New Year's Day!

What can I say, my family are a bunch of crazy party animals...! My bro decided to throw a party on New Year's Day that was a lot of fun! Lots of family came and a lot of his friends stopped by, too. No beer bong this year LMAO just tequila shots for some...there was also a lot of food and dancing. And no outdoor party would be complete without a fire, right?

Just some fun pics to share...we slept really good that nite!

Garrett aka SpiderMan!

My husband, the science guy, has a lot going on and I thought I would write a post about it, this makes it the easiest to explain.

Garrett has been working on a research project at ASU this semester, which he plans to continue thru May. He started last Fall and he works with one of the Grad students studying Habronattus pyrrithrix or in more simple terms the Jumping Spider. Garrett and Lisa are studying mate choice and coloration. Here are a few pics of him at work as SpiderMan, it includes him feeding the spiders Drosophilia aka fruit flies with a neat little contraption that he invented himself:

There are over 170 spiders in the research and some are kept in a climate controlled chamber seen below:

These particular male spiders will have a red band across the face once it has matured. Garrett will paint the red markings black and study the effects it has on those spiders being chosen as a mate. The maturity of the femail spiders is also studied and the spiderlings are taken care of and raised to be a later part of the research project. Garrett has also done some study on the effects of coloration among the prey of the spiders, too involving crickets. I didn't, however, capture any photos of that. Garrett spends a lot of time in the lab and on the weekends I usually go with him, since I miss my lab days...

He is getting such good lab experience and building up those letters of recommendations just in time for Med School applications, yay! So, we shall see what he decides to do come May graduation.

I included the last pic, because I thought it was pretty neat... do you think the science department is a bunch of Democrats?

Happy New Year!!!

So, New Year's Eve I had to work for a few hours, but it was slow and no big deal. My day consisted mostly of chatting with co-workers and waiting for 2 o'clock to come. It finally did and then all the fun began! Garrett and I promised my niece and nephew that we would take them to try out the LightRail downtown. So, we packed up our "rent-a-kids" as I lovingly like to call them, and we drove down to Tempe to wait with the MASSES of folks that had the same brilliant idea. After waiting quite a bit, we were finally able to board and we rode that puppy all the way to downtown Phx. The best part was going over Tempe Town Lake! The ride back was 10x better than the ride there, just because it was so less crowded. Either way, we all had a great time...
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Later, we decided to lay low this year and celebrate 2009 with the family. We headed over to my Tio Miguel and Tia Celia's house for some good eats and good times a la Mexicana!!! It was nice to see some of my tios and primos that I hadn't seen since the wedding. It was a little cold, but it wasn't too bad! We all decided that at midnight the Dick Clark Countdown was the only way to go!

Much Love and Happy New Year....!