Life is still kind of in flux (still trying to get a job and decide what I really want to be when I grow up) and I think what I miss most of all about really having a sense of where I'm going is the routine and ritual of it. Let me explain:
I get up in the morning and iron Ryan's clothes for him (not because I'm a 1950's housewife, but because he's feeding the baby and eating his own breakfast). Once that's done, I dress the baby and pack his lunch. Usually by this time Ryan is showered, dressed, and putting things in his pockets. By 0830 most days, they're out the door. I love this ritual. It makes me feel like our family is a little team of people working towards the same orderly goal....and then once it's over, I have a few wonderful moments of knowing that my day is my own until 1700. (Yes, I'm using military time. What? I grew up in a household where people said "Niner" instead of "Nine" when talking on the phone.)
After the boys are out the door, life is a bit harder to predict. My life changes from day to day--there's not a ton in the way of a set routine, and I miss it. Any time could be work time! Any time could be down time! Part of me is very invested in the grad school mentality of "OMG YOU SHOULD BE WORKING ALL THE TIME! ALL. THE. TIME." despite knowing that this is unhealthy, wrong and actually motivates me less.
In any case, despite valuing my ability to be very flexible in most situations, this is a time in my life where I wish I was a little more rigid, if only with myself. No one else is setting my time commitments, and so I have a vast canvas of time--I have the compulsion to try and paint it all one color and leave no negative space for contrast...To some extent a sense of ritual makes this into a paint by number, but at least that's a bit closer to the kind of art I want to create...
What rituals are you guys attached to (I know I haven't got many readers that aren't spam, but I do have some, thanks to Facebook)? How do you create that kind of structure when their is none?
Showing posts with label weird jobs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label weird jobs. Show all posts
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Return to everyday life
Ryan and I are back home in Cali, settled into our new apartment and studying during the new school year. Oisin is with us, and though I occasionally miss the excitement of going a new place every day, I'm still somewhat giddy to be back going through the motions of my every day routine in Davis. Cooking my own food is a wonderful task, as chasing around a toddler, for the most part. He's back in day care during the week and so far seems to be enjoying himself immensely, which helps.
I'm back to teaching and class and research, and keep finding wonderfully interesting new papers. I'm going to try and write about the most interesting things I find, and the interesting parts of being a graduate student, but they're fewer and farther between when I'm not in the field, so once the beginning of the quarter calms down a bit, I'm going to try to post some of the stories we didn't get to tell yet about the summer. For now, I leave you with a second video of dog sampling, this one of me taking the blood, so you can see what we're talking about. As a note, the calm reaction this dog has is the standard reaction we got--even the dog in the last video was this relaxed once we got the muzzle on.
I'm back to teaching and class and research, and keep finding wonderfully interesting new papers. I'm going to try and write about the most interesting things I find, and the interesting parts of being a graduate student, but they're fewer and farther between when I'm not in the field, so once the beginning of the quarter calms down a bit, I'm going to try to post some of the stories we didn't get to tell yet about the summer. For now, I leave you with a second video of dog sampling, this one of me taking the blood, so you can see what we're talking about. As a note, the calm reaction this dog has is the standard reaction we got--even the dog in the last video was this relaxed once we got the muzzle on.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Muzzling dogs
Due to popular demand, and a very helpful collaborator, we've finally got video of us capturing and sampling dogs. Sadly, we only had one video of us muzzling a dog so we didn't have much to choose from. It's a little amateur hour, but it gives a decent idea of the process for muzzling dogs that do not want to be muzzled. This is video from a hospital for mentally disabled people where some of the patients kept dogs, so we had additional concerns in keeping people back which made it a little more difficult, but the patients there were very sweet and helpful generally.
While this guy freaks out a bit, he was not hurt at all, just scared of the leash. We're tapping him on the head because we didn't want him chewing through the lead, as we're down to three leads now, and still have to finish sampling in India. We'll post more videos of actually taking blood and such in a bit.
[Guest post by Ryan, with bits by Cori, heh]
While this guy freaks out a bit, he was not hurt at all, just scared of the leash. We're tapping him on the head because we didn't want him chewing through the lead, as we're down to three leads now, and still have to finish sampling in India. We'll post more videos of actually taking blood and such in a bit.
[Guest post by Ryan, with bits by Cori, heh]
Monday, June 29, 2009
So you want to sample a village dog's blood....
Actually, likely you really, really don't. But I do, and so I'm going to explain how you actually do it here. It's one of those grunt work type parts of science (that is, it's data collection) but relatively pleasant and interesting, since it's often pretty challenging. Plus, the perks (international travel to places way, way off the beaten track) are excellent.
So, here's how we actually do it.
First, we put all of the following into a large duffel bag, and throw that into the back of a 4x4:
Step 2: Find dogs. If people keep them as pets or guards, this means driving around the countryside with translators (sometimes more than one) to explain your pressing need for blood from rural dogs. After many strange looks, most people are willing to help if only out of curiosity. I've often thought that it's probably particularly helpful that I'm female, as I get some especially strange looks diving onto riled up dogs with thick bite proof gloves. Novelty gets you a lot of interest.
If people don't keep dogs, we usually rely on shelters. Shelters are awesome because they usually have very calm, well-socialized dogs and enthusiastic staff. Also, it's great to be able to compensate people by donating to a dog shelter and helping the animals too.
We've also tried driving around looking for dogs, but this usually doesn't work as well.
Step 3: Restrain the dog. Get the owner or any other foolishly helpful soul (ie, me or Ryan or our collaborators) to put a lead on the dog. If it freaks out, let it do so until it runs low on energy. Then cautiously put a muzzle on the dog from behind:
If the dog is chill, that last bit is less necessary, which saves loads of time.
Step 4: Measure the dog. For breed dogs there are more than 30 of these measurments. We take six: body length, height, chest girth, chest width, face width, and snout length. Usually I call out these measurements to Ryan, who writes them down along with a number of other types of physical descriptions and takes pictures.
Step 5: Get the blood! Get someone strong and confident to hold the dog still and hold a forelimb so that the cephalic vein is obvious after an alcohol swab. Insert butterfly needle attached to tube holder and needle. When there's blood in the butterfly needle's tube, attach the vacuum tube. Wait, trying desperately to instill patience in a figity dog, for the tube to fill with five cc's of blood. Fiddle gently with the needle and pump the dogs paw to increase the speed of the flow.
Step 6: Weigh the dog (if it's under 50 lbs) using a fish scale and goat sling. Ignore the local people's laughter as the dog slips out of the sling for the third time before you can suspend the sling from the scale.
Step 7: Carefully release the dog, making sure no one lets go of the lead or muzzle before everyone's clear and they've really been removed from the dog. Losing one of four leads to a dog running away is not fun in the middle of a busy sampling day.
Apparently, with loads of helpers, tons of chill dogs, and an efficient system, you can take blood using this method (ie, steps 3-7) at a rate of about one dog every three minutes or so. At least, that's what we did today--seventy dogs in less than four hours.
Step 8: Mail blood home. Talk to people repeatedly about the lack of danger from healthy domestic dog blood and attach loads of letters making it clear that there is no value nor any troubling regulations on shipping this stuff.
And then we move onto the next country! That's how I'm spending my summer, and while it's exhausting and not fabulously intellectual, we're having a blast.
So, here's how we actually do it.
First, we put all of the following into a large duffel bag, and throw that into the back of a 4x4:
- butterfly needles (needles with wing shaped handles and tubing attached)
- Vacuum sealed test tubes
- Tube holders and needles (plastic holders and needles to puncture vacuum sealed tubes)
- alcohol swabs
- measuring tape
- data sheets
- sharpies
- pens
- leads (the kind you slip over a dog's neck)
- muzzles (in about eight sizes)
- camera
- a cooler with ice
- fish scale (suspensory scale)
- goat sling (a mesh sling for holding dogs from the scale)
Step 2: Find dogs. If people keep them as pets or guards, this means driving around the countryside with translators (sometimes more than one) to explain your pressing need for blood from rural dogs. After many strange looks, most people are willing to help if only out of curiosity. I've often thought that it's probably particularly helpful that I'm female, as I get some especially strange looks diving onto riled up dogs with thick bite proof gloves. Novelty gets you a lot of interest.
If people don't keep dogs, we usually rely on shelters. Shelters are awesome because they usually have very calm, well-socialized dogs and enthusiastic staff. Also, it's great to be able to compensate people by donating to a dog shelter and helping the animals too.
We've also tried driving around looking for dogs, but this usually doesn't work as well.
Step 3: Restrain the dog. Get the owner or any other foolishly helpful soul (ie, me or Ryan or our collaborators) to put a lead on the dog. If it freaks out, let it do so until it runs low on energy. Then cautiously put a muzzle on the dog from behind:
If the dog is chill, that last bit is less necessary, which saves loads of time.
Step 4: Measure the dog. For breed dogs there are more than 30 of these measurments. We take six: body length, height, chest girth, chest width, face width, and snout length. Usually I call out these measurements to Ryan, who writes them down along with a number of other types of physical descriptions and takes pictures.
Step 5: Get the blood! Get someone strong and confident to hold the dog still and hold a forelimb so that the cephalic vein is obvious after an alcohol swab. Insert butterfly needle attached to tube holder and needle. When there's blood in the butterfly needle's tube, attach the vacuum tube. Wait, trying desperately to instill patience in a figity dog, for the tube to fill with five cc's of blood. Fiddle gently with the needle and pump the dogs paw to increase the speed of the flow.
Step 6: Weigh the dog (if it's under 50 lbs) using a fish scale and goat sling. Ignore the local people's laughter as the dog slips out of the sling for the third time before you can suspend the sling from the scale.
Step 7: Carefully release the dog, making sure no one lets go of the lead or muzzle before everyone's clear and they've really been removed from the dog. Losing one of four leads to a dog running away is not fun in the middle of a busy sampling day.
Apparently, with loads of helpers, tons of chill dogs, and an efficient system, you can take blood using this method (ie, steps 3-7) at a rate of about one dog every three minutes or so. At least, that's what we did today--seventy dogs in less than four hours.
Step 8: Mail blood home. Talk to people repeatedly about the lack of danger from healthy domestic dog blood and attach loads of letters making it clear that there is no value nor any troubling regulations on shipping this stuff.
And then we move onto the next country! That's how I'm spending my summer, and while it's exhausting and not fabulously intellectual, we're having a blast.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Does your summer job involve searching yourself for fleas?
Hello!
Apologies for the sudden silence--while our hotel in Qatar had very convinient internet, our connection here is both slow and not in the hotel, so we've unfortunately had to blog slightly less obsessively. This is actually a real shame as Lebanon has been an amazing country so far.
We arrived safely Wednesday night and Ryan got to work on his aggressive driving skills. Rules of the road are decidedly optional here, and I say that as someone who just came from Qatar after having their car hit. Otherwise, after Qatar, Lebanon is wonderfully warm personally and cool temperature-wise. You can definitely tell it's on the Mediterranean Sea, in no small part because every part of Beruit and its suburbs seems to be positioned for an ocean view from the top of a hill. But even without the views--the food is wonderful and central in the way it ought to be in a good country on the Med--our collaborator here, Mounir Abi Said, has been trying to expose us to as many different Lebanese foods as possible, and knows what is the most delicious everywhere. We've also had a wonderful home cooked meal with him and his family, and were treated to awesome goat's meat pastries and fresh picked cherries in the Beqqa Valley yesterday.
Mounir has also been incredibly good at helping us find interesting shepherd's dogs in remote locations. He's worked previously with many of the shepherds in the valley and so they've all been super helpful in part as a favor to him. We have insane pictures that we'll upload as soon as the internet situation improves of us in the middle of picturesque meadows in the Lebanese mountains, surrounded by sheep, Lebanese and Bedouin herders, their dogs (many of which look like my dog growing up--a husky-sheltie mix named Romeo), and our collaborators. Not a place I could've ever imagined being, but wonderfully beautiful and enjoyable. The only downside is that most of the goats, sheep, and dogs have fleas and ticks, which doesn't leave one with the cleanest feeling after sampling, but so far, we've not had any bad luck with them, touch wood. A shower after a day of sampling is one of the nicest things ever.
In any case, tomorrow is our day off and so we're hoping to do some touristy things like drive up to Tripoli. I'll tell more about the country after that, but after three days, I'm pretty sure that I'll want to come back and really relax instead of working: the food and scenery alone would make that worth it.
Stats:
Apologies for the sudden silence--while our hotel in Qatar had very convinient internet, our connection here is both slow and not in the hotel, so we've unfortunately had to blog slightly less obsessively. This is actually a real shame as Lebanon has been an amazing country so far.
We arrived safely Wednesday night and Ryan got to work on his aggressive driving skills. Rules of the road are decidedly optional here, and I say that as someone who just came from Qatar after having their car hit. Otherwise, after Qatar, Lebanon is wonderfully warm personally and cool temperature-wise. You can definitely tell it's on the Mediterranean Sea, in no small part because every part of Beruit and its suburbs seems to be positioned for an ocean view from the top of a hill. But even without the views--the food is wonderful and central in the way it ought to be in a good country on the Med--our collaborator here, Mounir Abi Said, has been trying to expose us to as many different Lebanese foods as possible, and knows what is the most delicious everywhere. We've also had a wonderful home cooked meal with him and his family, and were treated to awesome goat's meat pastries and fresh picked cherries in the Beqqa Valley yesterday.
Mounir has also been incredibly good at helping us find interesting shepherd's dogs in remote locations. He's worked previously with many of the shepherds in the valley and so they've all been super helpful in part as a favor to him. We have insane pictures that we'll upload as soon as the internet situation improves of us in the middle of picturesque meadows in the Lebanese mountains, surrounded by sheep, Lebanese and Bedouin herders, their dogs (many of which look like my dog growing up--a husky-sheltie mix named Romeo), and our collaborators. Not a place I could've ever imagined being, but wonderfully beautiful and enjoyable. The only downside is that most of the goats, sheep, and dogs have fleas and ticks, which doesn't leave one with the cleanest feeling after sampling, but so far, we've not had any bad luck with them, touch wood. A shower after a day of sampling is one of the nicest things ever.
In any case, tomorrow is our day off and so we're hoping to do some touristy things like drive up to Tripoli. I'll tell more about the country after that, but after three days, I'm pretty sure that I'll want to come back and really relax instead of working: the food and scenery alone would make that worth it.
Stats:
7 flights
7 time zones
42 traveling hours
11,599 miles
5 countries (counting all landings and time spent on the ground at all)
3 countries (counting only those countries we left the airport)
Thursday, April 30, 2009
On Sapolsky, and living in interesting times
Went to a talk by Robert Sapolsky yesterday; really fascinating stuff. He studies, among many, many other things, stress in wild populations of Olive Baboons. Kelly has a nice summary of the neuroscience here, so I'll be lazy and focus on the parts that I found most interesting: the primatology. Sapolsky has been studying hormone fluctuations in Kenyan Olive Baboons for decades. He compares hormonal indicators stress levels at baseline to those after certain kinds of stress.
The punchline is that olive baboons, like humans, exhibit maladaptive hormonal responses to social stress. Basically, these hormonal responses (glucocorticoids) release as part of a stereotypical flight or fight response to stress. This response ramps up your ability to flee if a lion is about to eat you, for example. But, as Sapolsky put it yesterday, if you're stressed because need to run away from a predator, your body sends energy to your thighs. Great. But if you're stressed because you're a baboon who's trying to form fragile alliances....your body sends energy to your thighs. If you're stressed because you're on a blind date....your body sends energy to your thighs. Not quite so helpful in these contexts. What's more, your body does this with hormones that can negatively impact your stress levels long term.
If you're a low-ranking olive baboon, your situation is especially bleak: your life is super-stressful, since everyone can beat on you, and your body is constantly throwing stress hormones at your brain over things it doesn't need too. This means you're constantly reinforcing your stress response, creating a "learned helplessness" very like human depression. The happiest (and often highest ranking) baboons are the ones that know what actual stress is, minimize their stress at other times, use coping behaviors (apparently grooming is as good as smacking someone else around), and take control of stressful situations.
It seemed particularly appropriate to me that this talk was being given right now. It's an "ancient chinese curse" kind of year, in a lot of ways: we live in interesting times. When people talk about the Great Depression and WWII, they talk about the way these things affected entire generations, and built a sort of shared identity based on responding to hardship. In some ways, I suppose that respoding was empowering, but to me it still sounds a bit like being a low ranking baboon. I think it's fairly likely that things like the recession, climate change, and maybe swine flu might create a shared identity for my generation, and the notion of solidarity is appealing, but I dislike the lack of control that goes with it.
That sort of thing is a lot of the reason I do the sort of research I do. I like the notion that no matter what generation I belonged to, the things I do in my life are interesting, and that's something I took control over. You don't become a primatologist because of things happeneing to you, which fosters a fascinating work environment. I was talking with a fellow primatology grad student and we realized if we were to catch some fatal disease tomorrow, we wouldn't look back and think we hadn't done anything.
People like that make for a great work environment, even if we all probably sat through that talk thinking about how similar to the life of that low ranking baboon things can be sometimes, and maybe have been lately. Either way, at least some of my times are interesting because I wanted them that way.
The punchline is that olive baboons, like humans, exhibit maladaptive hormonal responses to social stress. Basically, these hormonal responses (glucocorticoids) release as part of a stereotypical flight or fight response to stress. This response ramps up your ability to flee if a lion is about to eat you, for example. But, as Sapolsky put it yesterday, if you're stressed because need to run away from a predator, your body sends energy to your thighs. Great. But if you're stressed because you're a baboon who's trying to form fragile alliances....your body sends energy to your thighs. If you're stressed because you're on a blind date....your body sends energy to your thighs. Not quite so helpful in these contexts. What's more, your body does this with hormones that can negatively impact your stress levels long term.
If you're a low-ranking olive baboon, your situation is especially bleak: your life is super-stressful, since everyone can beat on you, and your body is constantly throwing stress hormones at your brain over things it doesn't need too. This means you're constantly reinforcing your stress response, creating a "learned helplessness" very like human depression. The happiest (and often highest ranking) baboons are the ones that know what actual stress is, minimize their stress at other times, use coping behaviors (apparently grooming is as good as smacking someone else around), and take control of stressful situations.
It seemed particularly appropriate to me that this talk was being given right now. It's an "ancient chinese curse" kind of year, in a lot of ways: we live in interesting times. When people talk about the Great Depression and WWII, they talk about the way these things affected entire generations, and built a sort of shared identity based on responding to hardship. In some ways, I suppose that respoding was empowering, but to me it still sounds a bit like being a low ranking baboon. I think it's fairly likely that things like the recession, climate change, and maybe swine flu might create a shared identity for my generation, and the notion of solidarity is appealing, but I dislike the lack of control that goes with it.
That sort of thing is a lot of the reason I do the sort of research I do. I like the notion that no matter what generation I belonged to, the things I do in my life are interesting, and that's something I took control over. You don't become a primatologist because of things happeneing to you, which fosters a fascinating work environment. I was talking with a fellow primatology grad student and we realized if we were to catch some fatal disease tomorrow, we wouldn't look back and think we hadn't done anything.
People like that make for a great work environment, even if we all probably sat through that talk thinking about how similar to the life of that low ranking baboon things can be sometimes, and maybe have been lately. Either way, at least some of my times are interesting because I wanted them that way.
Friday, April 24, 2009
Dog domestication & traveling the world
Part of why this blog is called "Travels with Darwin" is because Ryan and I are evolutionary biologists. The other part is that we have a dog named Darwin, and we travel most when we're doing stuff related to dog DNA collection.
So how do you actually wind up getting your job to send you to a dozen countries in two months? Apparently, you work for the Village Dog Project. The description of the project is below:
I've collected DNA out of the backs of 4 x 4s, using a centrifuge that plugs into a car lighter, spinning down samples in cabs, at night in the middle of a tiny Namibian village, on 3 hours sleep, for 14 hours a day, translating through two people and four languages, with the assistance of the one ten year old in a village who knows where the dogs hide, while being called a witch because the dogs don't run away from me....
You get the idea. Wouldn't you want to spend your summer doing that?
So how do you actually wind up getting your job to send you to a dozen countries in two months? Apparently, you work for the Village Dog Project. The description of the project is below:
Understanding the evolution and domestication in dogs requires genetic analysis of a global and diverse panel of non-breed-affiliated village dogs. With a network of worldwide and Cornell-affiliated collaborators, we plan to gather dog samples from remote villages, establish a genetic archive containing DNA and phenotypic information from these dogs, carry out genetic analyses on these samples, and develop computational methods for analyzing this dataset. In particular, we are interested in understanding the location, timing, and demographic conditions underlying domestication; the genetic changes involved in the transition of wolf to dog; the relationship between these village dogs and the breed dogs; and the effect that historical forces have shaped village dog diversity.How we wound up with this gig is a story for another time. Basically, there just are remarkably few people willing to travel through every part of the third world at the fastest rate possible, collecting dog DNA and permits for dog DNA under the most bizarre conditions you can imagine.
I've collected DNA out of the backs of 4 x 4s, using a centrifuge that plugs into a car lighter, spinning down samples in cabs, at night in the middle of a tiny Namibian village, on 3 hours sleep, for 14 hours a day, translating through two people and four languages, with the assistance of the one ten year old in a village who knows where the dogs hide, while being called a witch because the dogs don't run away from me....
You get the idea. Wouldn't you want to spend your summer doing that?
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