Week 23 - Inverted

As I searched for a word to discuss my home life, I remembered a word I have heard often in the past couple of days when sampling rumen fluid from my fermenters. My treatments for methane mitigation were highly successful this week, and validified previous research done in the Netherlands. However, out of nowhere, my control fermenter crashed and burned, and when we sampled the populations the microscopic view represented a Cartoon Network barren wasteland. Rather than a roadrunner "meep-meeping" across the screen, I could only find dead protozoa and no movement from bacterial or fungal colonies. All dead. As it turns out, there were a few living members of the population hiding in the fiber, but I had not gotten them inverted well enough out of the end of the tube. I needed to do a better job of turning their world upside down and back again, in order to get some in the view of my sampling. Still, #2 is definitely dead.

This is how my fermenter population left me feeling. Credit.

My whole methodical world took a somersault on Tuesday morning when we work up to get ready for work. Usually, my wife hits the shower first, and then I come in and use the restroom. Well, when I flushed the toilet, it was a total no-go. No water flowing, so I promptly asked my wife what she did to the toilet to stop it from flushing. After escalations of blame, including a posit that Betsy could have turned off the water under the bowl, we agreed the pipes were frozen. It hadn't occurred to me before, but the NW corner of our upstairs is exposed to the wind and inconveniently is also our bathroom. The sinks and toilet are on outside walls, and with the subzero windchills, the pipes had finally succumbed to the inevitable.

Thawing the pipes out became a 2-day adventure, to where we finally had the bathroom up shy of 90*F, and it was horrible to try and sleep in the climate. Even Betsy had trouble sleeping with all the heat going on. On day 2, we woke up to water running, and dripping from the sink we had left on. Late that day, my wife texted me to tell me the toilet bowl was finally filling, and I thought the week was finally turning up.

Warmer weather (in the 20s) brought on a sudden snow flurry for about an hour on Friday. Hearing a prediction for snow and knowing that the crazy caps would be worn in full swing by local drivers, I tried to stay home a bit longer to give people time to clear out. No such luck. ODOT absolutely failed to clear the roads or prepare for the weather (and once the roads were locked, no way to clear with a plow anymore anyhow). It took me 45 minutes to go 1.5 miles to the highway and a grand total of 2 hours to get to work. En route I was hit while changing lanes. Out of nowhere when I was merging over to exit, the car far back in my rearview mirror came flying up and hit me in the lane. The contention over whose fault it is will probably lead to me being blamed, but I am still furious over being accused of causing an accident when I was going the speed of traffic and behaving civil given the terrible driving around me, while the student who hit me because he was well over a reasonable speed given all the sliding obstacles in his path. I dislike liars.

View from where I was sidelined by an idiot. Roads only bad because of the drivers.

Our Animal Sciences basketball team lost the first game of the IM season 33-31. I have to say that I was pretty tired early on in the game and feel as responsible as any for the loss. Some of our players came up with great play through the game to keep it close and I wish we could have turned in a win. Next game is Thursday, and we have been practicing some passing and more organization. Hopefully this comes in handy.

Keeping on the lines of inverted, something happened this week which I never would have anticipated. I was playing dance music for us to slow dance to in the kitchen, when Eminem's "Cinderella Man" came on. If you had asked me the odds of seeing my wife dancing to Eminem in our kitchen, 5 months pregnant, I would have told you "next to none". Fascinating turn of events my world has taken as of late.

Finally, I want to urge anyone who reads this soon to go and see "Les Miserables". The movie was a cinematic masterpiece full of emotional ups and downs, moral dilemma and decent singing. Having never read the book or seen previous play, I cannot compare it to other works. What I can say is that the movie made me think and feel, and took me on an adventure through the gutters of Paris during political and moral instability. I loved it.