The perfect strawberry

This has been an odd week. Tuesday I was finally able to go out and collect animals, which I'd been meaning to do for a while. Excellent conditions: warm, low tide, little swell -- I could have picked up huge numbers of shrimp.

Wednesday was a bit of a panicky day. My students had their first weekly online quiz, which always tends to result in a few people who freak out a little, because they've never taken a test this way before. While they were doing that and I was dealing with lots of little first time questions, my student Sandra walked into my office and I said, "Hey, remember that Woods Hole course we were talking about? We'd better start thinking about that, because the deadline's sometime in February." Surf over to the website to find the deadline is... February 1^st. Today. Yipes!

You can imagine how I spend the afternoon.

Luckily, we were able to pull it together, since we had worked to put together an NSF application for Sandra late last year. It's out, so fingers crossed. There's another application in two weeks. At least this time we have a couple of days to think about it.

Today I was in and out of the MSIRP conference. I'm not convinced I've advanced my research or created any new opportunities at all yet. And I am again perplexed that experienced, powerful people don't give better talks. But the food has been good. Tonight I had conference dinner held at an old mansion once owned by a wealthy citrus farmer; the secretary of the army was speaking. And while there was lots to like about the food, I happened upon a perfect strawberry on one of the plates. You bit into it and knew this was what strawberries were supposed to be like. Sublime.