One of our TWO pandemic puppies, Zion, playing hide and seek. Clever Boy, Zee!

Hi everyone!   By my reckoning,   it has been almost 18 months since the last post to the ANSMET blog;   and if you aren’t aware how “different” the last 18 months have been, and why,  you’re to be congratulated for your awesome hide-and-seek skills.

Let me start with a sincere apology;  we didn’t MEAN for the blog to go silent,  and if you were hurting for an ANSMET fix,  please forgive us. The short explanation is this- when the 2020-2021 ANSMET field season was officially cancelled, we made plans to keep the blog rolling with weekly (or more frequent) stories from great field seasons of the past.  But the reality of pandemic life for university professors thought otherwise. Like many, I had to completely redesign the courses I teach to work virtually;  and since I primarily teach lab courses, that was a lot of work, averaging 20+ more hours per week.  The pandemic also kept me busy with other pandemic-related stuff (I put in about 8-10 hrs weekly volunteering with vaccination clinics and other community-emergency responses to COVID).  Put simply,  I was super-busy,  and quickly made excuses not to post to the ANSMET blog.

But you deserve better than that!    And luckily,  while the pandemic rages on,  life for this professor has re-equilibrated.   Over the next 4 months or so it is my sincere hope to post at least weekly, updating you on what is happening within ANSMET.  In addition to posts from myself and Jim Karner (my co-PI in Utah) we’ll invite some ANSMET vets to help relive some moments from our program’s history.  Sometimes it may be no more than a picture;  other times it may be a full-blown historical essay.  Regardless,  we hope you’ll forgive us and help us get through another austral summer without an ANSMET field season by enjoying a few posts.

-Ralph Harvey, posting from unseasonably-warm Novelty Ohio.