Several people have complained that my blog has not been updated recently, which means that my blog is being read...

Two weeks ago I flew down to Pasadena to see Dan Grin, and to visit Los Angeles for the first time. Los Angeles is not the shithole I had expected; like any huge city, it has a lot of things to do: Dan and I went to the LA County Museum of Art, the La Brea Tarpits (a childhood dream realized), and drove through many of the famous neighborhoods (Hollywood, downtown, etc.) that I had heard of but never seen. I also thought the Caltech campus was very pleasant, and we had a great lunch in Koreatown. Unexpectedly I got to see Ann Marie and also Paul Jhun during my trip; it was great to catch up with both of them. (Dan, Ann Marie, and I went hiking in Topanga Canyon.) Still, that said, I wouldn't want to live in LA; I'll just leave it at that.

Last weekend Jennifer and I went to Davis, to attend an Olympics-opening-ceremony-watching party being held by Chris. We took the Berkeley-Davis shuttle, which at $5.50 one-way is a great deal, and I spent the early afternoon in the Bohart Museum of Entomology on the UC Davis campus. They didn't have any of the moths I was looking for, but the curators handed me a box of unsorted insects caught in a light trap in Papua New Guinea in 1999, and told me I could take it back to Berkeley. I opened the box, which smelled absolutely foul (due to the preservative), and found hundreds of all kinds of insects pressed between layers of felt-like material. There was a 30-cm long stick insect as well (perhaps partly responsible for the stench). Fortunately there are plenty of people at Berkeley who want to take a look through the box, but I told them I would bring the box back when we were through with it. The party itself was fun, the Olympics opening ceremonies seemed like anime, and the next morning after a breakfast of leftover chile, we went birding at the Consumes River Preserve, where we saw plenty of ducks (northern shoveler, bufflehead, American widgeon, northern pintail) as well as some sandhill cranes flying overhead and calling.