every day I'm learning

[sciatrix]

....today, the learning experience is that coordinating the shipping of twenty-odd singing mice from New York to Texas is a mind-bogglingly complex endeavor, and I am just barely coming out on top of the bureaucracy. But! But! There will be mice I can use for this experiment, ideally by my committee meeting and at least so that I can do a kickass talk for Evolution this year. I'm applying for the SSE Grad Council this year, although the deadline is today--gotta make sure I set some time aside today to do that in amid the flurry of emails.

Also, I'm very carefully dipping my toes into The Body Keeps the Score and gritting my teeth the entire way--more because conceptualizing my life as traumatic in any way feels bad and wrong and self-indulgent and terrifying than because I think that the book itself is problematic. (I'm listening to the text-to-speak function on my phone, which is comforting and a little less scary than reading it for reasons I have no idea how to articulate.)

I'm low on Diamine Meadow right now (review) in my TWSBI stub pen, and I'm really sad about it. I think I need to commit and buy myself a proper bottle of it--this is just the tail end of the 2mL sample I got for my birthday last year.

Comments

[sciatrix]

Alas, it is not: they sing with their heads pointed up to the sky like coyotes, or sitting up on their haunches, and they don't move while singing. So very little in the way of dancing, and they're not super up on talking to strangers either.

Fortunately reality is still pretty cute. (That's a colleague's youtube channel, which has several videos, including one incredibly ridiculous one in which he used a goddamn fog machine to "simulate cloud forests," except he knows full well that the clouds in said cloud forests don't normally swirl as close to the ground as the mice sit.

I tend to refer to that video as MouseZilla.

[notasupervillain]

I'm glad that reality is doing it's best!

I hope you don't have to hurt them in the experiments, that would be hard on you.

[sciatrix]

These are not survival experiments, since I'm taking tissues, but there isn't much that should distress or stress them more than handling: one restraint and injection, and then a few hours of listening to playouts and responding as they like, and then isofluorane anesthesia they won't wake up from.

The thing is, they hate handling. So as far as they're concerned, that's generally the most stressful thing that's happening to them.

[notasupervillain]

What are you testing, if you don't mind telling me?