Scribbles

I slept in this morning and only got to the zoo when 5 of the 6 new volunteers were tehre. It was frustrating because the new 3 aren't really learning anything because they keep going off to other rooms to help, when they should be learning to work in the busiest room, where the rest of us are focussed. The room with over 100 animals should take priority over the room with 20 or the room with 70 I would think. The experienced volunteers had an assignment due this afternoon, and only went in briefly to get the others started, but ended up spending the whole morning doing husbandry. Considering how much the zoo needs them, I would expect them to be treated slightly better!

Some of the little guys were really sick, I think from a bad reaction to the treatments yesterday, and one frog died. I'm glad I didn't know him very well, and I'm stressed out because one of the frogs has got a name now. Naming animals is bad, and I avoid it as much as possible, but soemtimes an animals just sort of names itself, and those are the names that stick! Fortunately I was able to get the experienced volunteers to agree to look after the frogs tomorrow when I can't be there, which is a huge weight off my mind! They're also going to start to get new bigger tanks ready to move the frogs on Sunday. Sunday is totally going to be Frog Day for me and I'm so excited!

So once I got to university and took several long walks to try and focus, I sat down and started redoing stats again (I found something that had to be considered, so now I'm re-analysing using a bigger model) and after a while I found myself grabbing a red pen and a piece of paper and scribbling out ideas and frameworks for the intro to the paper I'm hoping to publish from this data. The real issue is that as I've changed the focus of the study, all the reading and writing I did in order to graduate with this work is no longer relevant. So I get to go back to the drawing board and start reading and reading and reading and reading!

Something about scribbling makes you feel like you're accomplishing a lot! and the scribbles are often very useful later as you thought things through while involved with the data. So now I feel like I've accomplished something.

w00t!