Author Archives: Marci

Koski Reunion at Lake Tahoe

Posted in Entertainment, Friends and Family, Hobbies, Me Me Me!, Travel, Vacations by

A couple of weeks ago I took a few days off from work and flew to Lake Tahoe to meet up with most of the Koski clan. It was the first time I got to use my new camera (woo hoo!) and I’m sad to report that it appears that I, too, have been inflicted with a genetic disposition to take vast quantities of photos. This sickness has been further enabled by the fact that my new camera has a 2 GB storage card – you can only imagine how easy it was to snap off a few hundred pictures. At any rate, click here or on the picture below to see the top 50 photographs from this mini-holiday; just remember, there are plenty more where these came from, and if you don’t see a photo you were expecting to see, there may be good reason (i.e., future blackmail material, so stay on my good side, please). Enjoy!

D’oh! I’ve been Simpsonized!

Posted in Entertainment, Humor, Movies and TV by

Look at me – I’ve been Simpsonized! If you go to http://www.simpsonizeme.com/, you can upload a picture of yourself and undergo a yellowing process that will transform you into the newest Springfield citizen. Once the initial yellowing is complete, you can tweek things like your eyes, hairstyle, clothes, colors, and backgrounds. Here is the photo I uploaded and my final Simpsonized result:

Cuteness

Posted in Animals, Cats, Entertainment, Hobbies, Non-cats by

I recently purchased Photoshop Elements 5.0 so that I could start digitally scrapbooking. I’m kind of behind in my scrapbooking and part of the problem is that I’m so perfectionistic and making pages using paper and adhesives and cutting stuff out and all that takes so long to do – I haven’t started any pages recently because it’s just too much of an undertaking. So I decided to go digital and have my pages professionally printed – it’s actually quite cost effective, and is fast and easy to do. Plus, since I’ve been using my digital camera exclusively, I don’t have to print photos out and cut them up – one more step I can skip.

Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to write about. I purchased Elements and have been trying to learn how to use it. And the best pictures to start practicing on, I’ve found, have been pet pictures! So here are pictures of Zoe, Jesse, and Teddy – I’ve lightened and warmed them up, increased the contrast, and used a glow filter. Cute, huh?

Whirlwind trip to Portland and Back

Posted in Friends and Family, Me Me Me!, Travel, Vacations by

Well, it finally happened. Mom sold her house in Escondido and moved up to Portland. What an endeavor! Packing up her home took several weeks and it was very strange seeing the house completely empty. We started out on Friday and drove for about ten hours, stopping overnight just north of Sacramento. From there we drove about eleven hours all the way up to Portland. The second day was much prettier – we drove past Mount Shasta, and the landscape became rolling and green. I’m actually kind of jealous – I want to move up there now! Michael (the parrot) was very good the entire trip – she sat next to me the entire time and happily clucked throughout the drive. I think she rather enjoyed sitting in the car! Mom drove the white Durango (pictured below) with Leo and Bailey, and overall, the trip went very well. I flew back home on Sunday and called in sick on Monday to rest. It will be very weird being here without my mom, but things change, and I think she’ll be very happy in Portland. Here are some pictures of our adventure:

My trip to … West Virginia?!?

Posted in Career, Me Me Me!, Travel by

Yes, back in May I traveled to Shepherdstown, West Virginia, for a week of government training at NCTC, the National Conservation Training Center. We flew into Baltimore and drove out into the country – Shepherdstown is right across the Potomac River from the historic Antietam battlefield, if that gives you any idea of where I was. The weather was warm and everything was so GREEN, compared to the dry landscape of SoCal. There were deer and cardinals and bluebirds and so many other critters – it made me miss living on the east coast, and reminded me very much of where I grew up in Northern Virginia. NCTC is a fairly isolated campus just for the Fish and Wildlife Service – I took a course titled “Habitat Conservation Planning” which probably sounds more interesting than it actually was. But really, the course was pretty good and I learned a lot that will be helpful to me in my work. Anyway, here are some of the pretty pretty pictures that I took before my camera batteries died and held all my pictures hostage for the past month:


The hills are alive…blah blah blah blah blaah blaaaaah…

Posted in Animals, Career, Me Me Me!, Non-cats by

About once a week I get to leave the dim confines of my office and drive up to Palomar Mountain. I spend the whole day looking for butterflies! Me and the rest of the survey team are specifically searching for an extremely rare endangered butterfly, the Laguna Mountain Skipper. We think their flight season is almost over (sightings have tapered off a bit), but I thought I’d post some pictures of some of the butterflies – and other things – I’ve encountered on the mountain. Enjoy!

Here’s the Laguna Mountain Skipper. It’s about the size of your thumbnail, maybe a little bigger. There’s a look-alike species that is also present, just to try to fool us; but I’ve been scoring 100’s on my LMS tests, so I think I’ve got that problem licked.

See that little white dot on one of the leaflets? That’s a skipper egg. The butterfly will land on horkelia (the host plant pictured here), curl her abdomen around the underside of the leaf, and deposit one egg, maybe another one on a neighboring leaf. They’re kind of hard to find, and each individual lays only maybe 100-200 eggs before dying. Most of the eggs are parasitized by wasps, or grazed by cattle when they eat the plant. It’s tough being a skipper, and I’m surprised any of them make it to adulthood!

This is a funereal duskywing; there were a lot out this week but they moved very fast and were hard to photograph.

Here’s a lupine blue – there were a ton of blues out last time I visited the mountain, and there are a bunch of different types. They are some of my favorites! They’re still relatively small, a bit larger than the skipper (some of them).

This is a Melissa blue, which hasn’t been documented on the mountain until now. I took this picture because I thought the butterfly was really pretty!

This Mylitta crescent is quite a bit bigger than the other butterflies pictured; kind of mid-sized. There are a lot of larger butterflies on the mountain – we’ve seen monarchs, admirals, and swallowtails. This one just happened to stay still long enough for me to get a picture of it!

Sick of butterflies? I came across this Southern Pacific rattlesnake last time I was out in the field. I also saw two green racers, but this rattler let me take several photos of him. Don’t worry – I didn’t almost step on him, and my camera has a very good zoom lens. This guy was easily as big around as my wrist, and I’m not sure how much more of him was in the burrow there. I’m definitely learning to watch where I walk!

I Dreamed It, I Did It!

Posted in Career, Me Me Me! by

For all of you who can’t see my office in person, I have to tell you, my term-to-permanent office makeover turned out FABULOUS! Actually, the office makeover would have happened whether I got permanent status or not, but the timing just coincided. At any rate, I guess I’d been listening to the little Christopher Lowell in my head, who whispered “if you can dream it, you can do it!” over and over. I moved my furniture around to open up my small cube, and brought in a rug and lighting. I’d been using the overhead flourescent lights, but decided that they were making me crazy and I vowed to do something so I wouldn’t have to turn them on ever again – they kept making this constant humming noise, and I had this light-poking stick that I kept shoving at the light to stop the buzz when it got too loud. ANYWAY, take a look at the before and after results and let me know what you think – these images are taken of the same views (match up the posters on the walls for reference):

 
BEFORE: creepy lighting, crowded feeling (also, these pictures were taken during Halloween when I’d decorated the room with fake spider webs).

AFTER: homey feeling, more conducive to sleep than work (everyone is jealous and is asking me to make over their offices, too).

Wow – More Good News!

Posted in Career, Me Me Me! by

A few days ago I received a memo from our head office in Portland re: conversion to career-conditional status. Know what that means? Well, I had no idea either. So I headed over to my helpful HR coordinator, Larry, who explained that this means I am no longer a term employee, but an actual PERMANENT employee with the Service! Woo hoo! So now they can’t just toss me out on my arse for any old reason. This, I think, is good news and will be particularly important when I decide that I want to dye my hair bright purple. The “conditional” part of the status will drop off after my probationary year (during which time there will be no extreme hair dying), and after two years I’ll be fully vested in all my retirement benefits (which have been accumulating this past year anyway). It’s all very confusing, but the main point is that after a year, all bets on the appropriate color of my hair are off.

Coming up next: my fabulous term-to-permanent office makeover!!!

Holy Guacamole!

Posted in Day Trips, Friends and Family, Me Me Me! by

Did you know that the Avocado Capital of the World is just a few short minutes away, in Fallbrook? Neither did I! But since I love avocados, and Fallbrook happened to be hosting its annual Avocado Festival last weekend, I decided that Mom, Mark and I should go. And I also decided that Mom should drive because her car, more than mine or Mark’s, most resembles an avocado.

Wow – what a scene! It was an avocado mob scene, to be sure. Although it was mostly like a really really really crowded street fair (actually, that’s precisely what it was) – they were anticipating 75,000+ people – there were a few avocado-related booths. They had avocado fudge (!), fresh quacamole (yum!), avocado pottery and crafts, and fried avocado. But mostly it was just your usual street fair fare – snow cones, tee-shirt booths, sausages on sticks. And it was soooooo crowded – parking was slim to none (luckily we didn’t get a ticket or towed for parking on someone’s front lawn), and by the time we made less than one circuit through the street doing the slow-paced street-fair shuffle we were ready to go. But at least I can say that I’ve visited the Avocado Capital of the World! Woo hoo!!!