Just Finished the Busiest Week

For some reason the time during this week just seemed to fly by. The workshops, dinners, lab visits, and poster creation seemed to mesh together making a very busy week. I’m glad its over and I’ve learned a lot during it. I also met new interesting people at NIU, such as Dr. Papka, Joe Insley, and a few other NIU staff. Overall, my favorite part of the week was the dinners where we got to dress up and look all spiffy, and the lab visits because it gave us a new perspective of a hands on approach to how other labs operate. For example, the atmosphere in the DACHB lab is a lot different than the atmosphere in the DDI lab.

I should be done with my poster by the end of the day and the process of creating it was much easier than I anticipated.

I’m glad the weekend is finally here. I haven’t had much time after work to go do the things I enjoy, but I still managed to get some interesting photos for the week.

Here are a few:

This library is in the Barsema Alumni center, and seemed really out of place, because I never really have been in the building, yet there is this really cool and cozy law library in it.

I was bored and drove a few minutes to the far side of campus where there is this barn that NIU uses to store road barriers and gravel. I probably was “trespassing”, but there was no signs, and more importantly no one around.

I decided to try to take some night photos by the west lagoon. The LED’s on the buildings are really bright and have a cool illumination to them.

This photo was at Shabbona Lake State Park. A hidden gem surrounded by farm fields and wind mills. The lake is beautiful and there is a lot of cool pathways, and raspberries. The lake is made from a dam, and has a cool man made waterfall and overflow area.

Some storms were rolling in. The summer heat really creates a lot of turbulent weather that are very fun to drive in, and take photos of.

Japanese beetles are in full mating season currently. If you put out a bag to catch them it will become full of them within a hour or so…

This was about 15 minutes west of NIU, the farm field got flooded from all the recent rain. The owner is pretty interesting because he carved a dragon out of a tree stump and its definitely not something you expect to see in a rural area.