Syzdekistan

I watched a little bit of the news coverage of today’s tragic bridge collapse in Minneapolis and was very concerned about the lack of safety gear worn by the rescue crews. I’m trained in swiftwater rescue and it is very important that rescue personnel don’t even get near the water without a PFD, helmet, and [...]

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When I got back to work on Tuesday after the marathon, I found my cubicle filled with balloons and my coworkers had gotten me a congratulatory cupcake cake! They also had a card signed by everyone in the department and some of my friends in other departments. There were a few accusations on the card [...]

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I stayed home today with my bad head cold. I woke up enough to call in at 8:00 A.M. and then slept in until 11:00 A.M. I ate breakfast and then returned to bed and finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I briefly left the house to get a haircut and the stylist remarked [...]

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The marathon is in five days and I’ve got a cold. It started yesterday with a plugged up nose and a tickle in my throat and by this morning I had a severe sore throat. I plan on going to work today because I still feel relatively functional. Also, I am scheduled to give a [...]

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I just finished two days of fish work on the Virgin River near Mesquite, Nevada. The purpose of the trip is to monitor for blue tilapia, a highly invasive fish that recently found in Lake Mead after escaping from a fish farm. With the current drought and low snowpack in the Utah headwaters, the Virgin [...]

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I spent last week in Beatty, Nevada helping the Nevada Department of Wildlife and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service with one of their two yearly Amargosa toad surveys. The Amargosa toad (Bufo nelsoni) is a species of toad only found in a small area near Beatty in the Amargosa River. Several years ago, the [...]

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Today I came uncomfortably close to death.
At work, we are currently doing some native fish surveys on the Muddy River. We spent the morning checking hoop nets and minnow traps for native fish on the lower river right above Lake Mead. We caught a variety of introduced fish and a few bullfrog tadpoles and [...]

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Last weekend, I had the pleasure of attending the Desert Tortoise Council’s annual symposium which was held here in Las Vegas. The symposium is where all of the tortoise researchers get together and present their research. There are also talks on other topics like Asian soft-shell turtles. This year, there was an excellent series of [...]

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As I was leaving town for a fun night of razorback sucker larval sampling on Lake Mojave (I’ll explain that whole crazy process when I finally get to do it), Hot Pregnant Wife called me to say that she was beginning to have regular contractions and that I should start thinking about not leaving town. [...]

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This video has been passing around the biologists at work. It’s the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time. Like any funny thing, it’s funny because it is true.

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