Stupid Mosquitoes

So, because my mosquitoes are not maturing at a quick enough rate, I probably won't get to go up to Beaver Meadows this weekend! :( I hate mosquitoes. For any of you who have gotten the erroneous impression of late that I may have started to get fond of them, you are WRONG! I still hate them, I still hate the sound of them buzzing in my ears, and I wish I could be done with them all right now! Unfortunatley, I'm getting to the most labor intensive part of my project as far as mosquitoes go. In the next few days, I have to isolate individual pupae from each of my six hatches (as many as I can) and wait for them to emerge as either male of female. I then have to set up as many single family pairs as I can with those isolated males and females (crossing females with males from a different population and collecting the eggs from that cross). This breaks down to A LOT of tiny cages for individual pairs of mosquitoes. Then I have to make sure each female in these pairings feeds well, mates and lays eggs. Then I start the whole process over again, and repeat four more times. I'm sure at this point I won't be done in November. I should probably email my counterpart in Mexico to let her know...but I won't do that until I can get a good estimate of when I'll actually be done, no idea at this point, but after I get eggs from this first cross I'll just extrapolate.
Aside from the crosses, I am doing insecticide resistance assays as well. I won't go into details because it's too complicated to explain, let's just say it's going to involve an extreme amount of counting larvae/adults, and extreme amounts of dish washing, and extreme amounts of time. It's not part of my project, but helping out another person in the lab...I'll be doing the same for my mosquitoes later, so this counts as practice. In any case, I'll have help on this part, but I'm not at all looking forward to it.
Also, (let's just get all of the complaining out of the way shall we?) I am beginning to feel like a blob. My right calf and thigh are already super tiny and wasted away, and I haven't had any exercise for 21 days!! At least I know I'll be super motivated to get going once this damn boot comes off, but for now, I think my mood is being affected by the lack of physical activity.
My mood today: