Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Cotton harvest

Rita did not even come close to detroying us. It veered to the east on the last day and destroyed Beaumont and Port Arthur. But, now it is raining and my cotton is half picked and still in the field.

The problem is that with every rain the bolls hang lower and lower and then the cotton falls out onto the ground. The seeds absorb the moisture in the wet lint and then germinate. The little cotyledons in the boll die as soon as the sun dries everything out. The seeds die and the husks of seed coats get pulled through the gin and into the lint that I have to send in for testing. The fiber also gets weaker and weaker with rain and sun as well as accumulating dirt and trash from the wind and rain. All and all, not so good.

But, what can I do? I can't change the weather. If anyone knows how, please let me know, although with my luck it would have side effects and cause tornados instead of raining. Or worse stay insanely hot. Can you believe that it was over a 100 degrees just over a week ago?

We have a new student here in the lab, Stella from Greece. She is very nice. She is just discovering how difficult it is working here where no one is checking up on you or helping you to design good experiments.

I haven't written about Sheng Mei yet either. In part because this is a shared computer that I use and my blog is often up. I will change the settings so that a login is required after screen saver so that I can write about her. she is a different sort of person. To get to know her very well, one simply has to go to catforum, a sad site dedicated to people devoted entirely to cats. She posts on it 10-15 times a day and tells all the mundane, but strange parts of her life.

All I am going to say is that she tastes the cat food before she will give it to her 5 cats. So they only eat cat food that tastes good?

Anyway. I should not gossip.

Who knows. Maybe cat food is good. I should ask my little brother. We dared him to eat it when we were kids and he did. Maybe he liked it.

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