, and they have to be walked really early in the morning when no one else is on the street because they get aggressive with other dogs and strange people, so this means I wake up at 6:00 even on the weekends, which is just... not like me at all, heh. But all of the animals are super sweet. It's pretty nice for my ego to come home and EVERYONE IS SO HAPPY TO SEE ME OMG. So I'm really enjoying it, even if there's dog hair EVERYWHERE and Belle is needy and loud and psychotic and has WAY TOO MUCH ENERGY and Splotch has a marked tendency to wake me up at 2:30 in the morning MEOWING LOUDLY FOR NO REASON AT ALL. Can't get too upset with them, THEY'RE ALL SO CUTE.

( Oh and also I PIMPED MY RIDE. )

Well, here you go, guys, you've been waiting for this one long enough. I'll make another post at some point with a picspam of Everything Else I've been doing since, like, February, but here's the bird stuff at least.

( First off, I should summarize the Nauhi Experience, since I've never really gone and done that. )

( PICTURES )

Not that anyone would notice if I didn't tell you, but my ‘okina and kahakō are ALL OVER THE PLACE in this; can't be arsed to worry about it overly much, too exhausted. @_@

I really don't have time for this, but if not now, NEVER. So, a super-quick drive-by update, just in case any of you have been wondering where the hell I've been for the last week or so.

-Thursday and Friday I went camping for work at Pepeiao Cabin with my boss Mark and my Canadian volunteer comrade-in-arms Caitlin. We tromped around in the Ka‘u Desert for a couple of days through what used to be native shrubland but is now largely alien grassland, checking up on outplants that were put in after a fire some years ago. It was fun! Mark and Caitlin are both great company, and Mark's a fantastic cook, and Caitlin brought a bottle of Jack, and I got to see some cool endemics that I'd never seen/heard of before, and the stars were pretty at night, and it was awesome.

( -DANCING A LOT! DANCING A LOT SOME MORE! NEW JOB! )

-Here watch a cute video about seal cuddles:

Seal meets girl. Seal falls in love with girl. The end. from Bob Dobalina on Vimeo.

-THIS WAS NOT AS QUICK AS I INTENDED IT TO BE.

-♥!

Okay so it's past my bedtime already and as usual I am underslept (there is really not enough time in a day to work eight hours and commute and do all of the things I want/need to do), but I'm going to do a drive-by post of THINGS, because if anything I am about to get busier. When the fuck am I going to do my Christmas shopping oh my gaaaaaaaaaaawd!! T_T

First off, Ted Maddry is here with his girlfriend Lea... he's here to teach a Blues workshop this weekend. Mom's on O‘ahu for work, so I picked them up from the airport and fed them and showed them the ropes. It was instantly clear that they are both fabulous people, as I have come to expect from the traveling Swing/Blues instructor crowd; I'm really looking forward to learning from Ted and to hanging out with them and showing them around the island for the next week. Ted bought us beer (Maui Brewing Company Coconut Porter oh my gaaaaaaawwwwd~!) and said some really complimentary things about my mother (that he's been hearing her name from everyone on the circuit as a workshop coordinator who is supremely excellent to work with, and having corresponded with her for this workshop he can now see why) that I hope he will repeat in her presence, because awww~.

So, yeah, I'mma be busy playing tour guide and Blues dancing and having fun, and then next week I'm going on a Waipi‘o-Waimanu backpacking trip with some people, which I am super excited about; with this trip and the Labor Day Mauna Loa summit adventure that's two out of three crossed off of my Big Island Backpacking Bucket List... now if I can only get Pele to cooperate so I can camp at Nāpau-! ...Oh man, and then I've got the Haleakala backpacking trip coming up in January... SO MUCH AWESOME HIKING YAY.

And now a list of Things To Flail About:

- For those of you who enjoy Red vs. Blue, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along-Blog, the sillier bits of Doctor Who, and/or THINGS THAT ARE AWESOME, I highly recommend The Visitor from the Future (Le Visiteur du Futur), a French science fiction/comedy web series (don't worry, it comes with subtitles). The show is, in general, much like its title character: adorable, frenetic, and slightly insane (oh my god I have such a crush on the Visitor and his crazyface, for serious, SO IN LOVE), and it's full of time-travel shenanigans and robots and zombies and silliness. So. WATCH IT.

( Continued under the cut: rock and roll, naked Fassbender, jet packs, lava, SPACE, and that guy I like. And Batman eats a pony. )

THAT TOOK WAY LONGER THAN I MEANT IT TO, OH GOD I'M SO TIRED, okay bye now!