Camping!

We spent a nice long weekend camping with some of Rew's family in Pennsylvania's Locust Lake state park. We hadn't seen our niece Brenna in almost a year, and she grew some! We went for a nice "hike", canoed, and played on the beach. All in all, a relaxing weekend and a good chance to play catchup. Oh, and it turns out that sleeping on the ground at 31 weeks isn't that comfortable, in case there was any doubt on this subject.
Here's a silly Brenna playing in our tent. It's apparently a blast to jump up and flop on your bum, but I didn't give it a try myself.

Rew's brother Matt and Brenna

Not a good shot of me, but one of the few that shows the current belly proportions. That's Rew's dad behind me.

Canoes are more interesting than rowboats, according to the 2 and under demographic.

Here's Brenna giving Uncle Rew a rinsing. Actually, "Rew" comes out as "Eeew", much to the amusement of all involved. I'm Aunt Dardar. Works for us!

Go Cards!

Baby's first MLB game! We went to see our Cardinals play the hated Cubs last night at Wrigley. Rew spontaneously bought tix on Saturday. We lost, but we had a great time anyway. Hotdogs and Dove bars (TOTALLY on my pregnancy diet, really). Wrigley is a cool park. Very early 20th century!

Me buying a program so I could keep score.

Pre-game batting practice for the Cardinals. This was fun to watch.

Baby belly in the requisite 2006 World Champions T-shirt, which turned out to be totally inappropriate for the weather that evening (chilly!).

Speaking of adventures...

So. We had an interesting past couple of days. We ended up making a trip to the hospital early Tuesday morning with one of us experiencing sharp pains in the back and vomiting. That would be me. Rew made me go after dutifully looking up in one of the books that vomiting accompanied by pain should be looked at ASAP. We were concerned that our little dude was attempting an early debut (which would NOT be cool). After several bouts of extreme pain, anti-contraction medication, more vomiting, and extensive ultrasounding, it was determined that kidney stones were likely at fault. So all's well. Baby couldn't care less, in fact he yawned at us during the ultrasound (too funny). Wouldn't recommend this particular type of adventure if you can help it.

My hero

Howdy all. We're back from our western adventures, and in one piece. Two weeks of field work and we're more than happy to be home. The trip was great, and we got a lot done. Well, to be more clear, Rew got a lot done. He did most of the sampling for me, as it was pretty difficult for me to bend and squat by the springs as is necessary for sampling at this point. In essence, I would never have been able to get this done on my own so he's a real hero in my book. Also, I think it's only appropriate to consider him an honorary Geobiologist after this experience! Here are a few pix of our misadventures in wonderland. We were out sampling for 8/11 field days. The other days were rest days (we managed to see Dark Knight in Bozeman, totally worth it).

Rew, taking a bit of a snack break out at one of our locations in the Lower Geyser Basin. You can see some of the analytical mayhem in the background (mostly water chemistry in action).

Here's Rew showing one of the sampling locations after taking measurements of pH, Temp, and GPS. Looks inviting? It's near boiling and would make short work of anyone temped to dip.

Not sure what I'm doing here. Typically I spent my time recording all the things Rew was doing for me in my field book...I needed to feel like I was working on *something*.

Here's a really bizarre hot spring that we trekked to this year. I've seen a lot of springs, and this is the first one like this I've run into (not literally). It's called Tomato Soup Pool. Wonder why.

Here's a shot of the two of us sampling together. I'd been incubating some glass slides in this outflow channel to try to encourage microbial growth. We're taking them out and placing them in a preservative here.

Cool shot of a photosynthetic microbial mat typical of those found in the geyser basins. I don't really work with these organisms, but they make for a pretty picture! The whole field of view is probably 10ft wide.

Gratuitous animal shot. These elk were hanging out near one of our trails. They were totally unconcerned by us, even though they had a couple of babies with them.