What a waste of a day. This has been my first true day off from school and work in a while, and I did nothing but bum around the apartment until 4:00. Really, I didn't leave my apartment until 4:00pm! I have a whole semester of calculus to review and I just sat around and took naps. I know it's not really a big deal, but I just feel so bad after I've wasted a day like this.
Part of the reason I was so tired and out of energy is because I was out catching bugs last night! I went into work with Kory and ran around trying to find bugs. It's turning out to be a lot harder than I thought. It took a few soggy ruined bugs to figure out how much ethyl acetate I needed in the jar, and I'm still not very happy with how I'm doing it now. It takes about 20 minutes to a half an hour for them to stop twitching around, and this is such a pain. Am I supposed to put multiple bugs in one killing jar? I didn't last night because it just seems like it would be a mess, so I would catch one, wait until it was dead, catch another, etc. And moths, ugh. I don't understand how people can catch and pin moths because you can't touch them at all! Any little touch with anything rubs all the scales off their wings. I am not looking forward to collecting them.
This morning I tried to pin the few that I caught, and had no luck. They're either too small to pin or too hard to pin (even though they were in the killing jar all night) or the legs fall off or their antennae are broken. It's really frustrating, especially when you wait a half an hour to kill one and you go to straighten out a leg a bit and it just falls off. Entomology may sound easy, but it's not!
Not to mention how horrible I feel killing them. I wish it would just kill them faster. There was one poor grasshopper in my jar, who I thought was dead already. I made the mistake of putting a moth in with him and it was so sad. The moth was flying around like crazy, running into the grasshopper, who apparently wasn't dead yet. The grasshopper would get turned onto it's back and would twitch it's legs around, but it was no use, he couldn't get up. It was really sad. And then I made the mistake of taking them out of the jar too early. I had set them into a plastic container so I could go catch more, and 15 minutes later they were in the container twitching around like crazy, trying to turn themselves upright. This was terrible because I had to pick the poor things up and put them back into the killing jar (only after I waited 10 minutes for the huge monster bug who was currently in the jar to start dying.)
Well, tomorrow our class is going on a field trip to Jennings Creek where we are supposedly going to learn all the do's and don'ts of collecting bugs. Hopefully I'll learn some things that will make this easier.
On a better note, Kory and I finally bought a scanner/printer today. It's about time, I haven't had one since I moved out of my dad's house. Something is wrong with my old printer, it won't print yellow. We've tried two new cartridges, and just can't get it to work. So it's really nice to have a good printer. I also developed my first two rolls of REAL FILM for the first time in almost a year. Real film! It was quite a surprise to see some of the pictures on them. A few of them were quite old, there's even a picture of Dennis!
