SVP 2006

I've survived yet another meeting of the society of vertebrate paleontology; replete with "team Canada dinner," auction, after hours parties and actual scientific lectures. I'll provide more details in an upcoming post, but suffice it for now to say that it was one of the funnest meetings that I've been to and that I am too tired to really go into things now, as the only sleep I've gotten in a while were a few stolen winks on the flight back.

Just My Luck

I am a man of extreme luck; it is always extremely good or extremely bad, but always extreme. Today, Friday the thirteenth, cleche day of bad luck, turned out to be quite misfortunate for me. By way of exposition, it is important to know that I was planning on going on a company camping trip to Sequoia national forest today after work. I have been looking forward to this for over a month. From here it follows that it would be somewhat annoying to find that the socks which I had placed in the dryer the previous night were still damp this morning. Furthermore, because I had so much to get into the car in preperation for the trip, I forgot my watch on the coffee table; bothersome but not infuriating. Once I got to work, it just sucked. It was by far one of the most frustratingly boring seven hours of my life. After said time, I had one keep-worthy fossil compared to usually ten or so in an equivalent span. I've had other jobs (ie Disneyland) where I had to stand around doing nothing for long stretches, and long stretches of fossil hunting in the past that bore no fruit, but in both those cases I could still at least make an effort. If I had tried today to get to the spot where I knew there to be fossils, then in all likelyhood, I would have been reduced to a thin red smear in the dirt. Consiquentially, I just had to stand there, watching giant yellow caterpillars chew through some exceptionally rich fossil beds.
On Fridays, I always leave the site early so that I can drop off my week's worth of fossils at the office in Pasadena before 5pm. So, there I am, on the 210 freeway, just entering the city of Pasadena, when I hear a loud pop and sputter from my engine compartment. After maneuvering through 5 lanes of traffic and limping off the highway, I parked in a residential area and discovered that at least one head gasket has completely blown, the engine coolant has been shot out and so has one of the spark plugs. My car is now good for parts, that is all. AAA wanted $9 per mile to tow my van back to Fullerton, but given that that was close to 40 miles away I opted not to get the tow that evening. So here I am, on the raggedy edge as they say. At least I didn't break down near the camp site (where I am confident that cell phones would be usefull only as an object to throw at someone). My dad also offered to let me take his car up to the forest, but I declined. I need to get the van back to Fullerton this weekend and I need to make up my mind whether I spend the money to get it fixed or get it replaced.

Update

Not much to say here; I just thought that I'd update the blog just for its own sake.
anyway, here are a couple of pictures of the two gems that I've found at work. They are (in case you can't tell) a bird and a crab. The bird is especially rare and only a handfull of articulated specimens have been found from this age. The crab deserves note just because its the only arthropod that I've found in the six months at this site.



















By the way, I'm going to the SVP conference in Ottowa this year but don't have a place to stay since the host hotel was all booked up. If anyone reading this, out there in the blogosphere is going to SVP and has space in their hotel room, please let me know.