Again, and again. Somehow it is already the end of January. I'm not at all sure how that happened. It always astounds me how fast time goes, and I often have much less to show for it than I would like. In three short months I'll be heading back to the field, probably for the last time during my dissertation years. Before that happens I need to develop a good plan of attack, and that requires knowing what exactly I found out last year. However, given that my data collection patterns are shotgun rather than laser in nature, this takes a bit of work. And the clock is ticking. Time to ratchet down and crunch through a large number of hormone assays, behavioral data, statistics and manuscript preparations. This is not the fun part of the field biologist job, but it can be very exciting when you get the data in hand. The drum rolls, you hold your breathe and do the stats. And then you cry, or more commonly in my case, think to yourself "that is amazing, i must have done the stats wrong, lets try it again". But either way time waits for no biologist, no matter how much we'd like it to.
