What's that smell?....oh... it's me

As I was making a futile attempt to clean out the grime from under my fingernails, I realized that my black fingernails were a symbol of my favorite kind of day, a day spent getting completely and utterly filthy :) Here is my recipe for the perfect day: start out with sunscreen (on such a perfect spring day I knew I would spend every last second outside), then add a lot of dirt and sweat from weeding the garden (holy crap where did all these weeds come from all of sudden?), then add gear oil (time to find the source of the leak in the rear axle), and top it all off with some DEET and fish slime (we only caught a couple brim, but it was still a blast). And as a added bonus, tonight is the NASCAR all-star race...what more could a girl want?? :)

Seeds of wisdom

One of my favorite things about gardening is watching my carefully sown seeds start to sprout. It never fails to amaze me how you can stick a tiny dry little seed into the dirt and a week or 2 later there is a beautiful little plant growing in it's place. I understand the science behind it, but for some reason, even after our very successful garden last year, I still feel that I don't really know what I am doing and that there is no way all the seeds I planted will actually sprout. This year, when 90% of the green beans I planted didn't come up, I knew it was my fault for somehow not planting them right and that I was a failure as a farmer. Shawn told me that it was becuase we had so much rain in the week after we planted that some of the seeds may have drowned, but I was skeptical...how come the corn he planted on the same day came up just fine then?? So on Tuesday I decided to swallow my pride and try to replant all the green beans. As I dug up the dirt in the row, I discovered that Shawn had in fact been right, I found many of the seeds I had planted, and they had sprouted and even had some tiny leaves, but they were yellow looking and they had never breached the surface becuase they got stuck under the hard crust of clay that builds up after hard rains, and so they drowned...poor little things. Sad as it was that there was a mass drowning in the garden, I still felt happy becuase I knew that it wasn't directly my fault, it was just the damn weather, again! And I also realized that the reason the corn didn't drown was becuase it had already come up before the several days of downpours came. OK, so maybe I'm not a failure after all... but won't be sure until I see my new set of green beans come up, keep your fingers crossed!

A time for celebration

Even though this week was finals week for me, it was one of the best I've had in a while. To start, my college roommate Emily and her husband Ryan were able to bring home their new baby after many months on the adoption waitlist, I am so thrilled for them both and can't wait to meet Elizabeth Marie when I'm in Maine in June (check out their blog "Brinkley Parker"). I also found out that my sister Sarah got a management job for Aramark that she was hoping for, you rock girl! Shawn has completed his third week in his new planner position at Miller and is exceeding all expectations already (I knew he would), I am so proud of him. :) As for myself, I have successfully completed my first year of the PhD program (who hoo!), and I also have a meeting with the state public health veterinarian and the state pest management director to discuss a collaboration on a potential dissertation project on tick-borne disease in NC (probably Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever) I am so psyched!

Now that the semester is over I am planning to spend most of the summer working in the garden and catching up on some non-epidemiology reading. Any book suggestions would be welcomed! I will also be a TA for an online course for the Field Epi Certificate program, which is really nice since I won't have to commute into Chapel Hill except for maybe once a week. Of course, we'll also continue working on the mud truck over the summer (Shawn installed a new stereo and speakers today, now we can crank up that country music!), the next project is replacing the brakes.

As for the garden, we planted the tomatoes, green beans, peas, corn, cukes, squash and potatoes on Monday, the rest will go in tomorrow (no rain in the forecast, finally!) I also planted a bunch of gladiola bulbs in the front yard, but the bulbs were from Lowe's so I'm not sure if they'll actually come up or not, we'll have to just wait and see....