fjfj/ mntns7

-Overheard quote: "If you don't cut the brainstem, then it's still alive."-

I had a dream that I was watching some sort of celebrity dancing show, except that the set looked more like the stage used for Food Network challenges. How... interesting. Later I dreamt that I was on Blogger, and also chatting with someone online, except that I was chatting into a microphone. Also, my voice sounded a lot younger than it actually does.

Roly-polies look like sedate little things: trundling along in their little leafy habitats, antennae waving. Turns out, those individuals are merely public-relations.

Today, I had to catch 15 pillbugs for an "experiment" (never mind why I was participating in this). Sounds easy enough, once you find them, right? Well, spent about 20 minutes circumambulating the sidewalks of a large church that I have noticed has a variety of insect life (mainly because it's the church I go to every Sunday). I and the person helping me found that locating the crustaceans was relatively easy. Catching them -- next to impossible.

See, the irritating part is that many of them (particularly the small, already hard to grasp ones) don't actually roll into a ball as advertised. They just keep moving when something large (e.g. my fingers) descends on them, and unfortunately, this is a very successful capture evasion strategy. But! To cut a long journey short, we did manage to net about 20 (keep in mind we searched the whole of the sidewalks encircling this enormous building to get these 20), and they came home, making a variety of chittering sounds as they crawled over each other, oblivious to their fellows underneath -- only capsizing every now and then when a stack of them got too high.

So, they're finally home, safe in their tall (hence, completely unclimbable), lidded container. Then they had to be transferred to a shoebox with two different options (the first trial involved different colors, the second wet/dry) for them to choose, called, stunningly enough, a "choice chamber". All well and good. True, the usual setup uses two connected petri dishes instead of a shoebox, but the box should work just fine...

Unless, of course, the box has a hole. I was dutifully watching the clock and recording the numbers on each side of the chamber when I began to notice that there were less than 10, total (which is what the experiment began with). Uh oh. But I couldn't stop since the recording intervals were every 30 seconds, so I figured they were just hiding in some small recess of the box that I couldn't see -- after all, I was careful to push down any that tried to crawl up the side of the box. It was about this time that I heard a soft "pinnk". Then another. And another. I finally tracked the sound down to another side of the counter on which the box was set.

Lo and behold, there were ROLY-POLIES CRAWLING ALL OVER THE FLOOR!!!! I was more than slightly perturbed at this development. In such an agitated state, it took me several puzzled seconds to realize that there was, indeed, a hole in the corner of the box, and that these isopods with less brains in their heads than would fit on a pin had managed to find it, en masse. They then proceeded to set forth onto the counter, and just a swiftly find the edge. At this point, their inner aspirations toward lemminghood took hold, and they fell right off and pinnked onto the linoleum.

After taping up the hole, I recruited the other person to help me keep an eye on the things.

Reality check. Watch out for those pillbugs.