GUINEAS ON THE LOOSE

FINALLY the guineas learned how to follow the chickens OUT of the coop when we raise the gate for free-range time (until today, they'd just run back and forth along the wire portions, looking confused)!! Also, they finally have enough feathers (aren't they pretty?!) that they no longer remind me of creatures from The Dark Crystal.

You guys, this little bird is seriously the best. I never thought I'd snuggle a chicken, but Elsa is just too sweet and too cute to walk past without picking up (and she's the only one that still tolerates/enjoys being held, so we can't resist her)!

Two guineas, two roosters (turns out Chickalotta is a rooster as well, but he doesn't seem to be causing any trouble and Chester is still dominant, so we shall see how it goes), and four hens (though it's hard to see them all in the brush around the perimeter of the coop, where they like to forage).

 We're getting an egg about every other day right now, but we're still waiting for the producing lady to lay it in the correct place (one of the nesting boxes) instead of randomly on the floor of the coop. Hopefully she figures it out before the rest of the girls start laying (soon, we hope), so they copy the right way and not the wrong way...

 The chickens went exploring down the hill below the compost pile. Must be good eats down there, since the leaves were being kicked in a flurry. Chester is ever the good supervisor up on the log... (The guineas had already put themselves away back into the coop at this point.)

FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL 2016

We returned to Southpark this year with some smiles and excitement, a LOT of silliness, and a little bit of nervousness (new teachers, new classrooms, different groupings of classmates...)

(Same clothes, bigger kids! Well, bigger clothes, and shoes, but same uniforms.)

(Last year she wanted to be "a firefighter and a princess")

(He also wanted to be "a police officer" last year)

And some outtakes... (Clearly Cora is a fan of the hand on the hip pose...)

Lots of silliness in James' photos this morning, but it's ok - we were just glad to see him smiling and happy and feeling well!

They found their desks, organized their things, and got to work!

(James was unwilling to pose with his teacher. Perhaps he's too cool for that this year?)

Class lists (which will change some as new students register this week). 21 in Cora's class (including one of her favorite girls, Destiny, and plenty of others she had class with last year, though not any of her three best friends) and 23 in James' class (including the two sets of twins that were in his class last year, whom he was friends with). We were very pleased to see that the two boys that James had the most bullying issues with last spring are not in his class!

We sent them in with a folder filled with the worksheets they completed this summer and some baggies of BoxTops...

...and basket of Student School Supplies and Teacher Wishlist items.

Now we just cross our fingers and hope for a good year!

ACRO BOUND

Cora had her Acro placement today and she joined a group of young girls in tumbling and cartwheels and handstands with Ms. Susan. She was placed in Acro 2 and she is very pleased to be allowed to skip Beginner Acro (especially since most of her friends will be in Acro 2, since they've been doing it for a year or two). We just hope she enjoys it as much as she thinks she's going to, and that Ms. Susan not only teaches her how to do the moves correctly, but to never ever do them on our couch...

RIO OPENING CEREMONIES

We picked up fancy ice cream, laid out all the blankets, and had a late night Olympics Opening Ceremonies party in the living room!

WALKING PNEUMONIA

James had a low grade fever Sunday afternoon/evening, but no other symptoms. And he woke up cool and calm and feeling fine on Monday, so I went to Colorado as planned, and Jay took both kids to Daycamp. After lunch, while I was boarded and about to leave Dallas for Denver, Daycamp called me to say that James was pale and complaining of a sore throat (but not feverish). I notified Jay and had them call him as well, and he left work to pick him up, ran by the doctor's office, and received a diagnosis of potential infection (maybe sinus) and a dose of antibiotics. Fever returned that evening, but stayed low. On Tuesday, James went to work with Jay and was feverish again by lunch (hence the sweatshirt he insisted on wearing outside at the picnic table, even though the heat index was extremely high), so they had to pack it in early again. By that evening his temperature had spiked to nearly 103 degrees and while I was FaceTiming with him, he sent me into a panic as he hoarsely yelled "I can't breathe! I can't breathe!" and threw the phone to the floor, then ran away crying. 20 minutes later (which felt like an eternity), Jay and my mom had talked it out and decided to give him ibuprofen and acetaminophen, and take him back to the doctor in the morning (I had been worried that they'd need to go to the emergency room and was on the other line with my dad while they figured out a plan of action). Wednesday morning, after a good listen to his lungs (which had been clear on Monday), the doctor ordered x-rays and determined that James has Walking Pneumonia. It was great to have a diagnosis and the proper medicine (including a shot in the bum that James was very proud to tell me he didn't cry about), but pretty scary that Jay had been told if he didn't respond well to the nebulizer meds or seemed to be struggling to breathe at any time, that Jay should "not hesitate to check him into the hospital". Apparently my panic was justified. And it felt horrible to be 1200 miles away and unable to hold my boy or help Jay with all this.

 Luckily, the shot helped pretty quickly and James has been doing a great job taking his nebulizer treatments. His fever dropped yesterday and has been nonexistent today. As we snuggled and watched a movie last night after I got home from the airport, James was laughing and smiling, and Jay told me with tears in his eyes that it was the first smiles he'd seen from James all week. Poor Jay had been so worried about his little man. We're all home today, resting and healing. School starts Monday and we're hoping James (and Cora, who has had a low grade fever off and on since Wednesday night, and who is now on her own dose of antibiotics) will be well enough to attend. They missed back to school night on Tuesday (obviously), but we had a friend check the class lists for us and we learned that Cora will be in Ms. Currie-Busby's class (the same teacher James had last year, whom we liked and have good communication with) and James will be in Ms. Arnold's class (the teacher that our little friend James McKenna had last year and whom we've heard is great, so we're happy).

eDNA TRAINING IN COLORADO

I am a member of the Conservation and Ecological Genetics Team. While I started my position here at ERDC (9.5 years ago!) working on the population genetics of threatened and endangered species (as I did for my master's degree before), the nature of our workplace (soft money, competition for funding, changing climate of research interest among the higher-ups, etc.) leads teams to continually expand their areas of focus. One of those expansions was the emergence of eDNA methods (quite a few years ago now), as first applied to Asian carp monitoring, and now used to identify and track invasives as well as TES and elusive species. When my team first took on the Asian carp monitoring task, I was the one "left behind" to finish up other projects (because pop gen is my specialty). As such, I have been more out of the loop than in as far as the progression of eDNA methods and uses over the past few years, but as our team pushes forward with incorporating eDNA into many of our current and future projects, I need to get up to speed. My supervisor and others in the government eDNA group put together an eDNA Training and Technical Exchange Workshop (held at the Federal Center in Lakewood, CO, since it's pretty central to most of the nationwide eDNA researchers), so I spent the beginning of this week learning nearly everything there is to know about eDNA collection, processing, and analyzing. It was a great event and I'm thankful that I had the opportunity to go (not only did I learn a lot, but I got to meet a lot of our collaborators in person and make some potential new funding connections), though I greatly missed my family (especially because James was VERY sick all week and I don't like being away from my kids on a normal day, let alone when they feel terrible and are sick enough to make Jay worry).

Sitting almost behind the pilot on my first flight... The flight attendant and I could have held hands.

The view from South Table Mountain. We took a 3-ish mile hike with some of the other workshop attendees the night we arrived where we gained 1600ft elevation, walked a big flat loop up top, then descended. The downhill was the portion that REALLY hurt my still healing quads. I waddled a lot on Monday and Tuesday...

Angry rattlesnake on the trail. Had to go around. And watch for snakes off trail...

The view northeast towards Denver.

Sharing an Ironworks sampler (shared because the pours were so large) with a coworker one evening.

Touring some of the BOR's river/dam models and concrete testing stations.

Hoover Dam

Aren't they pretty?
These lined the walls in a building so big that employees use bicycles to get from one end to the other.

Glen Canyon Dam model. I'd like to see the real one someday...

Last night in Colorado required a trip over to Red Rocks Park (adjacent to the Red Rocks Amphitheater) for a little bit of hiking and trail running (my legs were finally feeling mostly normal by Wednesday), since it was a mere 15 minutes from our hotel.

Irene, me, and Xin, ready to pound the red dirt! (Rick took the picture for us.)

This place was pretty incredible. We would have loved to go into the amphitheater too, to see that in person, but it was open to concert attendees only. Red Rocks sits at 6200ft elevation, and we most definitely felt it while we were running. There was a lot of walking back up the loop to the visitor center... which was fine, because it gave us plenty of time to take photos and view the wildlife (3 deer, 2 rabbits, 1 snake, and lots of magpies and other pretty birds).

Just me and John Denver. And an eagle.

EGGSELLENT!

(Don't mind the egg pun, it's for James.)

Jay discovered our first egg this evening! It's the one on the bottom left, I assume from our Olive Egger. (The other 4 eggs are representative of the ones we get from the Beane Farm, which are usually brown, sometimes speckled, sometimes blue, and rarely cream colored.) Hopefully this means we'll start getting eggs regularly pretty soon - we can't wait to see what the rest of them look like!