Week 14 - Legends

I think it might be my goal to use the word of the week in as many different contexts as possible. It's been one of those kind of weeks, where nothing ever happens as planned. Not a bunch of huge ups and downs, but definitely some serious variety.

Urban Meyer in a UWeekly Cartoon last year. The man lived up to everything expected of him this year.

For starters, let's hit up Thanksgiving. My wife and I got to share some big exciting news with the family this past week and each took it in their own way - but all just about as predicted. I burned a bunch of calories by running a 5 mile race in my PB 47:43. I know, that's not super fast, but I had gas left in the tank at the end and later rocked it up at family football while everyone else was groaning.

The day after Thanksgiving, a guy tried to peel out of the stop sign by our house, hit a wet spot, broke into a spin and went airborne off of the neighbor's driveway. I was the first person there, and my neighbor on the other side was second. Long story short, when you get in a single car wreck, it's apparently always a safe bet to claim you saw a deer. I hadn't witnessed the actually accident but only heard the peel, brakes and saw the mid-air spinning, so I wasn't a reliable witness to prove he was lying.

At my in-laws, there was a surprise in the brew that I've been holding my breath about for a long time. My mother-in-law was 1 of 7 and all of them came into town for Thanksgiving, one of which nobody else knew about. This made for an absolutely chaotic Thanksgiving meal during which I never actually ate dinner. By the time the "meal" was ready, I was full on crackers, cheese, beer, wine (everyone loved the pear wine and mead we had made), and these amazing mushrooms covered in sausage and cheese. Great food, but we left before the true meal. Betsy was run ragged by the kids and eventually hid under the porch, from whence the family got the impression she was stuck and convinced her of this same fact. Picture a dozen people all crowded around the deck trying to dig out a dog that is convinced by the urgency in their voices she must escape now or forever be trapped. Truly a pathetic scene on the dog's face, and the family was equally feared for her survival. Needless to say that she was super wiped out by the end of the day, and even the next day was absolutely exhausted.

Betsy eating while lying on the floor on Friday. She was so exhausted.

Occasionally I see a movie worth recommending, but before I do so, I should warn you about a few things. My idea of a good movie is one that leads you on an emotional rollercoaster complete with high thrill downhill moments, a few corkscrews in the plot along the way (I hate predictable movies), and tunnels of despair. For example, I know the movie is nothing like the book, but I thought Atonement was a huge accomplishment, even though it took me days to recover from it. No Country for Old Men was also a great book, but I'm ok with the occasional happy ending, too. Sometimes peace is the happier ending, regardless of what happens to the main character. So my movie recommendation of this week is "Legends of Fall". This movie stars Brad Pitt among others, in another crazy, wildman type of role with brute strength, killer instincts and unkempt hair. Typical. But the movie is an epic journey through the trials of a family - something I thought was a stupid description on the info box, but completely accurate. Watch it, and you won't regret it.

Speaking of Legends, Rutgers and Maryland are proposed to enter the already weak B1G conference, bumping Illinois over to the bad bracket. My alma mater did luckily qualify for a bowl game this past weekend as they capped what is hopefully their most disappointing season ever. I don't think the fan base will recover for a while. However, over in the other division, 3rd place Wisconsin suffered their 3rd straight OT loss, this time to PSU, and yet they will still travel to Indy next week. PSU's head coach had some fun things to say after the game, I think he was trying to express how hard his boys had worked and how proud he was of their dedication. But I couldn't get beyond the fact that ESPN missed a big-time bleepable moment.

The game of the week is always OSU vs. scUM. Students jumped into Mirror Lake as always, despite the canceling of classes earlier before Thanksgiving and the recommendations against the action by the university administration. Traditions will not be stopped. I wondered how the new football coach here at OSU would react to the rivalry, but it would seem that Urban Meyer has a good grasp on the situation, based on his statement at the Earle Bruce Michigan week event. As a Spartan, it felt good to sit in the stands and feel the mutual hate for a university known for being a bunch of rich, pretentious, self-entitled snobs. Of course, both schools hate scUM for different reasons, but the end-game is the same. Beat the $#!t out of Michigan!

And beat them we did. Great game, exciting to the ending and a great victory to send the seniors out with, even though they couldn't go the BCS games. Having Tressel and the 2002 boys back for recognition made the entire game that much bigger. Nostalgia can be such a rush.

For the lesson of the week, I refer you to the PSA being passed around on Facebook (using a sweet new insert video option on Blogger.com). Remember, these are what not to do... I'm off to make sure these kinds of accidents don't happen in our lab.

Week 13 - Milkfat

This past week went by pretty quickly and quietly. The weekend is freshest on my mind so I'll recap it first. We got the leaves cleaned up and that sucked up nearly all of Saturday and Sunday. Using a larger mower, my wife got the leaves "raked" into rows and then we raked the leaves onto a tarp and dragged it out into the pasture. The leaves piled up to five feet tall and could have easily filled our living room. We also made it to a wedding about 90 minutes late on Saturday night (somehow memorized the wrong time...) but luckily we knew some people at the reception who let us crash their table. The Buckeyes won in OT and carried on to 11-0 on a meaningless season.

I also went mountain biking with an OSU faculty member on Sunday. It might not seem like a lot, but it is so exciting when I get to interact with my co-workers outside of the office. In this case, he was a well-respected, well-published statistician, but out there on the trail he was just another guy new to mountain-biking who wanted to experience the challenge and rush of some trail obstacles. Definitely one of the highlights of my week.

On Thursday, we also had a seminar on the effects of consuming milk by a visiting faculty member from my alma mater. It's worth mentioning that I really enjoyed his dry humor to make an old topic more interesting. He did a great job with questions and really interacted with us students. Within the dairy industry, milkfat is really what farmers get paid on. The research proposal that I spent all week writing to specifically oriented towards better prediction of how methane can be related to milk production and milk fat depression (MFD). The biggest problem with MFD is that when you sink a cow into lower fat components, she has a lot of trouble coming back out of this. That is why it's really important to understand the energy needs and nutrient balance of the cow and rumen, to maintain healthy and high-volumned milk production through her lactation.

It's funny, but when I searched for the cartoon clip that was put up at the end of our guest seminar, a lot of the first things that came back in results were very negative towards dairy farmers, milk and milk products. There were horrible claims about poison, fat, cholesterol and death by vegans with less education about nutrition or agriculture than a 2nd grader's afternoon at their grandparents' farm. For a long time milk has been linked to saturated fat and increased chance of heart disease, leading to death, but as it turns out, a lot of this data was pseudo-fabricated in a similar manner to the tobacco ads and endorsements of the same era. As it turns out, the foundational paper which correlated to saturated fat to death utilized less than 1/3 of available data which led to the desired results.

Yes, it is true that milk has saturated fat, but saturated fat is not bad for you. In fact, milk fat when provided on an equal basis has been shown to have similar or improved health effects in human patients. More importantly, fat intake is not related to heart disease so much as cholesterol. Well, it could be said that milk increases cholesterol, but it increases HDL cholesterol. So the ratio of HDL:total cholesterol actually improves, which has been shown to decrease risk of heart disease. And if all that isn't convincing to you that the milk fat argument isn't all the horror people play it to be, remember your chance of death is 100%, so do you really want to live life without milk?

Which one would you rather?

Milk does great things, such as strengthen your bones with increased calcium availability. It also provides a great source of healthy calories that are balanced in fat and protein. These are great for growing kids, and good in moderate doses in your adulthood, too. Now, people say that "full fat" milk is bad for you, but what you really don't realize is that even whole milk is only 4% total milk. Comparing this to 0.5% fat in skim milk, the difference is very small. And what are you replacing it with? Water. Why pay for more water when you could save money by consuming less pop and increase your healthy consumption of dairy calories instead with whole milk instead of skim?

If you don't want to drink milk, that's up to you - it leaves more for me. I also know that not everyone can drink milk due to allergies or enzyme inactivity. But don't go spreading lies about milk quality, milk safety or  the health aspects of milk fat consumption. I can tell you that I am at a healthy weight, a healthy fitness (mountain-biked 11 miles of advanced course in one sitting without training this weekend) and a healthy intellect. I drink milk and eat cheese and feel great. Have you got milk?

The heroes of the dairy industry: hard-working cows who love to get outside on their time off. Credit

Week 12 - Quiet

Thank God the elections are finally over. This has been the worst election season that I can remember. Rude debates, nasty negative adds, stupid people with overwhelming bumper stickers and billions of dollars spent it is finally over. John Stewart appropriately categorized how I felt in the week leading up to the election (click here) and now that it is gone, the stupid infomercials are a relief. While I had intended to delete everyone off of my Facebook who posted about politics in the "day after effect", I simply didn't have enough time to get rid of them, so I just got rid of the most caustic posts. To everyone who wants to move to Canada, knock yourself out, but isn't socialized medicine and liberal government what you claim to be running from?

I feel like the horses are still more effective in democracy than us.

The only candidates I really cared about were 50/50 with how I voted. Pat Tiberi was approved with a rousing 60+% and huge advantage over he opponent. However, Sherrod Brown beat the upstart due to an independent truck owner/operator getting 5% of the votes. Props to him, even though I'm stuck with Brown for a few more years. At least he pursued his political dream and even that small of a percentage is a huge win in the face of our stifling bipartisanism.

Contrary to the title of this post, my week was not actually very peaceful. Instead, I've found more stuff to do at work in the wake of reduced homework. This past week has been mostly absorbed in data interpretation and grant writing. Meanwhile, we are trying to figure out a method of sampling rumen fluid and silencing the reaction for storage and future analysis of dissolved hydrogen in the sample. As you can guess, increasing hydrogen by use of acid to silence the microbes is not my first choice since it will be more complicated. The longer I sit and work through it, grant writing is definitely an art. There are so many things to consider, such as the education and priorities of your audience, the comprehensive or limited review of literature, how specific the protocols need to be, and then how to describe the theory behind the hypothesis (which is hopefully stated very directly and clearly).

Two more pear wine bottles blew over the weekend while we were away in Louisville. I was pretty nervous to be away from home for a few days, but more so for another reason. Who knew that the wine would blow in the basement? No, I was worried because on Friday we got a call before lunch that someone had let our sheep loose at the house. If I could have caught them, there would be hell to pay. Instead, my wife had to go home from work and catch the sheep to get them back into the pen. I had to run over to Lowe's and buy heavy duty chain and locks just to keep assholes from driving onto my property and letting my sheep loose to be hit by cars on the busy road. How ridiculous is that?

All things tallied, our family did pretty well down at NAILE in Louisville. Besides having a good time and avoiding conflict at the end of a 16-hour show day, my brother and sister each placed 6th nationally in separate classes for Shropshire ewe lambs that were bred and raised on our own farm. This is really exciting to me and I can't wait for us to be raising our own little lambs on the new place. What a great environment this will be to raise our own kids amidst.

While trolling around the internet this week, I stumbled on a decent whiskey review site that I want to endorse. I'm not sure that there isn't a partial bias to different segments of the whiskey consumption demographics, or that average scores reported for whiskeys might not always be as telling as the means, but I am recommending that before you buy a whiskey you should look it up on here. Very thorough and it has great potential for the future. Take this link to the example review of Johnny Walker Red. For what it's worth, I thought this whiskey was the devil's making before I read the reviews. I can't conjure up a single good night related to that damn crap, including my fifth that we backpacked around Ireland back in 2008.

Something fun that I learned this past week in class. Eicosanoids are a type of fatty acid with 20 carbons and varying levels of saturation. These can be turned into many types of hormones in the body. Well, arachidonic acid (C20:4) is present in the membranes of human tissue. When we are exposed to tissue damage, arachidonic acid is dislocated from the membrane and falls into one of a few signaling pathways. Based on the extent of damage, other signals flowing through the cellular area, and extent of oxygenation, the arichidonic acid can be used to signal for swelling to limit blood flow (vasoconstriction), formation of blood clots, signalling for inflammation or communication of pain to the brain. All of this from little fatty acids in the membrane. All of this is programmed to happen and does on its own. The body isn't thinking on the spot but is prepared ahead of time to behave in this way. Absolutely fascinating. What a wonderful world we have around us.

Week 11 - Halloween

In absolute contrast to last week, this week was much simpler and straightforward. I spent all of my free time counting down the days until political season was over and praying we could really get a break from all the rhetoric. We got visited by a con artist who was probably trying to rob the house. Luckily, I was late at home working on data management from some projects and so I encountered him in our driveway. He messed with the wrong guy. The real cap on the week was Sunday night when my family moved over 7 sheep to our place to start grazing down the weeds and tall grass before it is destroyed by winter.

Over the weekend, Illinois came into town and was solidly thrashed by a 10-0 Buckeye team. As always, we went to the game and had a great lunch beforehand, and as always, we stayed until the Carmen was sung at the end. This didn't stop people from leaving ahead of us and traffic was actually pretty light on the way home. Most notable of all was the scoreboard. This past year our school's leaders decided to purchase a new scoreboard with $7 million in donations from the public. This is all good and well but the scoreboard was spazzing out when we walked into 30 minutes prior to game time. The situation worsened as we had no announcer for the marching band entry, recognition of veterans, singing of the national anthem or recognition of the F-18 flyover. At the start of the game, the board was flashing the BSOD and I was betting on no score the entire time. However, with 11 and change left in the 1st quarter, the scoreboard and announcer were finally fired up, to cheering and applause of the crowd. That's a new one.

Blacked out scoreboard at Illini game.

Prior to going down to the game, my wife and I overhauled our house since it's been a few weeks since we last cleaned it. This included sweeping, vacuuming, washing bathrooms, mopping floors, folding laundry, doing dishes, putting away belongings, etc. The house was in great shape when we left, minus one failure on my part. I tried my best to unclog our upstairs bathroom drain, but the masses I removed with a wire coat hanger were not enough. Next step is some hardcore Drain-o, before resigning to having to purchase a new product. I really don't want to cut into the wall and disassemble the drain. I do all the practical thinking at work and by the time I get home I'm pretty burned out on hands-on thinking. I just wanna go outside and chop up trees.

Friday was our graduate student chili cook-off and while I didn't win, I did make a pretty fantastic chili with a little kick to it.  Ingredient list was simple: 1 lb breakfast sausage, 32 oz. kidney beans, 32 oz. black beans, 32 oz. diced tomatoes, 2 splashes of Frank's Red Hot, 3 habanero peppers, 3 teaspoons of chili powder, 1 Bud Light, and 8 oz. tomato paste. Recipe was even easier: 1) Cook sausage and drain grease, add to pot. Add everything else to pot. Slice habanero peppers from top to bottom to allow juices out, cook in pot and leave in to serve. Total cost of the chili would be a bout $10 and it serves a hungry family. One thing that I have decided is an absolute necessity though is a slow-cooker liner. This saves so much time and money; my wife is my hero for buying them.

I think the habaneros scared away voters.

My wife and I's pumpkins this year. Mine is on the right.

Halloween was of course this past Wednesday and we again had no trick-or-treaters, although we did carve pumpkins together and put a shirt on the dog. I hope this isn't a permanent trend. It's unfortunate that we don't live in a development but we live across the street from one, so I hoped we would have some kids drop in. Even when we lived in our apartment complex we didn't get any takers. I'm still trying to see where we fit into the holiday these days. When I was younger, our parents made sure to dress us up and get us out around our neighborhood. I was often Davy Crockett, once a dinosaur, once a cheetah, etc. My parents helped make the costumes and you'll have to take my word for them being awesome because this was back in the pre-digital days before we could document everything like we do now.  Then in highschool we blew off costumes to hang out and carve pumpkins. College was a time to dress up, get drunk and get laid. Unfortunately, my process often ran in reverse and ended with very disjointed costumes (a few of which I will share below). When I was into a serious relationship, our costumes got progressively better but then we lost the excitement of going out. For a couple years now we've just been dressing up the dog and carving pumpkins but it feels like the holiday has died for us a bit. It has so much less allure when you don't have kids to dress up but you're too old to go out yourselves.

2006. I thought I left the dorm wearing a costume. Turned out I only brought a sword.

2007. Me cheating and dressed up as a cowboy.

2007. Nobody knows who the guy in blue was. That was a rough night.

2007. Only photo to document why you don't cross-dress for Halloween - too much friendly fire.

2008. Lots of time at the bar, but only 1 pic with costumes. Halloween bowling.

2009. Halloween in Flint. Year Boondock Saints II released.

2009. Best group costume ever.

2010. Elven warrior on right. Face-off with Leonidas.

2012. Our older years have brought along dog costumes instead. Redneck Betsy.

It's weird being stuck in the middle like that but this is exactly how I feel at work as well. I'm still working on trying to break free and take responsibility for my own thoughts. I'm used to being able to check in with someone and see what they think about my research, but in your doctorate work with my advisor, you're supposed to cut loose and lead yourself while using him as more of a reference. After being checked and pulled back so often during a master's project, it's hard to get in this habit of leading and answering your own curiosity.