Week 26 - Fireball

When we were kids in the Awana program, my sister and I would recite Biblical verses and be rewarded with candy. Simple Baptist programming to rapidly trick you into memorizing all 66 books and then a quick dump of sugar-high children on their parents until next week. But my sister always had a keen tongue for those atomic fireballs, and I only wanted pure chocolate. Given that chocolate is more expensive (as it should be), it was rare at Awana, and I chose fireballs often to give to my sister, or even my older brother. They became a subverted currency in the house - good news for someone who could get a lot of them but never really liked the afterburn taste.

With the fire raining down this week from the meteor in Russia, it made me think of the book of Revelation and all its dismal predictions. I got there from a happy hour discussion on the issue where one staff member mentioned that she had read about companies who mine these passers-by before they disappear out of range. This is, however, still false at the moment as we have not actually accomplished this. Even more worrisome is the discussion of intentionally bringing asteroids into orbit around the earth or moon - asking for trouble. That reminded me of "Armageddon", the 1998 movie where a lot of guys fly up to space to dissect an earth-bound meteor (spoiler alert) and most of them die. My wife's favorite scene is where the guy and his girlfriend are singing and dancing in the hangar before takeoff; luckily he shares Will Smith's later fate and returns home from saving the world safely to his girlfriend.

I spent a lot of time searching for decent video from the meteor in Russia, and I haven't really found anything superb (since nobody knew it was going to explode like that, there aren't a lot of well-planned videos), but this one I included really does a good job of showing the flaming glory, the civilian surprise and the "boom's" power. I wish everyone over there a quick recovery, and hopefully a rapid return to normality. This is amazing.

In other news, BBC reported this past week that fidgeting could be a very annoying habit of men to women, but a method of successful performance for men. I know that I was always a very fidgety person during exams in college, lots of head scratching, pencil braking, nail biting, hat displacing, etc. ... but I also never considered my performance on these examinations as more than average. Who knows, maybe that habit my wife is trying to break me of is the very reason that I am pretty successful at what I do?

Week 25 - Twenties

This guy greeted us at Starbucks on my wife's birthday.

This past week was my wife's birthday, and we have really started plowing through our mid-twenties. While I've taken it pretty well, given that I feel much older than that every single time the weather changes and my leg or knee starts screaming, my wife has started thinking about all she wanted to have accomplished by now (as if all she has done isn't truly exceptional). So we tried to have a smaller celebration with family and focused on good quality hang-out time. As I've said before, I have been blessed with great in-laws, but our families are very different in many ways. But all my worries were for naught as we had a great time together enjoying good food. Once everyone left but my dad (still stocking the fire) and 2 brothers, (randomly kicking a cell phone around on the floor), we essentially collapsed into the fireplace room due to the sheer exhaustion of entertaining. It always amazes me how exhausting it can be to entertain even the most casual of guests are your own place.

For her birthday, I made a pineapple upside-down cake. For those of you who haven't made or had one before, it is a pineapple cake with fruit on top, best served for breakfast or lunch birthdays because it's kinda sweet. Simple recipe to follow: 1) Put pineapple and cherries in the bottom of a greased/floured pan (this tends to stick), 2) Put brown sugar and crushed walnut on next, covered by melted butter, 3) Pour on pineapple cake mix with pineapple juice subbed for the water, 4) Bake and eat. This was so simple, even I could do it, and it is one of her favorites, so it was a good dessert to use for our lunch gathering.

We also had visitors in the lab this past week from across the water. A company had some big-name visitors in and they wanted to visit us so my PI could talk to them about some research questions they had. It was fun for me, because they stopped in to visit the fermenters and asked a few questions. It's nice to be on the map every so often and know that what you are doing is found interesting by someone else of importance and intellect. Now back to the grindstone.

The last few weeks I have been coming in to work on the weekends again to keep these buggers alive, and dosing them up with some items of interest. The data from this will be used to determine treatments for real experiments as we're really just focused right now on proving the concept of our gas measurement with known substances for methane reactions. It's fun to see the system in use and observe similar data to years of work by people before me. This is just the beginning, though, and thankfully this week will be the end of the fermenters for a while. They require so much upkeep and attention that it is hard to focus on anything else throughout the day.

With my wife's birthday inevitably follows the Superbowl. She is lucky that I could care less about pro-football and thus we make a perfect pair of non-enthusiastic football viewers who pay attention more to the ads than to the actual game. This year's #2 ad by vote was the #1 ad on my own list, Dodge's tribute to the American farmer. Since I'm delinquent on my posting schedule, the subject of Harvey's involvement in animal rights and the use of his tribute to the farmer as the narration for the commercial has been beaten to death, so I'd like to keep my comments simple. Yes, he contributed to animal rights groups, but for the protection of animals, not the liberation of animals. Sure, he could have been as confused and tricked by those slithering bastards as any other person in America. No matter what, he still appreciated the hard work put in by the farmer and his praise should be appreciated, not disdained. Noted for "the rest of the story", he told the farmer's story as it really was, and Dodge did us all proud to feature his story in a tribute to the America farmer. What they did was really cool, and almost made this Ford kid change his born-and-raised prejudice. You can watch it below for yourself.

Week 24 - Ace

I'm running a bit behind in this blog, so hopefully I will make up 2 weeks in time to post on time this coming Sunday. Everything has been so busy here that I haven't found the spare time to sit down and write out what has been going on. February always seems to be a very busy time of the year, regardless.

When I think about the word "ace", I usually think about luck. Aces bear respect in poker, are worth 15 pts if you drop one in rummy, and are a solid back-up plan or the root of your demise in euchre. To be an "ace", you're one of the best in your league, for example, the fighter pilots of the world wars. Most correct example of an ace is the man recently deposed of all his honors, since he also has just one of something else, although fortunate to survive a bout with cancer.

I am now accepting sponsorships for logo placement with Mudsock Cycling - call me.

Recently, Ace has been more of a brand-name recognition for me. I started using Ace Hardware for lab parts, plummer's putty, etc., since they are much closer to work than Lowes. The very first time I walked in, they were so helpful and cheerful, and they have only gotten better each time that I go there. They are reasonably priced and prepared to deal with our university accounting which can give larger companies huge fits. My wife and I recently acquired the remainder of the paint for our room (which will be Dr. Seuss themed), and visited our local Ace at home to get all the paint mixed up. Again, so helpful, honest about products, and happy to be working, the help at these stores is wonderful and a blatant depart from the careless entitlement of half the employees I encounter or who disrespect my wife at Lowes. So as we continue to prepare for the arrival of our newest family member, this post title is a cheer for the company that makes our little projects a reality. If only you could come help me build my bar ASAP, too.

Find us on Facebook!

This past week also marks the beginning of something which I hope will grow and flourish over the years. A friend of my brother's and mine wanted to start a bicycling group and came up with a local name from the history of the area: Mudsock, Ohio. Thus was born "Mudsock Cycling", and for those of you who want to claim you had the idea first, you're too late - We own the Twitter handle, Facebook account, web address and logo. But just because you're too late to have the idea, doesn't mean you are too late to join our group. We are gathering all those interested in just general fun bicycle-riding to join our Facebook group (as if I wasn't busy enough already). Eventually, this will turn into a cycling team with sponsorships and events, but for now we are just a group of guys and girls who like to bike. Check us out!



Our first event as Mudsock Cycling will be our appearance in the Sub 9 Death March this Spring in BFE, Indiana. For those of you who know as much as I did about the race before I signed up, the race goes between cemetery checkpoints in Indiana and just over half of the participants last year even finished the race. My goal is to be in the top 50 percentile - but given my winter bicycling "shape", I'll be lucky to post that well. Either way, it will be an adventure, and I am excited to embark on this trip with my older brother. I will miss my wife over the weekend, but it is good and refreshing to support personal activities so that you are more refreshed and able to focus on your spouse when you are with them. This will be a good opportunity to spend a day just relaxing - how better to do that than risking life and limb on a mountain-biking race?

Lastly, but surely most importantly, this past week was an ultrasound of the baby. We decided to hold off on knowing the gender, but have it in an enveloper in case we lose our resolve. When we got down that far, I had to avoid looking because I have enough previous experience with ultrasounding to know what I'm looking at. What's really important is how truly amazing it was to see our child and how it is developing. In just a few short weeks, it has gone from a lump the size of a brownie sundae to a full-fledged, yet still entrapped, human being. We could see the arms move and rub its face. We could see the eyes look at the ultrasound handle, and even the lens of the eye when it looked directly at the image capture. Legs, toes, brain and organs, our baby is slowly taking shape. It was a truly wonderful moment and we both felt like we were really part of something special that day. I know it isn't easy, but what a wonderful gift to be able to bring a baby into this world.