Day Thirty-One

Well, it is official, I've been at my internship for a month!  I started June 10th, and now it is July 10th. I can't believe it has only been a month, it feels much longer.  It doesn't seem real that this time in June The Doc gave me a tour of the NRC and let me loose on the museum. It doesn't seem real that at the beginning of my time here I was frustrated and basically unable to identify the simplest bee fly, and now I'm looking at flies from Madagascar that may not even be described!!  There have been ups and downs, but I'm glad I've stuck through it.  I definitely see I have improved a lot, as pointed out by The Doc today.  To hear her say that makes me really proud, she's an expert after all, and I like birds.

Today I looked better at two guides that could be somewhat useful to me.  They both are scans from books, so I can't Ctrl+F the words I'm looking for.  In one, the things that could potentially be useful are written in foreign languages.  The other is in English, but is something like 900 pages long.  Neither has an index in the back, that I can find.  OH!  But in the foreign language one, I can understand one section, or at least parts of it because it is written in Italian.  Finding guides for the Afrotropical/Madagascar flies is like pulling teeth out of a hummingbird, in a word: impossible.  I guess technically improbable because baby hummingbirds probably have an egg tooth.  Still, it is pretty darn hard.

And in other news, my dad and I saw The Heat tonight.  I enjoyed it except for Michael McDonald and Taran Killam.  And that is basically because whenever I see either of them I think of Stewart and Cougar, and Mokiki and Jonathan Cavanaugh san.  And if you don't know who those characters are, click on the links.  I did enjoy seeing them, because I find them both hilarious and I'm glad they're able to do non-comedy roles (their characters in The Heat were pretty serious).  The best part was Sandra Bullock's character swearing for the first time.  It was awkward and hilarious.  Melissa McCarthy did a great job as Detective Mullens, and she was probably my favorite out of the whole cast.  I would recommend seeing it if you don't mind swearing or blood/seeing people get killed (not that many scenes, but some people aren't into it).