Monthly Archives: February 2022
The GREAT BACKYARD BIRD COUNT is COMING!

Our cat, Mikey, watches juncos and white-throated sparrows from the comfort of his perch in the breakfast nook…he’s ready for the Great Backyard Bird Count! Are you?
The Great Backyard Bird Count is slated for February 18 – 21, 2022 (that’s President’s Day weekend)! This is a really great way to contribute to environmental science—as well as get to know your avian friends!
Participating in this event is free and can be done at home. You can learn all about it here: https://www.birdcount.org/participate/
Unboxing JURASSIC PARK MONOPOLY!
It’s my birthday weekend, and this year I wanted to celebrate my love of dinosaurs, so I got Jurassic Park Monopoly for my friend Bruce, my husband Nathan, my housemate Charles (if he wants to) and me to play in between some dinosaur movies like Area 407 and The Dinosaur Project (and probably others we’ve seen a million times). It was so cool I wanted to share it!
If you like this game and want to pick it up, I got it for about $26 on Amazon (it happened to be on sale when I was looking), but normal list price—at least there—seems to be more toward $30-$40. It’d make a nice gift for the dinosaur/JP freak in your life who has everything else. Here’s the Amazon link: https://amzn.to/3GoDNDX
Enjoy!
A little fun with forensic entomology …
Writers—especially of the darker genres—often joke that after we die, people would find things in our browser histories that might indicate we were actually something more sinister: how long does it take someone to drown, could you actually kill someone with a steak knife?, what kinds of poisons have no smell, how do you rob a bank?
Recently, I had to do some research on types of bugs that might be associated with a dead body. I had taken a really interesting forensics class back when I was working toward my (still unfinished) certificate in archaeology about twenty years ago, but digging up those notebooks in the basement was more daunting than Googling it.
I found this interesting little article from the Amateur Entomologists’ Society called “CSI Entomology: Insects at the scenes of crime.” You can check it out here: https://www.amentsoc.org/insects/insects-and-man/forensic-entomology.html
It’s not complete or very detailed, but it’s a good place to start if you’re a writer and you need to work on this particular level of realism in your stories, or maybe if you just need to make one quick mention (as I did). Have fun!