with fifteen dollars today, i bought: two packages of annie's mac and cheese, a bag of pasta shells, a can of olives, a jar of pickles, a box each of raisins, triscuits, cheez-its, and rice-a-roni, a half-gallon of soymilk, a pound of tofu, two cups of yogurt, and two yellow peppers. my two favorite things in the world right now are the discount bin at the natural foods store, and the discount grocery store, where slightly-crushed boxes of annie's are 85 cents a piece. the other thing i love is having a friend who works at a plant nursury and smuggles me out plants to put in my apartment. and the other thing i love is rainclouds. and one more is my classes, which are incredibly lots of work and information already, but in a good way.
yesterday i learned 25 species of local or common trees and shrubs in the pinion-juniper and ponderosa zones (also known as the upper sonoran and transition zones) that i didn't know on wednesday, as well as how to identify them on the basis of a dichotomous key (based primarily on leaf structure (evergreen/deciduous, simple/complex, opposite/alternate) and secondarily on fruit type and dispersal method). we also covered the evolution and phisiology of angiosperm (sepal, petal, pistil, stamen; calyx, corolla, gynoecium, androecium), population dispersal as related to merriam's life-zone concept as related to island biogeography and demes, the biochemical process of photosynthesis (6CO2 plus 6H20 to create glucose (C6H12O6) and 6O2), energy transduction versus transference (via convection, conduction, or radiation), and the ratio of biomass productivity to precipitation. i'm going to be quizzed on all of this on tuesday, though mostly on plant identification. and then there's biology, in which i'm giving a presentation on nucleic acids (as pertinent to DNA, RNA, and ATP) on monday, and for which I'm writing my first research paper (on the effect of false sugars (saccharides, aspartame, etc) on the body as opposed to actual sugars (sucrose, fructose, etc)) next week. the professor from the fiction class i dropped called to tell me that if i fill out the right forms, i can take an extra class, and that she'd really like me to consider rejoining them. i only laughed because if you'd told me last year that i'd be turning down a fiction writing class to take 30 hours of science a week, i'd have laughed then, too.
yesterday i learned 25 species of local or common trees and shrubs in the pinion-juniper and ponderosa zones (also known as the upper sonoran and transition zones) that i didn't know on wednesday, as well as how to identify them on the basis of a dichotomous key (based primarily on leaf structure (evergreen/deciduous, simple/complex, opposite/alternate) and secondarily on fruit type and dispersal method). we also covered the evolution and phisiology of angiosperm (sepal, petal, pistil, stamen; calyx, corolla, gynoecium, androecium), population dispersal as related to merriam's life-zone concept as related to island biogeography and demes, the biochemical process of photosynthesis (6CO2 plus 6H20 to create glucose (C6H12O6) and 6O2), energy transduction versus transference (via convection, conduction, or radiation), and the ratio of biomass productivity to precipitation. i'm going to be quizzed on all of this on tuesday, though mostly on plant identification. and then there's biology, in which i'm giving a presentation on nucleic acids (as pertinent to DNA, RNA, and ATP) on monday, and for which I'm writing my first research paper (on the effect of false sugars (saccharides, aspartame, etc) on the body as opposed to actual sugars (sucrose, fructose, etc)) next week. the professor from the fiction class i dropped called to tell me that if i fill out the right forms, i can take an extra class, and that she'd really like me to consider rejoining them. i only laughed because if you'd told me last year that i'd be turning down a fiction writing class to take 30 hours of science a week, i'd have laughed then, too.
