A word on time...

...and how I don't have any of it! School is in full swing and I still haven't settled in, despite the fact that I've been here for three weeks. There are still a few boxes and bags on my floor to be unpacked, and I have yet to step foot in the gym since I moved back in (I usually go for at least an hour each night). On top of being a full-time biology major taking time-intensive courses, I am also the president of GreenFire (our highly-active campus environmental club) and a member of the animal welfare club (we volunteer at local animal shelters, make collections for them, etc.). Oh, and I have three jobs where I've been working over 15 hours a week. It's tough, but at minimum wage it takes a lot to make anything.

The good news is that I got my camera back from Canon and it has been fully repaired for free, so now I can get to work on my gear reviews (in all my free time!). I've also gotten my AZ photos uploaded to my photobucket account, so I'm ready to start working on my big trip posts. It will be a long process, but I'm excited to share my adventures and photos! In the meantime, I hope to get up some of my favourite fall photos, for those of you who may not get to experience it as grandly as we do here in the midwest.

Yes indeed, fall is upon us here in Wisconsin! The trees are alive with yellows and oranges, the bushes are turning red, the days are shortening, and the squirrels are going nuts for nuts. Literally! There is a huge walnut tree by my second-story bedroom window, and the grey squirrels (photo of one below) have been in it constantly, plucking the big green fruits and peeling the outer coverings off so they can stash the inner nut. They knock down three times as many as they manage to grab, so my afternoons are filled with the constant dull thuds of the fruits hitting the ground thirty feet below. I have to be careful when I do homework in the yard now, with the constant threat of walnut-asteroids. A few branches hang over the roof, so you can imagine how it sounds when they shake the fruits loose up there! You'd swear someone was pelting the house with baseballs. Lately I've been seeing a tiny little red squirrel among the fallen fruits, flitting around in the crazy paranoid manner that is typical of his species. I had thought he was perhaps a passer-by, but I heard him chattering his defensive calls this afternoon in a nearby tree, so he's obviously staked some territory in the neighbourhood. This makes me quite happy, because red squirrels are a rare treat in this area and I will enjoy his plucky presence this winter.

I must now get back to work on my developmental biology homework, but I will leave you with a random cool tidbit from this morning's reading: animal embryos first develop their hands and feet with webbing between the digits, sort of like paddles or flippers. A set of genes later turn on and tell the tissues between the digits to die. In animals that retain their webbed feet (like ducks, for instance), another gene represses the genes that tell the interdigital tissue to die, so the webbing remains. How cool is that!?

Brit