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ilex  ·  1674 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: August 28, 2019

Chickens

Annie has a little bit of bumblefoot, so every couple days she comes inside for a bit so we can change her bandages. As far as she's concerned, she comes inside for a bit to get extra snacks and attention. She can't see well, so new things and places are even more scary for her than for the average chicken, but she feels safe and loved snuggled up against me.

(she gives very good hugs with her body pushed up against me as firmly as she can!)

Research

I met up with a new student who's working on a project that I'm interested in. I'd talked with her advisor about it before, but haven't had much time to actually do any work. We're planning to meet up and study together, which I'm looking forward to -- it has been a while since I've had other students working on the same thing I am.

The financial aid office, which manages the fellowship I'm funded through right now, is threatening to cut off my funding if I don't take "corrective action" to fix the problem that I have taken "too many" credit hours. Most of those credits are research credits I've taken just to meet the "enrolled full-time" requirement to get funding in the first place; 80% of their purpose is just bookkeeping for the university. I've got a year or so before I hit their hard limit and my funding disappears, so hopefully I'm outta here by then. Dammit, I just want to do research and write papers and help the newer students as much as I can and not worry about whether the university deems me worthy of $16k/yr, is that too much to ask?

Climate Change

kleinbl00's post yesterday got me thinking about the future and, in particular, the uncertainty of climate change. We've had a cool summer here and the fresh produce has suffered for it. I have some red pepper plants that just now are starting to make fruit, and it seems like this sort of thing is just going to be more commonplace in the years to come. Am I going to be able to retire? Will the bit I've saved now actually add up to enough, or are the markets going to become more unpredictable too?

Last night I finished The Dispossessed. At the end, LeGuin reveals that on that universe's Earth, humans never got their shit together and were almost eradicated by climate change. And, fuck, that book was written in 1974, and here 45 years later we're getting ready to do the same fucking thing and even so we're still arguing about whether or not it's happening, or whether or not we should bother talking about it.