Ain't Shootin' This

I celebrated Earth Day today by taking a desperately needed time-out from working on my landscape ecology term project and get some practice identifying various plants for my plant quiz in my ecosystems of Florida class. As I drove into Gator Bowmen, there was a good-sized tortoise in the road. Instinct #1: stand back and take a good shot at it to test my skill #2: go pick it up and look at it closely #3: wait for it cross. I decided against shooting it because I had the Equalizer and it would take me far too long to draw, anchor, aim, and fire with my back-tension release. I caught the tortoise closely and looked at it how it was assembled. It's really neat seeing how it's constructed and how a turtle is actually a single piece unlike a lot of these shell-fish. There's something inherently fascinating about the critters in the order Squamata and how they're assembled. I was expecting more serious armor on the tortoise's legs when I was checking it out, but it was nice and soft, very much like those alligators I handled. Reptiles are fascinating!

The Liquidambar trees at the range are also fascinating. I like the smell of mango when I bruise the Acer-like leaves. I still need to work on identifying the individual Quercus species. My gut instinct tells me that most of the Quercus are hemispherica, virginiana, and possibly either nigra or glabra. I really like Quercus virginiana. There's also plenty of Prunus caroliana, which has an interesting almond-like smell when I bruise the leaves. Oh, Carya glabra is also fun to work with. One of these days, I'm going to have to learn how to cook Carya glabra nuts.

Xi Sigma Pi Plaque

Here's a picture of my plaque for Xi Sigma Pi. On the front is the crest, which is a fir tree on top of the crescent moon. The fir tree is symbolic of energy and youth, while the moon is symbolic of the goddess Pallas Athena. The back has signatures of active Xi Sigma Pi members. I'm proud to have this either on my desk or wall!

XSP, Pi Chapter

I don't know how on earth I find myself in these places, but here I am. And here's why I need to keep my caloric intake as low as possible without running into any metabolism issues and stay as active as my classes will let me. It didn't help that the darned laundry machine also shrank my jeans.

The Ranger in me is more than a bit flustered at not being able to take more than 40-50 shots a day, if I'm lucky enough to get that many. I'm getting more like 20-30, which is woefully inadequate to even maintain my skills, but education trumps all even if I have to give up everything else I have in this world for it.

No Calming Down -- Yet Another Nightmare From Hell

I attempted to force myself to sleep a lot earlier so I can not only be up in time for my early morning modelling class, but also be alert throughout the day without the use of coffee (80-100 extra calories from what I add to keep the acid in my stomach from making me miserable) because I'll be stuck in meetings. And then it began.

I was writing up some findings on a coupled artificial neural network-based model for evapotranspiration and carbon fluxes for loblolly and longleaf pine forests. I was already growing restless, having worked 16-18 hour days on this project for several weeks, even months, at a time to stay ahead of my competitors and to keep up with deadlines. And one day, I heeded the call deep inside of me to breathe fresh air once more. I was gone for perhaps an hour just to make sure I didn't lose my feet to gangrene and then I received notification that because I took a break when nobody else did, I lost all of my fellowships and grants. I was also banished from the program and stripped of all my dignity and forced to work in trades that involved nurturing humans in the hell-hole of the city with not even a chance of return to academia or even time in the wilderness. Had I lasted another ten years without a single break, I would have been allowed to return to the wild to hunt again and to be with my own kind -- archers, hunters, wilderness-folk, nerds. But unfortunately I failed by taking a break and not allowing my research to be the only priority in my life. Thus there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth as I was stripped of the only thing I had left -- my research, all for a want of a bit of time to clear my mind.

My heart is still racing, I'm running a fever, everything hurts, and I feel really weak, kinda like after donating blood after fasting for a day. But I don't care anymore. I need to keep pushing forward. There is no rest anymore and I don't know if I'll ever earn rest again.

Ends Justify the Means?

Perhaps it is time for the Ranger in me to die so I can concentrate on my work fully. After all, the only thing of possible worth from me is my research, nothing else. Nobody will really care if I'm in decent health or if I can consistently shoot a 540/560 in a full field round with 40-50 X's, only that I publish in relevant journals and advance my field. All the Ranger does is distract me.

I love my weapons and I trust the bow far more than I would 99% of humans... but right now it feels as if I have to choose between my dear weapons and my research with the pressure I've been under. It's to the point where every time I even draw my bow or even just stand up to stretch, an image of one (or more) of my professors will appear and tell me to go back to work even if I did work for several hours in a row with only a few toilet breaks and a few cups of tea. Food is worse than ashes to me now and I'm forcing myself to at least eat enough to avoid health problems, even if there's no pleasure in anything besides research and classes anymore. I'm even avoiding most of my friends knowing that they'd take me away from my work, which is the only thing that is of worth anymore. I came here for an education, not for anything else, and even if I give up everything else, I intend to be the best researcher I can be... even if I were to sacrifice the only activities I've allowed myself -- archery and exercise -- and even if it would drastically shorten my life expectancy. There's just nothing really left as far as meaning in life anymore except for developing novel approaches to modelling ecosystem fluxes to better understand the processes that drive and control them. I just can't bring myself to do anything else anymore without that horrible feeling of guilt of being a lazy bum. Not even in sleep I can get any rest -- I wake up at least 3-4x a night thinking about my projects (or get woken up by the person sitting next to me in seminar), no dreams of the hunt in the wild, only Python code, remote sensing images, and eddy flux tower data.

Vicious Cycle

I need to tell myself that there's nothing else that's worth caring about besides my research and classes anymore. I want to shoot and roam outside but as soon as I step out, the call to my work is so strong that I return to my work. Anything I do besides my work and I feel an intense pain in my conscience that I'm doing the wrong thing, that if I don't return to work, then I will fail in what I set out to do and will be replaced by someone more efficient. Yet when I try to focus on my work, my body and heart keep nagging at me with that need to train. It is a vicious cycle and I can't even leave my research without feeling that overwhelming urgency that can only be relieved by returning to work without doing anything else. Food is like ashes to me and people have become odious pests. I look like a blimp with extremities. I don't know if even the Ranger is strong enough to break from this.

I'm going to see if I can at least attempt to get some work done, even if the Python code no longer makes sense and my proposals are little more than characters on a screen.

Need More Time

I think I might've just barely worked off enough calories (darn that half-a-pinky-sized piece of chocolate I had this afternoon!) to earn that bit of spinach salad for dinner. I'm tired of engulfing my bike seat and barely fitting into some of these desks and being winded after running up and down stairs 7-8 times. It's almost impossible to really eat without doing an energy balance calculation and making sure that my energy inputs and outputs are where they're supposed to be (ie, output > input).

I keep reminding myself that I'm here for my education and to further the field of ecophysiological modelling and nothing else. I shouldn't even be caring about anything else besides my work even if it costs me my health and sanity. But here I am, worried about something as piddly as my physical and mental health, which shouldn't really matter at all if those sacrifices will make me into a really solid researcher. Besides trying to understand evapotranspiration and carbon fluxes at different scales and then taking different modelling approaches, there shouldn't be anything else in my life. Alas there is though. I still have an overpowering urge to roam about, maintain enough physical strength to do field work, and be as good of a bow-hunter (even if it's just dots and foam animals) as possible. For me, now that I've been surrounded by a bunch of social primates who don't understand the concept of the "natural loner" who wants to be as competetive as possible, archery and going out into the wilderness are the only two things that will let me even remotely let me refresh myself if I have to take a break... I need to learn how to go without taking any breaks at all so I can be more efficient. Unfortunately, most human bodies and minds are also hard-wired to need breaks and I'm in the inferior category of people who do need breaks :(

My weapons are my most reliable companions and the people I feel most comfortable around are fellow archers, even if my colleagues are first-rate academically. Don't get me wrong, I'm generally happy here at UF, just that I'm not fond of being around of hyper-social people (the kind who don't understand why someone would happily sequester themselves with academics or archery practice on a Friday/Saturday night) for extended periods of time and I can't stand extended periods of enforced inactivity. Time for me to go back to work, possibly with a couple of shots here and there. I still haven't earned that salad yet but I also need to do some data processing and readings before I can do much of anything else.

What the Frequency, Installation 2 of n

I have a few more "What the Frequencies" on my mind right now that won't quite let me sleep...

1) What the heck happened today (well, Sunday) to make it such that I couldn't go to the store to get some toilet paper and some other random supplies? Did some random holiday hit without me knowing... and is it correlated with all the horrible pastels and coprophilic lagomorphs I've been seeing everywhere?

2) Why all the emphasis on appearances, especially on females when in most cases appearance doesn't really help (and is more likely to hinder) function? I don't know why, maybe it was already from being irate at not being able to get vital supplies and not being able to do much more than a brisk walk without invoking the magic word "ouch", but some creeps in pastel underwears really got under my skin with some rather scathing comments. So what if I'd rather be functionally clad in non-painful colors (grey and camouflage) and looking more like a plumber or a bow-hunter than a slut or a business-sheep? It's one thing if I'm about to interview or presenting at a major symposium and I'm supposed to look professional in a suit, but in my day-to-day functioning? Sheesh!

3) Lack of standardization in clothing/shoe sizes. Need I say more? How the heck is someone supposed to be efficient when something gets worn/destroyed and needs to be replaced if the error function is large enough to overshadow everything else? I thought sizes were supposed to help and at least be within a 90-95% confidence interval instead of being swamped within huge error functions... but maybe I'm wrong! I'd so much rather be able to zero in on exactly what fits based on the data than have to make several iterations and suddenly start feeling like I'm doing a bad bootstrapping on a computer that barely has enough CPU power!

And a pondering... how the heck do I explain to my neighbors upstairs that as much as I respect their privacy, the anti-social grad student downstairs also sleeps every now and then? Is a can of WD-40 at the doorstep appropriate? Or do I just keep a set of earplugs? Or is it time to retaliate by training on my falling-apart target with a loud, poorly-tuned compound bow in the middle of the night with arrows that have been fitted with Bunny-Buster blunts? Or do I just play up the fact to the neighbors upstairs that I'm an aspiring bow-hunter and a former pesticide chemist with experience working with uranium and arsenic...?

I swear... people also like to really bother the natural loner more than the natural social person. Oh well, time for me to get a few more rounds with working on the back-tension release and then off to sleep so I can stay awake in my lab! And I really need to find somewhere I can go jogging without having to worry about all these horrible people that like to harass solitary joggers by their very existence. I already feel like a complete slug and glutton by being short 30 minutes of my training goal (2 hours).

The Ultimate Friday (and Saturday) Night Fun

At the recommendation of my archery coach, I finally got my paws on a really nifty book, Core Archery by Larry Wise. It's a really good outline on how to improve my form and execution and I really like the biomechanical/physics approach that the author (a hard-core archer) takes. The bias is definitely towards compound and Olympic recurve, but a lot of the material, such as the use of back-tension and the core (aka the spine) is also very relevant to traditional archery. Longbow and horsebow are going to be very interesting for me because of the way the shelves are constructed on these bows, if there is a shelf -- I have to cant (tilt) these types of bows to keep the arrow stable while I'm drawing and aiming. As far as trusty little Sorondil-Telcontar goes, I'm at my best when I'm leaning in and canting like a madwoman, but then again, I'm also usually shooting in cramped conditions where I'm lucky if I can even stand up straight! The real emphasis though is on the Equalizer, where I do have a lot more competetive opportunities to keep me sane.

So far, I've been experimenting with my stance and realized that I really need to work on that open stance now that I know I have a strong tendency to drift right. It was also cool realizing that I'm actually supposed to get kick-back -- so apparently the kickback my coach's bow is actually a good thing, even if it looks awful! I really enjoy doing these drills with a video camera to really nail my form down, although there's no substitute for having someone who has their form down like their breathing. That's where my coach comes in when my weekends aren't being hogged by other stuff.

I swear, archery training is far superior to other non-academic things I could be doing on a Friday night. I almost pity the creepy people who'd rather be watching TV or sitting in these hell-holes called clubs and bars. Of course, acdemics does trump everything, but in an ideal world, I would be training at every chance I get! The only things that would make my training even better are the presence of someone who can help me correct my bad habits and being out in the wilderness under a star-lit night. And as I like to tell a lot of my colleagues, "Why even bother with a pesky, annoying human significant other when there's a trusty bow (traditional or compound), the wilderness, and a lot of training to become an even deadlier shot?"

Oh, nearly forgot... food tastes a lot better after jogging / biking / swimming / lifting weights for at least an hour or two! And no training for anything (academics included) in my opinion is complete without intense exercise... if only I could politely but very firmly explain that in easy-to-understand terms to a certain handful of people who think that students are supposed to be sedentary potatoes!

Better Shots of the Equalizer

I took some better pictures today that capture the color of my new string and cable system. I'd much rather be training with my back-tension release or working on my 3-D shooting with Sorondil-Telcontar (Chek-Mate Hunter I T/D recurve) or trying to replace my excess fat with some real muscles than writing a mock proposal on Pinus clausa seed predation. Could be worse, I suppose. At least I don't have to do any horrendous social studies homework that involves reading long, boring books and kissing up to the instructor on those essays from hell. Or I could be stuck reading one of those awful classics that don't have any cool combat or transformation scenes. Anyway, here's some really good pictures of the Bowtech Equalizer.

Cool Things

Thought I'd do a bit of an entry on things I find extremely cool (but not mentioned a lot in my other entries, ie, not archery or raptor-related) after an entry on things that were beyond un-cool. So here goes:

Toilets -- There's just something inherently interesting about these water-filled devices with pipes that bring water in and send water out. Maybe that's why I enjoyed some of the chemical engineering classes I took at Caltech and why I'm so fascinated with fluxes. I like to imagine mass-flow through the pipes and then going into one holding chamber for the reaction to occur and then being extruded into the next holding chamber for the next set of reactions. Now I'm thinking about nifty things like plug-flow reactors, batch reactors, constant-stirring tank reactors, and turbulent flow. And then thoughts of differential equations and steady-states also fill my mind. I also remember an old game, NetHack, where there was one variant where the character could do some cool things with toilets like poisoning their weapons by dipping them into the toilets. But really, toilets make for interesting thought experiments as far as fluid mechanics and differential equations go. And they also make for great analogies for developing any kind of flow model!

Multitools -- I like moving parts. And I like to be prepared for just about anything that may come up. A multitool, like a Gerber or a Leatherman, is something I'll almost never be without. The only times I won't have one on me are on an airplane (for obvious reasons) or when I'm swimming (but it'll be nearby). I always seem to run into a need to repair something and 95% of the time, the multitool will have the right tool in it to take care of it. All I'm missing on them are allen wrenches and pepper spray! Anyone want to try to design one that has those things too?

Mountain bikes -- The ultimate form of transportation for distances of 10 miles or less. I love the breeze in my face and the exercise I get from racing around. They're also very portable and generally comfortable. Only problem is that for some reason, the cops like to harass people on bikes if they're trying to save their own hides from all the aggressive vehicles, especially those darned short yellow buses and monster tanks full of children and being driven by people who I swear have the wits of fermented radishes.

Carnivorous plants -- They're all really cool, but my personal favorite are in the genus Drosera, or sundews. I love watching bugs get caught in the sticky leaves because they mistook the glistening red droplets for the local bug buffet. It's even cooler watching them struggle to get free when they realize that the bug buffet is hard to get out of and then watching them get wrapped up in the leaf and slowly get suffocated and digested until all that's left of the bug is an indigestible, chitinous exoskeleton. I get a serious kick out of waving a fairly large Drosera capensis (Cape sundew) around a cloud of Drosophila (fruit flies) and then watching the plant feast on the little bastards. Dionea (Venus flytrap) is also really cool to watch, although not quite with the same glee as with the Drosera. I like watching some arthropod crawl into these traps and getting munched on. I'd love to see a good-sized carnivorous plant catch something larger than the standard arthropod, like a mouse or something.

There's a lot more cool things, but I'll save them for future posts!

What the Frequency... ???

There's a lot of things that I've been observing of late and make me ask "What the frequency...?" (note: yes, I actually use that word in place of more entertaining words to avoid getting myself into trouble)

1) Impractical female attire. So two of my favorite pairs of field cargo pants (one khaki, one faded army camouflage) got destroyed in a rather embarassing accident and I looked at possible replacements for them for when I'm in the field. I do have a pair of really nice desert camouflage and a really nice pair of hunting pants, but what I miss about the two pants I inadvertently destroyed beyond repair is that even in really hot weather, they still keep me cool. I did a quick search to see if I could find anything and for some reason, all of the female stuff was either ridiculously tight or wouldn't handle the rigors of sand pine scrub and/or saw palmetto underbrush. I never understood why female attire has to be so restrictive on movement and/or exposes my big butt-crack, gut, and anything else I need covered to protect me from bugs and vegetation. And then there's the shoes -- why is it so hard to find a decent pair of shoes that'll let me jog, hike, and keep my full mobility without going to a pricey sporting goods/military surplus store? There's a reason why I almost always get my clothing from the men's department or sporting goods! It's also next to impossible to have good, deep durable pockets in female attire -- I like keeping everything on me when I can't take my backpack with me. I can't ever stomach the thought of carrying a purse -- it's too easy to lose, it attracts far too much attention, and the compartments don't fit my tools very well and personally, I think it's cruel and unusual punishment to have to use one for lack of pockets in clothing. I like my camo-green fanny pack much better, even if it clashes with interview attire. At least I'll be able to catch potential thieves, it'll always stay on me, and it gives me full mobility. And then there's the really atrocious colors, which brings me to the next point...

2) Colors so awful that make me wonder why I didn't just join the military for good clothing. Except for a few random pieces of black and blue denim, why is the majority of female clothing horrendous colors like bright white, pink, and just about every other pastel that makes any red-blooded wilderness geek want to vomit? I like my greys, beiges, navy blues (at least business suits come in this color but I sure as hell can't bike in one of these, much less go outdoors), browns, and various shades of green. I can't stand these darned pastels and flashy reds that plague the female clothing departments. Sometimes I just wish I were color-blind, or at least selectively color-blind so I don't have to feel so sickened at these horrible pastels. Pink is the ultimate throw-up inducing color in the world and the only way you'll catch me in pink is if a piece of red clothing accidentally found its way into my white laundry, which has happened... and only until I can wash the crap out of that accidental dye-job or over-write it by slipping a piece of something that'll neutralize the horrendousness of pink.

There a lot more "What the Frequency" type stuff but I think I'm going to save it for after I finish up my term papers. I also need to keep working on my back-tension shooting and get some exercise so I can shift my dominant weight eigenvalue to something below 1.000, preferably without an imaginary component.