Delicious meal of the day: roast rabbit with coffee-chipotle rub (plus the usual roasting goods of potatoes, carrots, and garlic cloves). I really think rabbit is one of the best meats available. Thanks, Pele!

I have just returned from a 4-day trip to the SE Partners in Flight conference, where recent research on birds is presented every year. This year it was held in Raleigh, NC, included some excellent talks, and a poster session which took place at the NC Museum of Natural Science. My favorite quotation, from a presentation on controlling feral cats: "Cats are very popular. In fact, 87% of the internet consists of cats*. The rest is porn."

We also got to see NC State University's research forest, a restored prairie owned by the museum, and watch a displaying male woodcock on one very chilly evening, after which we retreated to Dos Taquitos, which is hands down one of the best Mexican restaurants I have ever been to. If you ever get the opportunity to try Chiles en Nogada, do it. Roast poblano, stuffed with shredded pork, apples, currants, and who knows what else, topped with a walnut cream sauce and pomegranate seeds. It's a traditional Mexican Independence Day dish due to its lovely green, white, and red colors, and is oh so amazingly good.

I talk about food a lot, don't I?

*Link not part of the original talk. But it proves his point.

Oh man, I have posted too many times today. This is nuts.

First off, don't forget about the SOPA thing. That is incredibly important. Go do that.

Secondly, for those who do not have tinylongwing friended, go see my latest entry there if you want to read about Pele, a passage Cooper's hawk.

Finally, a little update on my life! Yesterday I had a meeting with the guy at Arkansas Game and Fish who is getting me funding for my MS project, now starting sometime in the spring. So that's still coming along, we're just waiting for the funding to make its way through the state government and on to us. It's a much slower process than it was supposed to be, but that's bureaucracy and science funding in the current political climate, unfortunately. It'll come through eventually.

More immediately exciting is that I am volunteering to help out with the project of another student in my graduate lab. Her project is focusing on optimal foraging of red-tailed hawks and American kestrels here in agricultural fields around Jonesboro. (Why is this not my project, you ask? Because I chose the one that had funding attached. Hawks are cool, but getting paid to go to grad school is even cooler.) What this means for us right now is that we have to go out and trap and band a bunch of redtails and kestrels, which is good fun.

( Pics below )

Napoleon caught a shrew at the OFA winter falconry meet! To have a bird catch anything at a meet at all is awesome, because it almost always involves flying in a new place with people they don't know, but he did all that and more. And I am exhausted and there is no need to be redundant, so I will link you to zolac_no_miko's recap of today's events, because she did an excellent job of summarizing everything.

But man, was that an awesome, awesome day. I couldn't be happier with my tiny little predator. D'aww.

Just put a couple recent (as in, from today) photos of Napoleon up over at my kestrel journal, should anyone not following it want to see them anyway.

Meet Napoleon. As always, most falconry stuff will get posted to tinylongwing only, with the exception of exciting announcements. Such as this one. :)

Oh hey guys, let me tell you about my awesome evening spent perusing this site, an archive of mathematical fiction that is available for free on the internet (they also list a lot of non-free fiction, but free is awesome, as we all know). Much of it is SF, unsurprisingly, which is fantastic. So if you want to get some hardcore nerdage on, this site has literally over a century of stuff available, from Mary Shelley to Lovecraft to Heinlein to Doctorow. So awesome.

Also, I have received news that the first Eurasian kestrel x merlin hybrid ever produced has hatched and is a healthy adorable chick. :) Exciting!

Stolen from zolac_no_miko:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4 sentences on your LJ along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.

"Shortly after that we orbited at Sanctuary. I was glad to be there, as the ship's internal pseudo-gravity field had been off for most of two days before that, while the Chief Engineer tinkered with it, leaving us in free fall - which I hate. I'll never be a real spaceman. Dirt underfoot felt good."

Starship Troopers, Robert Heinlein. So very full of excellent, but then we all know I have a Heinlein obsession.

... Yeah, that's all I've got for you. I took pictures of Penny today but haven't uploaded them yet. Perhaps tomorrow. She did some very impressive hovering, though. If I'd known she'd keep it up as long as she did, I would have taken a video.

Also, what is with Canadians grabbing/bumping our speed skaters tonight? My goodness.

As of today I am officially hired for summer, woohoo! Enough of this crappy "job" at Dick's that hasn't given me hours in six weeks (I've been working at my dad's place in the meantime again). Come mid- to late-April sometime, exact date TBA, I'll be leaving for San Francisco for a quick MAPS training session, which will largely be review as I worked for them last summer as many of you will recall, and then April 28th-ish I'll be off to Saipan! I'll admit to my ignorance here; before applying for this job, I didn't know the US held the Northern Marianas Islands as a commonwealth. I knew we had the Marshall Islands, and Guam, of course, but directly north of Guam is a volcanic island chain that apparently belongs to us as well, which we claimed from Japan in WWII or something. So I'll be over there all summer long, banding birds, enjoying a culture totally different from good ol' Cascadia, and lounging about on the beach eating coconuts and papayas. When I return depends on if I get in to Boise State or not - if I do, I'll be back in September sometime, otherwise I'm going to stay as long as I can, which probably will just mean mid-October.

There is no cell phone coverage on the island, which means that while I'll have a landline phone number, anyone who calls that number from a cell phone will be charged as if you were dialing an international number. But have no fear, you should all be able to contact me easily enough via the internet, as the house we'll be staying in has wireless. Handy! And this means I don't have to take the usual extended RP hiatus I was fearing. It also means I won't have to wait until returning to the mainland to watch the new season of RvB! These are both very good things.

I'll do my usual temporary address post when I get it, in case anyone wants to send me anything. Which I encourage you to do, just for fun, if you feel like it. It'll take about 5 days for anything to get to Saipan, but hey, you don't have to pay international postage! So that's convenient.

I will, of course, have to release Penny before I go. Sad, but I'd planned on that happening anyway, as if I wasn't going to Saipan, I'd be going somewhere else. Hopefully she'll find a mate and have lots of adorable squeaky fluff-headed babies. ;D I'll just have to catch another when I get back.

Okay so for those of you who I told the date of the winter OFA meet to, it has changed - it is now Sunday, January 31st. Not the 30th. Exact location TBA, but it will be somewhere around Corvallis. It is a one-day meet, so Melissa, as I said, no worries about housing unless we want to turn it into an event of sorts, if we want to do stuff around the Corvallis area on Saturday or Monday I suppose.

To everyone else: Happy New Year!

EDIT: I FINISHED CHURCH'S PROFILE PAGE. Well for the most part. I want to add a picture still. BUT. That was a lot of typing. Now I just have to tune up Shadow's a bit and I'll be set.

As a note to prospective Aphelion players - no you do not have to write a history anywhere near as long as I have. Also, lines like Hometown/Likes/Dislikes were added just for fun and are not required.

You know what's really unfair? shinyget is out hawking right now and I'm not.

I know, right.

BUT. To make up for that, I'm going to finally put up some of my photos from OFA's fall meet, like, a month ago.

( Aren't they pretty? )