When I checked the thermometer on the back porch this afternoon, it read 50°F! Everywhere on the roads, there were puddles, rivulets, slushy snow.

The current forecast is for a Sunday overnight temperature of 6°F, however, so it isn't suddenly spring.

This winter I have been noticing that my cuticles are in rough shape. Almost on cue, NPR wrote a story about nail health, with tips for improvement, including information about cuticle management. I don't know about you, but I hadn't realized that fingernails are more water-permeable than skin! The article helped me to appreciate that I probably need to do even more to keep my nails and cuticles moisturized as compared to what I've been doing to keep my hands moisturized in general. So far the general skin on my hands has been in better shape this winter compared to previous winters because I've been more consistent about applying lotion, but as I noted, that hasn't seemed to help my cuticles.

So I found a recipe for homemade cuticle oil this week and mixed up a batch this afternoon, and now hopefully that will help. My DIY blend includes sweet almond oil, jojoba oil, sunflower oil, some Vitamin E, and a small bit of lemon verbena for scent. Most of the ingredients I already had lying around from the days when I used to make my own lotion; I gave up on that lotion-making a year or two ago after finally finding premade lotions I actually like.

Meanwhile, Saturday morning was devoted to rowing. We had a pretty intense workout that involved crab walks and squats and pushups and other things, done with a teammate in a relay that included a series of 6-7 500m pieces. After the rowing, I went over to the boathouse to work on the latest of the neverending boathouse projects.

First, satisfyingly, the plaques that I glued magnets onto stuck to the boat shed's support beams successfully:


This is really good because it means I can now figure out how many more rare earth magnets I'm going to need, and finish that darn project for once and for all! I had tried testing the strength of the magnets by putting the plaques onto my refrigerator, but they didn't stick to the fridge very well even after I added on a ton of magnets. So it was good to learn that it takes fewer magnets to get the plaques to stay attached to the thicker steel of the boathouse beams.

It's also time to start reassembling what we call the "bubble dock." We took it completely apart last fall so as to be able to reassemble it to spell something out, instead of having it consist of a random mosaic of black and gray pieces. Let's see if you can figure out what it now spells:






We use this as something of an auxiliary dock to our main dock, but it takes on a particularly important role in the early spring before we get our main dock put out. This is really just the first part of reassembling it, but it's an important part because each piece is supposed to line up with its neighbors in a specific order for everything to go together correctly. Next, we'll put in the connecting pins to lock the pieces together. But it's probably best to wait until the snow under the pieces finishes melting before we try that step.

And it's going to be a couple more weeks before we actually put it out on the river.




This has been a long winter, and it definitely isn't over yet.

Today was the day before spring "break," wherein I administered the first of two midterm exams. Students reported they had a lot of exams this week, which we all agreed was not ideal but better than trying to have an exam immediately after spring break.

Since my afternoon office hours were very quiet, I was able to spend a good part of the afternoon working on data entry for a project that two of my current three research students are working on. We are looking at what happens to worker ant body sizes as leafcutter colonies get older and larger, comparing colonies headed up by two queens to colonies headed up by groups of six queens. Since starting those colonies back in the summer of 2024, students and I have periodically gone through and collected out the colonies' trash piles, which contain all of the dead workers - a noninvasive way to examine adult ant body sizes.

Cataloguing what has been done with the colonies since their establishment led me to realize we'd overlooked a set of samples that could be particularly informative to include. So although I was quite tired, in the last 30 minutes of the day, I finally located the samples and started to get them ready for measurements.

It is much more fun and rewarding to apply ant heads to a piece of double-sided sticky tape for the purpose of measuring how big they are than it is to grade exams, so most likely that's what I'll work on for the first part of the day on Monday.