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.