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.