No, I did not Die over the Summer.
Really. I promise.
I actually wanted to increase my frequency of posting over the summer, but that did not happen either. So here’s a quick update on things and I’ll try to get back in the habit. It’s a good habit, I think venting throughout the summer may have made it easier, I’m not sure why I didn’t write anything.
Early in the summer, I brought back a little canister of pill bugs from Ohio and we set them up in a mini container to make sure they were OK to put into the millipede cage before we actually went and DID it. They bred so quickly, I’m glad we didn’t put them in to start. Somehow one or two made it into the main terrarium though, but there hasn’t been a population explosion from what I can tell. Unfortunately, I disobeyed one of the biggest rules of keeping non-local pets and put a couple dead leaves into the pill bug container without boiling them. Within weeks there was a small mold infestation, and we cleaned it out, sorting the pinhead-sized baby pill bugs carefully. We didn’t do it well enough, however, and there was a serious relapse. We really didn’t anticipate just how serious this problem actually was, and how deep the infestation went until we decided to completely sanitize the container and found one pill bug survivor. ONE. There was no trace that anything lived in that cage except for the single pill bug survivor and the tiny local millipede that obviously had an immunity to the mold.
Other than that, the millipedes are doing just fine. Turns out that Promethea loves zucchini. That was the first thing we put in her cage that she actually ate! Giger has grown another half inch or so, it will be more as his new segments fill out, and he’s getting to be quite robust. I also can’t get a good photo as he runs around on my hands so fast that its ALWAYS blurry…
We also found room mates, which has been a constant stressor this summer, and I got my student loan in order just in time. I never did find a second job, which caused me a bit of stress through the first half, but fortunately due to being overly-frugal this summer and receiving the student loan, I will be in the exact same financial situation entering this year as I was last year, so I feel much better. I could be in a better position, but that’s my own fault.
School starts in about a week. I have mixed feelings about it now… I probably will be doing overtime in the labs as we struggle to get all the machines online in time. The people who did construction ensured that we couldn’t even start on such things until this week, and we’re waiting on Maya licensing before we can image all the shiny new g5’s… and there may be an issue with all the old g5’s slotted to be put in the downshoot room, but we’ll find out next week after I tinker with them a bit more and the boss gets a chance to look.
I am excited to be taking on school-related problems instead of the nonsense from this summer, but I’ve entered one of my nihilistic art-slump type phases RIGHT as I need to be thinking of how I’m going to shape my projects this semester. Almost all my classes will have almost pure freedom of subject matter, so if I can’t whip myself in shape in about a week or two, to put it mildly… I’m fucked.
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