Good morning, John. What...what?!

This is a corner of my office that I never use. I made a set for Games With Hank, in the year, whoa, God, like 2015, and this is where I sit, where I do other things that aren't at a computer, which at the moment, and possibly for the long-term, is my microscope station.  I have a microscope now.  I'm very excited about it.

It is nice to be brought into a different world that is beautiful and less complicated than the one I'm normally in, which, this week has been a lot.  Like, I'd love to add something helpful.  I don't have much to add.  I think Joe Biden's going to be president in two weeks.  I don't think that there will be a coup.  I think that all of this is tremendously destructive to democracy and our country, but I don't think that we are headed into a civil war.  

It's very bad, it's just not anywhere close to that bad and in fact, like, what these people want us to think is that maybe there will be a civil war, 'cause that's what they want, because they're idiots.  More important than that, though, I recently went to Flathead Lake, where it was freezing, literally.  There were beautiful waves of chunks of ice crashing onto the shore and because I have a microscope, I was like, probably I won't find anything really interesting but I am gonna dip my bare hand into this lake and pull out some water.  I'm gonna collect every scrap of vegetation that has made it through this churning mass of grinding rocks, you know, ice is rocks, and maybe I will find something cool.  

Well, John, I've been looking at this sample, which is in this tank right here.  I just saw something with my eyes, which I did not expect, but I just turned the camera on and I'm gonna walk through the process of trying to take a look at whatever this little thing is or these little things, there's a bunch of them.  

So right here in this corner, there are these little white dots that are moving around a little bit, and I'm gonna try and suck some of those up.  Okay, I got the little shrimpy thing on there.  That's exciting.  Uh, hopefully I did not just murder him.  I think I did murder him.

Well, first try is a failure.  

Whoa!  And now I can take the eyepiece out of this and shove it in here and then I can attach this to my phone.  Let's try find whatever that thing was.  Hello, friend!  Whoa!  What, oh my gosh, what a big boy.

I didn't even mean to grab this thing from this sample, and it's huge.  It is--I can actually see it on my slide.  Oh man, that's cool and we can zoom in closer here, get a better look at his insides.  Don't drink the lake!

Okay, well this is cool, but I still wanna see one of these little shrimpy things.  I think I got one?  I did.  He's zooming around in there.  Okay, this time, I'm not gonna push down on the cover slip.  This lighting does make me look like a murderer.  Mm, he's huge.  oh jeez, he's got little arms in there.  

There's a lot going on with this guy, but I still can't really tell you what he is.  I'm a little upset that he can't move around.  Oh, and then there's this, which is, you know, still huge.  Oh man, this sample is just teeming with life.  Can you believe I pulled this out of just like, ice?  And I'm just like grabbing tiny drops at a time and it's got stuff like that in there.  See a little shrimpy.  I'm putting on my cover slip.  I wanna see one of these things so bad!

Aha!  Wow.  Okay, that's a whole different--that's a whole different experience.  Is the other thing even the same thing as this?  Whoa.  Whoa!  Look at his tail!  This thing is so fun to play with!

Journey to the Microcosmos is currently having a Kickstarter for this microscope along with this attachment that allows you to make content with it.  We're also putting together a little guide to help you get started in your own journey to the microcosmos or if you don't wanna do that, we also have the whole channel, where you can come and watch us explore and it's really wonderful.  

It's a nice break from things.  That's the most relaxing part of my job, actually, I'd say, by a fair margin.  John, I'll see you on Tuesday.