Welcome back to work

So, on Monday my flight arrived in Austin at about 12:30pm, and for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to swing by the lab on my way home (it's not on the way) even though I'd been traveling for 28 hrs and no sleep. Still, it was good to be back, and the lab is more like home than home anyway, for the most part.

Please bear through the long story before the juicy pics. (You'll appreciate the double pun in a few minutes.)

I was informed on arrival that the power had gone out to the buildings that house our bug room and recent prep lab. After a bit of trouble shooting by facilities, they determined that the main power supply had shorted due to a waterline break not too far away. This means replacing 1000 feet of power supply, which will take quite a while. In the meantime, we're temporarily powering three 25 cubic foot deep freezers with a generator, the fourth trips the breaker. So, we had to consolidate some partially thawed, partially bagged, partially tagged, completely smelly critters of all wonderful drippy sorts out of the fourth into the other pretty full three freezers. Luckily, some of that was bags of "Biological Waste", so Environmental Health Services is coming by soon to pick up 25 gallons worth of parts. For the rest we did a pretty good job of playing freezer Tetris, chipping the ~1-2 inches of frost off the walls helped. We found some turtles, tons of birds, flat rabbits, bags of goo, a coral snake, bags of assorted parts, croc chunks, and at the very bottom sitting in two inches of blood and water, two bears. As AJ put it, "Some days this job is just like Christmas." Amen.

Shhh, he's sleeping. Thats the small one, I call him Walter Payton.

This one is The 'Fridge. We couldn't find room for him in the freezer, so in a few days when thawed, he will finally get dissected and macerated, since the bug colony has been frosted out. The typically 80 degree room was in the 40s when I checked it Monday, and there isn't much buggy activity in any of their tanks these days.