Not scary fast, but still pretty fast

I got the announcement for the spring semester competition for an internal Faculty Development Grant about 3:11 pm on Friday. I just finished phtocopying the required five copies and stuffing the final proposal in an envelope, at about 3:40 pm today.

From learning proposal to completion: four days and half an hour. And I didn't really work on it over the weekend. Admittedly, this was a fairly short proposal: a form cover page to fill in and four typed pages outlining the project. Still, I'm pretty pleased that I was able to turn that around so fast. I think I may reward myself by quitting a little early and getting ice cream. I need to go to the post office anyway, and if there's ice cream on the way... heh.

If this one hits, it'll provide me with about $1,900 to travel to Houston to visit a lab that works on a sea slug called Aplysia, and have a couple of people come down to visit my lab to show me some tricks in working with the slugs. Aplysia is a widely used organism in many neurobiology labs, thanks mainly to the extremely aggressive promotion by Nobel laureate Eric Kandel. We have one species, Aplysia brasiliana in fairly large numbers locally. It's not much to look at when its still, but it is amazing to see when it swims. It unfurls some flaps that normally cover its gills, and swims along by undulating these flaps, a little like a skate or ray does. It's graceful in a way that only animals without bones can be. (A short video of this is here.)

I've worked a little bit with slugs, but not very much -- so I want to go get some help in learning how to care for, handle, and record from the brains of these beasties.