statistics sucks my will to live...

Case in point



Trying very hard to focus on stats so I can go for a fun bike ride later!!! Not completely working at this point in time....
Yesterday was both awesome, and kind of sobering. I went and rode the Nats RR course, started with the boys, got dropped on Bingham...spent the rest of the ride by myself until I got out to Masonville. It wouldn't have been so bad had there not been a 30mph headwind out of the south, booooo. However, it was a gorgeous sunny day, I got some tan, and fresh air, and Caley rode back with me. We split a tangelo at Horsetooth mtn park, then finished strong going up and over South Dam. By the way, the right hand corner off of the dam where there's that stop sign? TOTALLY SCARY AND WILL BE VERY SKETCHY IN THE RACE! Anyway, I am trying to maintain a positive outlook on the race, but it's going to be super-de-duperly hard!!
Caley and I are going to go for a sunset ride on Blue Sky this evening, I think he's planning on doing a road ride before that, nice for me cause he'll be tired! Maybe I'll have some cool pics later.

Ok, enough procrastination! Back to the stats.

New Belgium Short Track (again)

I did two races again this past Tuesday for the short track series, and I won both of them (for the women)! Some pics courtesy of Brian and Caley (some from last week as well)

Utah Recap

Utah was wet and cold, not exactly the Utah we've all come to know and love...

The team did really well, very proud of Caley winning the crit yet again! Tirrel won the womens crit, she has kicked some major butt this season! Tirrel and Julia also finished one and two in the conference. I can't go into details about how many of our riders placed in the top three within the conference, but let's just say we did in every category except Mens B to my knowledge!
Here are a few pics from the weekend!

Caley winning with me jumping up and down ecstatically next to the finish line


Me warming up/looking like a squirrel


At the start line of the crit (only race that wasn't freezing/rainy/snowing/sleeting)


During the crit, the group that I finished with


Hope you all have a great day!
-Megan

Getting Ready to head to Utah

Hopefully the weather will be nicer than is predicted (60% chance of rain tomorrow in SLC) and we will get a chance to practice out TTT this weekend!!! I'm excited for the races, I hear there is a huge climb in the RR, should be a good indicator for nationals. I've managed to have fun this past week despite the stress of school and work; Rio ride on Monday, short track on Tuesday, campfire at Brians on Wednesday, mtn bike with Caley on Thursday, and travel today!
Unfortunately, it looks like only one out of my four sites hatched...I'm going to leave the egg papers in over the weekend just in case, but I'm not sure what I'll do if I can't get any mosquitoes from these sites! It stalls my whole project, I'm afraid to talk to Dr. Black about it :(
Anway, I have to go pack up for the trip! Pics to come soon.
-Megan

New Belgium Short Track Series

Yay for the harbringer of summer and warmth and mtn biking!! I'll try to get pics up of me actually racing/winning next time:) Here, courtesy of Yann Roper, hanging out after the 5pm race



Next Tuesday is supposed to be in the 70's, will be nice after today and this weekends snow!

Brain-Fried

Just met with Dr. Black for two hours following a two hour lecture on genetic control strategies for disease vectors. Talk about not having any mental strength left for anything but writing about how I lack mental strength. Oh, and I also turned in a take home exam today that I spent ALL of yesterday writing.

This past weekend we were Durango for a few bike races. Weather was cold, rainy, snowy, and at times lovely, sunny, and warm. According to Dan, this is all due to some volcano erupting and seeding clouds. Not sure if that's actually what's going on, but the weather has been rather unstable, even for CO. I ended up 7th in the crit and 7th in the road race, yes, consistently in the back half:) I'm not exactly looking forward to getting my butt handed to me at nationals. As long as the other girls have resigned themselves to the fact that I will not be a factor we should be ok...just don't want the guilt of feeling like I should be contributing and attacking or some such nonsense;)
It was nice to be at home and see the fam for a few days, they are super busy all weekend taking care of everyone, but we get a few moments to visit. It's weird growing up and getting the boot. Lately I've been getting the boot on some things I'd rather not, like security deposits, blue-ice packs, care packages (I guess that happened awhile ago but I wanted my complaint list to be longer). Anyway, weird, and I'm bad at changing life circumstances. It's amazing I actually took the initiative and got someone to sub-let the apartment and that I'm thinking of moving across the country sometime in the next couple of years.
Here's a pic from the weekend, stolen from Caley...he has a better camera and skillz.

Thursday!!

Yay for today! It's almost Friday, I've already gone to class, studied for my stats exam a bit, and have a delicious dinner to look forward to tonight with excellent friends:) Yay!
I met yesterday with Dr. Black to do some analysis on the DNA sequences I have from the Tapachula populations, and also the populations we have here in the lab. We found one potential marker, and I still have a few populations to get sequences from, but it was less than we were expecting. I REALLY need to find some DNA from Martinez Torres, I swear Gustavo was working with that population...I just need to find where he put all his DNA!!! If he even had any...oh man, I should just start a cage, suck it up and do all the work. Basically, the first time I hatched mosquitoes, I didn't get enough adults from Martinez Torres, so I wasn't able to analyze the population for differences in the DNA. However, I think there are at least one or two potential important difference in the population from the ones in Tapachula, so I need to be able to look at them. This is one of the things that causes me stress at night:)

...............continued on Saturday morning...............

Thursday night ended up being BEAUCOUP fun!!!! We all headed over to Emily and Brendans for some pizza, wii, and Pineapple Express. I haven't laughed so much in ages! And, my forearm is pretty sore from wii tennis:) A little embarrassing... Caley and I had a lovely night in last night. I tried my hand at cooking some artichokes, but I think my little microwave is not as powerful as the one I grew up with and they didn't cook through as much as I would have liked, but turned out pretty good regardless. We ended up watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit on netflix, and it was great! I hadn't seen that movie since I was probably about five years old, and I think it's because it scared the crap out of me as a child:)
Today will be spent studying for my big stats exam next week...kind of nervous about it to tell the truth, I'll feel better once I look at the old exams and get a better idea of what he expects. Anyway....here is the view outside the window this morning!