New housemate.
May. 4th, 2006 09:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
castaliaWell, it couldn't last forever. As fun as it's been having the house to ourselves the past few months, Christina and I finally settled on a new housemate. Another guy, but this one seems much cleaner/saner/more polite and MUCH better at English.
Feisal (sp?) is from Saudi Arabia (I think that's what Christina said) and is here in Bangor on scholarship to do a PhD in business. Extremely well spoken and polite, from what I can tell, and possibly a bit shy as he said he'd never lived with girls before. Not sure of his age but he looks mid twenties or thereabouts. So far I'm not getting any creepy vibes from him, though he's only been here a few hours. Evidently he's spent time in LA, a brother or cousin or something who's studying there, so there's a hint of American influence in his accent. It's nice that we've kept our house diverse but still maintain the ability to understand each other.
ETA: I just had a chat with him as he was going out to do a few things at the university, and he seems really quite lovely. I found out he's studied in the US himself, both at the Uni of California, Long Beach and at Uni of Colorado. His English is just brilliant and the conversation was very pleasant. We may have found a winner! Hopefully no terribly weird quirks will surface in the next few weeks ;)
In other news, just finished a 14-hour night shift on the ship for the mussel cruise thing. Disappointingly there wasn't anything new for us to do except experience being on the ship overnight. Basically we were free labor for the school's ongoing mussel study in the strait, kept busy with filtering seawater for chlorophyll and SPM (suspended particulate matter) after each CTD drop. It's more boring than it sounds, if that's possible. Still, it was nice being out on the ship again, and we got cabins this time so we could sleep or do whatever on our off time. Plus, the captain of the smaller boat who picked us up this morning took a few minutes out of his time to take us closer to Puffin Island so we could watch the puffins and seals, so that was a nice bonus.
Tonight will be finishing up my (final?) project proposal, the more detailed one that will be given to the external examiner. We'll have presentations next week so they can identify problem areas before we actually start. I spoke to Chris earlier in the week and now I have a more detailed plan about what I'm doing. I'm quite excited now! I'll be doing some filming of mating behavior to get an overall description of the process (doesn't matter if it's been described before by anyone else, and there's always the chance of seeing something someone else missed), looking at age and size in relation to sexual maturity and possible observational learning in male visual displays, and most excitingly looking at chemoreception in mate choice. For this last one, we're going to build a Y-maze and look at mate choice and preference b/w recently mated males and not recently mated males. If there's time, I can look at sperm flushing and mate guarding as related to sperm competition. Dependent on how many animals we have and what replicates I can get, he said I might not have enough to perform much in the way of statistical analysis, but that this is perfectly ok and having a thesis that's mostly descriptive isn't a bad thing at all. So I'm quite pleased about that :)
Man, I slept all day after getting home, so I'm sure I'll be up all night now. Oh well, maybe I can get a few things done. And maybe type up my thoughts on the first half of the new House two-parter, which kicked all kinds of ass.
Feisal (sp?) is from Saudi Arabia (I think that's what Christina said) and is here in Bangor on scholarship to do a PhD in business. Extremely well spoken and polite, from what I can tell, and possibly a bit shy as he said he'd never lived with girls before. Not sure of his age but he looks mid twenties or thereabouts. So far I'm not getting any creepy vibes from him, though he's only been here a few hours. Evidently he's spent time in LA, a brother or cousin or something who's studying there, so there's a hint of American influence in his accent. It's nice that we've kept our house diverse but still maintain the ability to understand each other.
ETA: I just had a chat with him as he was going out to do a few things at the university, and he seems really quite lovely. I found out he's studied in the US himself, both at the Uni of California, Long Beach and at Uni of Colorado. His English is just brilliant and the conversation was very pleasant. We may have found a winner! Hopefully no terribly weird quirks will surface in the next few weeks ;)
In other news, just finished a 14-hour night shift on the ship for the mussel cruise thing. Disappointingly there wasn't anything new for us to do except experience being on the ship overnight. Basically we were free labor for the school's ongoing mussel study in the strait, kept busy with filtering seawater for chlorophyll and SPM (suspended particulate matter) after each CTD drop. It's more boring than it sounds, if that's possible. Still, it was nice being out on the ship again, and we got cabins this time so we could sleep or do whatever on our off time. Plus, the captain of the smaller boat who picked us up this morning took a few minutes out of his time to take us closer to Puffin Island so we could watch the puffins and seals, so that was a nice bonus.
Tonight will be finishing up my (final?) project proposal, the more detailed one that will be given to the external examiner. We'll have presentations next week so they can identify problem areas before we actually start. I spoke to Chris earlier in the week and now I have a more detailed plan about what I'm doing. I'm quite excited now! I'll be doing some filming of mating behavior to get an overall description of the process (doesn't matter if it's been described before by anyone else, and there's always the chance of seeing something someone else missed), looking at age and size in relation to sexual maturity and possible observational learning in male visual displays, and most excitingly looking at chemoreception in mate choice. For this last one, we're going to build a Y-maze and look at mate choice and preference b/w recently mated males and not recently mated males. If there's time, I can look at sperm flushing and mate guarding as related to sperm competition. Dependent on how many animals we have and what replicates I can get, he said I might not have enough to perform much in the way of statistical analysis, but that this is perfectly ok and having a thesis that's mostly descriptive isn't a bad thing at all. So I'm quite pleased about that :)
Man, I slept all day after getting home, so I'm sure I'll be up all night now. Oh well, maybe I can get a few things done. And maybe type up my thoughts on the first half of the new House two-parter, which kicked all kinds of ass.
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Date: 2006-05-04 09:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2006-05-04 11:10 pm (UTC)