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!