dottie continues to eat and poop normally, hooray!
things seem good with her, even though i'm crazy and have anxiety when i leave her for long hours of time now. cool, right? shit was so stressful, i can't even explain it.
so i've been hanging at home, sort of monitoring her. she was supposed to be crated and kept calm, and that is very hard.
i emptied my old garage rental in the fan and turned it over to a friend, who was really excited to set it up as a workshop space. nice to not have another monthly bill, but weird to not have it anymore cause i've rented it for the last 6 or 7 years.
the rest of the weekend was spent cleaning and setting up my own workshop space in the house.
i have a friend that is doing vernal pool research, sampling pools in goochland looking for a specific species of salamander but also recording whatever other wildlife she finds there. her partner sucks and hasn't helped with the project at all, and i told her i'd help. after many tries at meshing our scheduling, it finally worked out monday.
these dudes, spotted salamanders, lay their egg masses in vernal pools, which are sort of like tidal pools of the woods.
the pools fill with water seasonally, long enough for salalmander eggs (and toad and frog eggs too) to gestate, turn in to larvae or tadpoles or whatever, and slowly grow into adults.
there werent really any signs of masses or salamanders at the first pool, though we did see lots of snakes. i also found a real cool millipede wandering around.
on to the second pool we went.
these were the masses we found, there were craptons of em, and they were HUGE.
they were already hatched, and oddly green.
we looked around for a while trying to spot any larvae in the water, but the pollen on the surface, the glare from the sun, and the tannic nature of the water was making it really tough. finally i started just scooping up tub fulls of water that were close to rotting vegetation and lo and behold, little stupid salamander babies!
they kind of look like the flying dog dude from neverending story.
all the little ones were clearly the new hatched babies, there were shittons of em! every other scoop i'd have caught one. after a while, and moving to a sunnier spot of the pool, i started scooping up bigger ones. super cool! you could see their spots already, and their gills were reddish. 
it was a good adventure, i needed it. been bummin laterly with work stress, home stress, and puppy dog stress. i'm really hoping that the moped rally picks up my chin and makes me stoked on life again.
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