Sandra Cookie's Christmas

Merry Christmas!

I had a great holiday and hope you did, too. One of my Christmas presents was a digital camera - yay! - so now I can more easily share recent photos! Here's the Cookie family minus Alicia on Christmas Eve:




Here is our cutesie country living room all decked out for Christmas (after Santa had come!):





Here is my failed attempt at Stuff on My Cat - Xmas Edition:

And here is some Christmas Artwork from a much younger Sandra Cookie:

This last one is a quilting that I sewed by hand! Can you believe it? I don't (and I'm pretty sure can't) do stuff like this anymore!

Haha!

Whew! I was feeling kinda down today (actually very down), so I decided I totally needed to cheer myself up. I thought I would share the things that made me laugh out loud:

1. Reading The Onion. They're featuring some of their best 2006 articles. I especially liked the pieces about consoling Pluto and defending marriage.

2. Rereading some of my favorite comics. Is it legal to repost these or am I breaking a copyright law? Anyway, most of these are from the washingtonpost.com comics section:









3. Some new (to me anyway) "yo mama" jokes (from A Prairie Home Companion Pretty Good Joke Book):

- Yo mama's armpits stink so bad she made Right Guard turn left.
- Yo mama's so ugly the Red Cross talked her out of being an organ donor.
- Yo mama's so ugly all her neighbors chipped in for curtains.
- Yo mama's so fat she sat on a quarter and a booger popped out of George Washington's nose.
- Yo mama's so old she sat behind Jesus in the third grade.
- Yo mama's so slow her ancestors arrived on the June Flower.
- Yo mama's so dumb she only changed your diapers once a month because it said on the box "Good for up to 20 pounds!"
- Yo mama's so fat when she was walking down the street and I swerved to miss her, I ran out of gas.

Top 10 Cool Places Where Sandra Cookie has Tossed her Cookies

I love traveling, but something I've had to deal with most of my life is my weak stomach. I've barfed on sailboats, ferries, cars, buses, planes, and once on a train traveling at 5 mph. Fortunately I seem to have outgrown my motion sickness, food sensitivities, and other causes of stomach issues (for the most part). So now when I look back fondly on all the places I've been I realize hey, I've upchucked in a lot of neat places, including 5 countries and at least 4 national parks. Hurling is much more pleasant when you have pretty scenery to look at instead of porcelain. So, I thought it would be fun to compile a list - plus it would give me an excuse to prance out a few vacation photos! Thus, I now present...

The Top 10 Cool Places Where Sandra Cookie has Tossed her Cookies

10. Mt. Washington (on the Cog Railway)
My dad was the 500,000th person to enter the Mt. Washington visitor's center, and our family won a trip on the Cog Railway up the mountain. Luckily I had a plastic bag with me.

9. Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park
The combination of my father's driving style and winding Skyline Drive was never good.

8. Beautiful downtown Philly
The Philly marathon and half marathon have got to be the most scenic urban race courses. This is one of my better race photos - taken at the 2005 half marathon - but it was my worst race. I tossed my cookies twice after this moment:


7. sailing on Lake Erie
It was a gorgeous windy day - perfect for sailing - but my friends felt bad that I was sick. "Really," I assured them, "I'm having a great time! [dry heave]"

6. off the coast of Nova Scotia
On a ferry. It sucked.

5. Grand Canyon National Park
I tossed my cookies both ABOVE it (in one of those prop planes) and NEXT to it (on the North Rim). These pics suck, but that's because I took them with my cheap camera in 1994:



4. Yellowstone National Park
At Mammoth Hot Springs. This is also where I got the worst sunburn of my life.


3. a rainforest in Panama
This was definitely from something I ate. I also threw up in the "porn room" where we were staying - so called because the hot tub and shower were right there when you entered the room, there was no door to the toilet, and there were mirrors everywhere. I.e., if you were peeing you could be seen from anywhere in the room. ALL of the rooms at this quaint little bed&breakfast were like this!




2. Galapagos Islands
Both on our boat (many times) and on Isabella Island, not too far from the iguanas, who were totally sympathetic.



1. Iceland (right into a crevasse!)
I only barfed once, but I could've 100 times and the scenery would've totally been worth in.


Most amazingly I did NOT toss my cookies while traveling on this road in the Andes while riding BACKWARDS in this van. Go figure.

Stuff on My Cat

One of my friends (Kate I think?) directed me to the following website:
http://www.stuffonmycat.com/
There are two types of people: (1) those who find this site hilarious (2) those who think people who find this site hilarious are insane. Well, if you're in group (1), read on, because below is my little version of Stuff on My Cat, featuring...Madeline!

REWARD: ID Mysterious Thingy and you win!

Anyone out there in the life sciences? If you know (or have a good guess of) what this thing is depicted in several images below, PLEASE enlighten me! I think it might be a pollen grain of some sort, but I know a lotta pollen, and this doesn't look like anything I know. My other idea was a planula larvae, but it doesn't appear to be ciliated. It's about 60 microns long. It's been everywhere in my zooplankton and fish gut samples all summer and autumn long and no one in our lab knows what it is. I am offering a reward (you'll get to Hug a Limnologist Today) to whoever can confirm for me what this is.

Pineturkey

If anyone else's family has a pineturkey like we do at Thanksgiving, I want to know about it - please leave me a comment detailing your pineturkey tradition.




If by chance you do have a pineturkey, I'll bet YOU don't lovingly place yours on a tatted doily handmade by your grandfather! We usually slaughter our pineturkey for breakfast the day after Thanksgiving. Don't worry, we have a real turkey, too. But you may still think the Cooke family is a little odd.

Manger avec ma soeur

On my parents' computer I found some pictures from this summer they FORGOT to share with me, including this one of my sister feeding me junior mints at Allerton Park (hey Alicia, are you one of my loyal readers?). Then I found a similar picture from October 18, 1982, except I'm the one stuffing her face:


24 years later and not much has changed (except now she's the bigger/stronger one and can beat me up. Which she does sometimes.)

I swear to you I had a perfectly normal childhood...

...despite what you might infer from the following piece of artwork I found at my parents' house:



It was in a folder of semi-rejected pieces - stuff that's not that good but no way will my mom throw them out. It was undated and untitled, but the artist is definitely me. I don't remember drawing it, so if you're wondering "huh??" I can't explain it either.

Copious Quantities of Copepods

Last night I was feeling creative again, so I drew a copepod, specifically Cyclops scutifer:

But my drawing pretty much stinks when you compare it to the photo I took today (of a different species) using our compound microscope camera:


See the ocellus (eyespot), hence the genus name? This lady (yes, it's a female) is about 1.5 mm long and was a survivor among several thousand other zooplankters (mostly Daphnia) that I collected more than a week ago and had long since kicked the bucket. She is covered in epiphytes - harmless green algae - which gives her outline a fuzzy appearance. I was surprised to see someone still swimming around in the collection jar. Unlike most of her jarmates she is primarily a predator (but also eats algae and other things), so she may have eaten some of the smaller Daphnia. Also, many cyclopoid copepods are hypolimnetic, meaning they inhabit the hypolimnion - the bottom layer of colder, denser water in a stratified lake, so she may have been more able to withstand the near freezing conditions of the incubator. Anyway, she's dead now!

I've spent most of the past few days (actually most of the past 5 years) counting copepods and other zooplankton like this for my research. I think it's fascinating, although most people probably think I'm a dork.

Introducing Sandra Cookie's blog!

Hey Future Loyal Readers of Sandra Cookie's Blog!

So I decided to start a blog because all of the cool people are doing it. This first post is sort of a test post as I figure out all the ins and outs of blogging. Let's see if I can get the basics: colored text...check. Fun fonts...check. Okay, posting of a Cool Picture:



...check! Doesn't it look yummy? I drew it myself using my pastellos! I was inspired by the M&M cookies sold in the Woodmoor Pastry Shop, this neat little bakery in Silver Spring, MD where I had my first job, many years ago. I think a picture of a cookie is appropriate for the inaugural post of Sandra Cookie's blog, and I decided to draw a cookie rather than photograph one because (1) I was feeling colorful and creative and (2) I don't have a digital camera, so drawing & scanning was quicker.

My name is Sandra Cooke. The history behind Sandra Cookie, in case you're interested (and if you've read this far, you must be) began in elementary school, when some of my classmates thought my last name was pronounced "cookie". More recently, at a research symposium in grad school one of my fellow grad students, whose first language was not English, introduced me as Sandra Cookie. Everyone thought it was cute 'n funny, so "cookie" sort of stuck. What I think is funny is that telemarketers will ask to speak to "Mr. or Mrs. Cookie" to which I respond "there's no one here by that name". Anyway, I love cookies, so it's a good moniker. It's also unique according to this website I heard about on the radio. There are apparently 113 Sandra Cookes in the U.S., but zero Sandra Cookies. However, when I entered my mom's name on this site (Laurine Cooke), it came up with zero - meaning it is statistically unlikely that anyone with that name exists. My mom definitely exists, so this site is just another example of how statistics need to be interpreted with a grain of salt!