Hello everyone!

Just in case you were worried, I have NOT in fact dropped off the face of the Earth!  I’ve been gone for two reasons:

1) My hard drive on my computer died.

I haven’t ever actually HAD this experience before, so it took me three weeks to realize why my computer wasn’t working properly.  If it had been a spectacular failure, with my hard drive going out in a blaze of heroic glory, I might have figured it out sooner.  But no, it sort of creaked along for a couple of months, getting slower and more decrepit each day.  I ran through several different attempts to fix the problem based on previous experiences with slow computers before I finally realized that my hard drive was on its way out.

All that was fine and good – I found the problem.  Yay!  However, getting a new hard drive is like getting a whole new computer.  I absolutely HATE getting new computers.  I find installing software and transferring over all my files to be tedious beyond belief.  It is such an unbelievable waste of life for me.  If it wasn’t for the fact that I could no longer view any of my RAW format photos and that was driving me absolutely crazy, I would probably still be finding excuses to avoid installing my software.

So, I installed my software (most of it at least…), but then…

2) I Immediately went on vacation.

I made plans back in February to go to New York and visit my aunt during the good fall leaf time.  We spent a few nights in New York City where we ate some really excellent (but expensive) food and saw some really excellent (but expensive) museums, including the marvelous American Museum of Natural History.  Then we took a train to my aunt’s town in upstate New York.  There I ate in my cousin’s restaurant, visited with his family, went to more museums with my aunt, and generally had a wonderful time.  However, I didn’t have access to a computer most of that time and wanted to make the most of my time with my family, thus the blog silence continued.

I didn’t see too many insects on my trip (though I did find a deer tick crawling on my hand after spending 5 minutes outside looking at leaves one day – seriously, New York?), but I did see some in an art exhibit at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art:

That’s a piece by Johnny Carrera called Icicahiya, a lovely screenprinted installation that was set up to look like sails on a sailboat.  I’ll be perfectly honest: I have no idea what this piece is meant to represent, but my eye was IMMEDIATELY drawn to the print of the giant water bug.  You can see it along the bottom row, between the beetle and the internal combustion engine.  I absolutely loved this piece!  It combines screenprints of black images on white and has an old natural history book/informatic look to it.  Wish I could have something like this in my living room…

Now I’m back home, but I’m leaving again tomorrow afternoon for a work trip to the Smoky Mountains: I’m attending one of my Museum’s educator treks for teachers and informal educators.  These trips are fantastic!  This particular trip is focused on elks and bringing field work into K-12 classrooms and informal education settings and it should be great fun.  We’ll also be learning about the awesome citizen science program at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which is why I want to go.  I am really looking forward to the trip!

And all this is to say I haven’t forgotten about the blog, but there have been extenuating circumstances that have prevented my writing for the past 3 weeks. But, I fully intend to jump right back in next week, just as soon as I get back from my trip to the mountains.  I’ll try to make the post worth the wait!

Hope you’re all doing well and, if you’re from the Northern Hemisphere, enjoying the fall!

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