My dance card is officially full

I’ve squeezed one more talk into my fall schedule, but that’s it — if you want me to come talk to your university or organization, it’ll have to be in January or later — I’m not accepting any more invitations. Here’s my complete and final long distance travel schedule for the next few months.

Friday, 12-14 Sep: Denver, CO
Friday, 19-21 Sep: Madison, WI
Thursday, 25-28 Sep: Long Beach, CA
Friday, 10-12 October: Springfield, MO
Friday, 31 Oct-2 Nov: Toronto, ON
Thursday, 13-15 Nov: Kearney, NE
Wednesday, 19-22 Nov: Philadelphia, PA
early December: Central Florida (pending)

I do have a few engagements set up for the spring already, and it’s filling up fast, too.

PZ & Greg’s Excellent Party…update

We have a date and time — Thursday, 18 September at 7pm. We have a rough location — somewhere in the Minneapolis/St Paul area. And most importantly, we have the will to party to celebrate the one millionth comment on scienceblogs.

We also have an excess of specific venue suggestions. Now we could do a gigantic pub crawl, but that would be unseemly…besides, that’s already scheduled for 18 October, when it’s time for the Zombie Pub Crawl 4: Spawn of Death. But I digress. We need you to vote to narrow down the choices. Greg has the list, read it and vote! It’s going to be the very best geek event in Minneapolis ever, at least until ZPC4:SoD.

The insanity begins

The first day of classes is on Wednesday.

<insert long despairing wail here>

I have to get ready now, so life is going to be a bit frantic for a few days. This term I’ll be teaching Developmental Biology, a fun class and not a problem right now, and I’ll also be teaching our intro course, Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development. That’s going to be a bit more work; it was taught for the first time last year, and it still needs some fine-tuning.

Then, just because my semester isn’t crazy enough, there are travel plans. I’m losing a lot of weekends this term. Here’s the rough schedule for the year, which will probably expand as time goes by:

7 September: Minneapolis, Minnesota
12 September: Denver, Colorado
19 September: Madison, Wisconsin
25 September: Long Beach, California
31 October: Toronto, Ontario
13 November: Kearney, Nebraska
20 November: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
30 January: Edmonton, Alberta
mid-February: Greencastle, Indiana (tentative)
22 April: Ashland, Oregon

If I’m not in your area sometime, don’t fault me, I’m trying. Now, where are all the invitations to speak in Australia and Hawaii? Why isn’t the deep South asking me to come on down?

Our baby is gone!

We just moved the last of Skatje’s stuff out of our house and into her dorm room. No more kids at home! We’ve come full circle now to 1983, back when we were a couple living in a studio apartment, living on Mac&Cheez and free government cheese food, scraping by on minimal grad student stipends. Now we’re in a big old empty house that we got because it was a perfect family home, but otherwise, we’re still getting by on the cheap, since we still have two kids off at college.

Oh, and we’re also left holding the bag on two cats.

In case you were wondering…

I’m still yucky icky sick and oozing slime and fluids like a mollusc, but I did go see the doctor, and she assured me that my death was not imminent but probably at some distant time years hence. I interpret that to mean that my agony will be long and interminably enduring.

We also scheduled a colonoscopy. This is probably not a good day to annoy me.

PZ’s Galápagos Adventure

Here follows a brief account of my sojourn in the Galápagos Islands, just to give you all a rough idea of what I was up to all this time. I’ve tossed in just a few pictures to illustrate what we experienced; I’m planning to dole out the rest a little bit at a time, each week. I took a lot of pictures, and I was a real piker compared to a few other people on the trip — I’m thinking that if I use mine and some of the other photographs people took, if I post one a week, I’ll be able to keep the blog going for about 3800 years.

[Read more…]

Tropical breakfast

Somebody shoot me. Yesterday was a full 24 hours of travel with nothing but intermittent naps, and of course I wake up this morning at my usual time of 6am after only 3 hours of sleep. And I seem to have acquired a chest cold. Or pneumonia. Or Ecuadorian Lung Rot, or something. I’m hoping that at some imminent time point, after I’ve taken care of a few chores, my physiology will allow me to get some sleep.

Until then, let’s look back in time, to a morning a whole week ago, when I would regularly awaken to a whole grand morning feast of exotic tropical fruits, and I’d feel like eating them all. This is my taste test of a granadillo, a weird fruit with a horrible color (gray) and an unappetizing texture (watery mucus) and a fine sweet flavor.

O PZ of times past, who could awaken in fine fettle and a zest for adventure, please reincarnate in this body soon.