Hello Flog,
Long time, no flog. Guess where I am?!?
“Chicago”
good guess.
Yes, I ventured to Chicago for an extended weekend of fun and work in the Chicago Botanic Garden lab for the next step of my project about intra-specific pollen diversity (see proposal posted many moons ago).
I was greeted on Thursday night by Lea, Amy, and Scott with pizza! It was awesome and tasty, though I am more of a thin crust person myself. On Friday, I went to the lab with Amy and Lea and began dissecting the heads that I crossed this summer. Amy developed an ingenious system for separating my achenes and getting them x-ray ready that involved the sticky side of a post-it note.
Achenes prepped for x-raying.
Later, Stuart, Gretel, Lea, Amy and I explored some of the gardens on the way to lunch in the café. After a few more hours of dissection, we went home and upon Stuart’s orders, painted the town red, so to speak. After giving Lea’s dogs lots of love and attention, Amy, Lea, and I explored downtown Evanston and stumbled into a pie shop where we ate four different types of pie. Much like an ice cream shop, this pie shop begrudgingly gave us samples of their pie, so we all made very informed decision as there were a lot of choices. We all shared a expresso cream, pear fig, “Fat Elvis” (chocolate, peanut butter banana), and a curry lamb pie. Decadent, I know! Consensus: pie is delicious. Then we returned to the abode and watch Portlandia and went to sleep at promptly 9:30.
Amy and Betsy workin’ hard.
This morning, Amy, Betsy (Amy’s visiting friend, feat. in photo and also shoutout for the help in lab), and I went to the gardens while Lea hit the lib hard. With their help, I finally dissected all my heads and got them ready for pre-germination treatment.
Shortly, we will be off to Lou Malnati’s Pizza to eat more pie (the central theme of my trip).
Toodaloo,
Laura
This post earns an emphatic “Mmmh!”