Recently, Jeff and I went camping in Indiana with his family...and his parents' motor home, which makes camping much more bearable for me. A clean shower is a necessity! Anyway, Jeff's sister found this little caterpillar in their tent. I thought he was pretty cool so I did some research to figure out what he was. He'll eventually turn into a tiger swallowtail butterfly like the one in the picture beside him and the eye spot is meant to disguise him as a snake to fend of predators.

Last weekend, we went to Cincinnati with Elizabeth and Bill to see a Red's game, which was alot of fun. I love that they sell skyline cheese coneys at the stadium. We also dragged them to the conservatory because its one of my favorite places in Cincinnati - that's where we took the pictures below. I didn't put them first because Elizabeth didn't seem so thrilled when she asked if they'd turn up on my blog - of course they will!!! This blog is as close as I get to a scrapbook.

After my mom's persnickety little comment about my neglect of the Menniti family in my blog, I must include this last picture (not that I didn't plan to eventually) but at least I know someone looks at my "scrapbook" every once in while. The two unwashed miscreants are my brothers - aren't we a good looking bunch? My dad smoked a ton of meat (literally. We had several beef briskets, several pork tenderloins and like 10 racks of ribs.) and we had a barbecue the Sunday before Memorial Day. I have to give him credit, he's got this meat smoking thing down. The brisket was perfect but his cooking will never compare to my mom's - except maybe in the quantity of food produced per meal.

The honeysuckle was flowering over memorial day when we were home. It grows all over the hill behind our house so the whole neighborhood is perfumed in the evenings. I spent a little time eating the nectar from the flowers, which will always be fun for me - its good to be kid again every once in a while.

I might actually graduate.

I was cleaning out my inbox when I found a link to some pictures from a conference I went to last spring in San Fransisco.....what a great place for a conference. Petia is another graduate student (who also works on MBRs but anaerobic ones). Anyway, why was I cleaning out my inbox? Well, I finished all the writing I've been doing so now I'm back in the lab building MBRs. (Don't worry, I'll post pictures of my toys they're done. I will then expect the requisite ooohhing and aaahhing even if you're not impressed). The first thing that needs to happen is that my work life (desk, computer, lab space) needs cleaned and organized so I may proceed to wreck it again once my reactor run starts. Then its 5 months of long hours spent slaving over reactors before I can graduate. But, it might actually happen. Based on the timeline for phd completion I put in my prelim, I'm right on schedule.