Bug Gwen's Annex

Terra Formars Anime

Ok, so today I discovered the Manga series Terrafomars. Mars is terraformed and taken over by extremely swole murderous roaches. Humans altered with the characteristics of insects (bombadier beetle, mantis, silkworm, etc) travel to Mars in order to fight the Roaches.

For the last 6 years I’ve been writing a personal annual report. It’s a useful way to evaluate what I did, and a lot of times a year that feels like a failure looks better when I take a longer view.

This will also include some 2017 stuff, since I completely skipped even trying to write a report last year. If you look at these reports over time, you’ll see a pattern: my health has steadily declined since I started working at Purdue. 

I really love what I do there (see adorable photo above), but it’s not much of a surprise that it’s a physically demanding job with a lot of stress associated with it. And as I’ve devoted more and more of my life to this job -- so that I have health insurance, which is REALLY important as you will see below -- the rest of my life has shrunk.

My first year running Bug Bowl in 2015, I had what I thought was a stroke. I’m in charge of a massive outreach event for >30K people, and I’m a part-time employee. Seems reasonable that I might over do it.

I stopped writing for WIRED in 2016, because I didn’t have the time or energy to keep it up. In late April (right after Bug Bowl) I discovered lesions on my spinal cord were the reason I was having trouble walking.

 I turned down most speaking invites in 2017, because I didn’t have the time or energy to travel. I’m pretty sure I had more health things going on, but because I was still paying off my 2016 health bills, I didn’t go to the doctor.  I did still do three awesome things:

I attended SciFoo in August at Google Headquarters

I was a visiting scientist at DragonCon in September

I got to hang out with Mary Roach for a day in December.

I think the big thing I realized in 2017 is that I don’t have do do everything myself. Other people can go hang out at Google or take over my work at Sci Fi Cons. Bug outreach will be more sustainable long term, if more people are doing it.

So 2018. Well.

This year I decided to try to run a crowdfunding campaign for Bug Bowl, since a lot of our equipment was over 20 years old.  The video helps show the scale of Bug Bowl:

Success! Thanks to my many online friends, and community members, we did fund repairs. (you can still make a tax deductible contribution here). THANK YOU!

In 2018, in addition to the successful crowdfunding, I also:

Had a paper accepted to Annals of the Entomological Society of America, and I’m co-author on another that’s been submitted to American Entomologist. 

Did a super fun training for librarians about how science news gets made and covered 

Collaborated with Indiana Humanities on a bee project

Survived 4,800 girl scouts

Had someone in a position of authority at Purdue text me a penis photo

Did a bunch of media interviews, including this one which is about native bees, I SWEAR

My advice to anyone considering a crowdfunding campaign is: don’t. It’s a huge amount of effort. And I was an idiot to take it on during the busiest part of my year. Which is probably why this year’s crop of central nervous system lesions were in my brain, and I finally got my official diagnosis: MS.

I’ve suspected it for quite a while, but it’s only this year I’ve started talking about it. And seriously, folks. Please. Please don’t make your first response to someone telling you they have MS be “Oh, my [aunt/mother-in-law/nephew] had that and they died.”

This is not a fatal disease. It is a pain-in-the-ass disease, and yeah it will get worse over time. I’m gonna die, but so are you. We all will die. “Multiple sclerosis is seldom fatal and life expectancy is shortened by only a few months.”

I have a new project! Follow PestControlFails

Pinterest is not great about preserving links, so I’m migrating my old board of fails over here.  Follow my new tumblr for... really sad stories, actually. 

I  document these so that the scale of the problem is more apparent.

Over the next months, I’ll move all my old pins here. 

Link to the original if you can’t wait: 

https://www.pinterest.com/membracid/incredibly-bad-ideas/

You might have seen this story last week; gosh the jokes just write themselves, don’t they? 

Because I am a nosy curious person, I thought I would take a look through the FOIA report, posted in full here. 

There were indeed roaches in some food prep areas. That’s to be expected in an enormous, public, and old building. Honestly, I found the multiple requests to remove safes (presumably for storing important documents) and fire extinguishers (presumably for putting out FIRES) from offices a lot more of concern. 

Here is a summary of some of the more interesting bug reports. 

There were a lot of requests for “bug lights.” 

Unsure if these were bug zappers (ineffective and not for use in food prep areas) or just the yellow lights that are supposed to not attract insects at night.

Chief of Staff had ants: 

There were cobwebs with dead bugs in them. Shocking! 

In August the ants and roaches came back, because....August. 

The Vice President had mice, which since I’m from Indiana, is extra hilarious. 

In general, nothing that shocking other than government people apparently can’t pick up mice and bugs and put them in the trash. So many requests for trivial things that would take a normal person a couple of seconds to do.