08:00 – With three weeks until deadline, I’m in the home stretch on the biology book now. I’ve allocated the rest of this week to finishing up two lab sessions that are now in progress, one the vertebrate survey and the other about the life cycle (cell division/mitosis). Once those are complete, I’ll spend a few days doing a quick run-through of all the lab session chapters, cleaning them up and making them consistent before I send them off to reviewers. Then I’ll finish up the Preface and Introduction chapters and start incorporating comments from the editors.
Someone on the Well-Trained Minds forums posted a query yesterday about scanning her old color negatives to produce digital image files. She’d found the Epson Perfection V300 Photo Scanner on Amazon.com for $80 and asked if that would do what she needed. My old Epson 3450 scanner died some time ago, and I’ve had replacing it on my to-do list since then. I checked and found that the V300 is Linux-compatible, so I replied and told her that I’d just ordered one and if she wanted to hold off for a while I’d test it by scanning some of our old color negatives and let her know how it worked.
Barbara is mad at me because of my reaction to a story in the newspaper this morning. Apparently, she was talking about it with her friends at work yesterday. Some woman couldn’t find her dog, so she went and looked in her neighbor’s window–which I’m sure is what any of us would do if we couldn’t find our dogs–and saw him having sex with the dog. They got a DNA sample from the dog, which they had a vet analyze. The DNA matched, so they arrested the guy. When Barbara told me what had happened, I started to laugh. She was not amused. “This isn’t funny!”, she said. “It’s disgusting.” The more I laughed, the more trouble I was in. Must be a girl thing.