Nerdin'

Nerdin' is one of my favorite pastimes. The classes that I've been taking this semester seem especially conducive to nerdin', because they involve extensive plant I.D., tree aging, GPS, and maps. It's been a tough call to determine which of my classes is nerdier. 

But then my Maps and Wilderness Navigation class took a trip to Flagstaff (I had pics but sadly my camera is M.I.A.) and we went to the USGS Space Center, and then had a library archive tour.  Our nerdy little hearts were so happy to learn from George the Geologist while he told us about the lengthy process of mapping the Grand Canyon-- he spent months surveying and tracing the complex geologic features. This is the dragon map that he made:

Probably the coolest thing I've learned in Maps and Nav is that non-GPS folks are referred to as 'muggles' by the GPS/ geocacher community. You have to be careful to hide your GPS while in public for two reasons. One is that you will look too nerdy (my textbook actually told me this), and Two is that you can't let the muggles see you when you are using your GPS and trying to find a geocache.

We all look super nerdy trying to use our GPS units, but we try to embrace it.

But probably unsurprisingly, my favorite things to nerd about are herps.

The tail end (pun intended) of lizard season was a couple of weeks ago, so I was lucky to find a few of these scaly guys sunning outside of my house. I had yet to touch one, so I ran back and forth in my PJs trying to grab one, and finally trapped a larger one in a box and scared it enough so that it stopped moving. I felt bad for a sec, but holding a real live lizard was way too cool. In my herpetology class last spring we only had gross preserved specimens to study. This is a million times better:

While continuing nerdin' on this lizard, I looked it up in my herps of AZ book. It's a Ornate Tree Lizard!

And see that spot of blue on the side? That's how you can tell that it's a male. Nerd-tastic.