Week 31 - Shockers

This past week was laced with basketball upsets as the Kentucky Wildcats lost to Robert Morris, and the 'Zags blew it against Wichita State. But more surprising than all the "Cinderella" moments was the announcers at the end of the Gonzaga collapse. "The Shockers have lived up to their name, as they defeat the #1 seed". Is it just me, or is it truly a shame that people watching the game see this bound up wheat shock mascot dancing around and ask, "What's that weird yellow dude doing?" That yellow dude is a wheat shock, which is how people used to store harvested grain before we had the modern day combine. Those shocks can still be seen where the Amish follow traditional farming methods. The shocks spread out on top to protect the grain underneath from the weather until you have time to separate it from the stalks manually. Americans have become too distanced from the growing of their food.

Wheat shocks

Wichita State University "Shocker"

With all of hullabaloo the previous weekend, we never really got around to celebrating St. Patrick's. So on Friday, after my class presentation for seminar, I decided to head home early and throw in a ham. I boiled mash potatoes while singing pub songs over a bottle of Bushmill's, and was pretty toasty by the time my wife got home. Friends came over, we had a fire, the Buckeyes won, I tried to make the fire bigger with gasoline, I drank a bottle of mead, my brother took the gasoline away, my wife made me take a shower when I finally came in, and I woke up with a hangover. The best nights always end with, "Why are my underwear on the floor?" I wish I had a dollar for every time something like that happened. But the headache that follows gets more and more difficult. The next day we brewed a cherry wheat, and my father-in-law helped with both that and the hanging of some chair railing for the baby room. We reached 6 months this past week and the time is passing ever so quickly.

Week 30 - Crows

They circled as the wind blew at my back. "Caw! Caw!" The damn wind kept switching directions as I slipped through the patch on the sidewalk where crunchy ice disappeared into a smooth spot, clear as glass. (crunch) Again back on the better part, I could hear the flutter of wings in this desolate town. When I decided to leave the hotel and walk to the Irish Pub (the Royal Mile), I thought I would encounter some people, somewhere. Quieter than the freeway after a zombie apocalypse, and colder than my memories of Michigan, the town felt like it could be a Fargo-based horror, with me as the unsuspecting Truman, merely used to shoot "real" footage. Block after block, with shadows fluttering above and occasional, nerve-rattling cawing, this 0.8 miles from the Holiday Inn over the highway seemed like an eternity in my head. So many times I started to turn around, but I felt drawn to this pub, the only place I knew I could find some warmth, a smile and at least some liquid calories. Not only was this place short on people or social life, but food was a tough one to come by as well. I hope I never have to return to Des Moines.

Freemason Lodge in Des Moines

Church in center of Des Moines

More downtown church

Des Moines was totally dead

Crows hiding from me, everywhere.

As it turns out, the pub was nearly worth the trip. Nearly empty, except this "engaged" cougar who asked a lot of questions and never answered any of mine, the bartender loved his whiskey, knew his beers and was the first friendly face I'd seen since I entered Iowa. I wish I'd had more time to pursue the whiskey as this also had the best collection of single malts that I'd ever seen in one place. Truly magnificent. Sadly, I stuck to the stouts, which were heartwarming in their own right. And then I had to go back out into the cold, wake up my former boss at the hotel who had landed through the snowstorm in my absence, and sleep through nightmares of those damn birds. I've attached pictures and video of the town that night.

Panorama of the whiskey at The Royal Mile

Conference itself wasn't too bad, besides a catastrophic failure of a presentation. When I loaded up the ppt and the text was all missing, I should have thought to change the slide design and hope that the projector was displaying another color properly. Instead, when the woman apologized for what had been happening all morning, I took her at her word and just plowed through it. I listened to the online talk and it didn't sound nearly as bad as it felt in person, but it's tough to talk about data that isn't on the screen. I fear that my audience didn't gain much respect for me from the talk, but I really thought that I salvaged the situation as well as you can salvage a projector error on a 12-minute talk. Meanwhile, my old friend Gail introduced me to many of her colleagues and it was nice to meet some new faces. Introductions from someone make that so much easier and less awkward.

We made the long trek back to Columbus, and I finally was able to catch some sleep. I drove the whole trip in just 9.75 hours, so not too bad considering 2 snowstorms and 4 stops. And then I slept... for a long time. Work in the lab was pretty slow the next couple of days, as I recovered from the exhausting trip. And then come the weekend.

My friend Tony had been bugging me for a while about this new "rock" violinist, Lindsey Sterling, who was dropping in on C-bus during her tour. He drove down from Michigan and we crashed a fish fry en route to this ordeal at the Newport. Venue was shoddy, crowd was very nerd/unshowered/gamer/goth, and the beer was super expensive. But the concert was great and the closeness of the old converted theatre made it feel like a small gathering. Lindsey was really great, and I plan to pick up her music after hearing it in person. It's exactly what I'd like to hear more often on my drives in to work. No lyrics, but just lingering violin with an up beat and pure sound.

A view of the Newport as Lindsey came on stage.

Dueling violins, played solo.

Lindsey Sterling, best picture we could get.

Graveyard dance.

Saturday was supposed to be a Crew game in the evening after the Beef Expo, but my wife decided she didn't feel well enough to go to it. Instead, we stayed home on the couch and watched Big Ten basketball for the tournament. Sunday was a family birthday party, and I enjoyed a few beers over breakfast to celebrate informally my favorite holiday of the year. All in all, a pretty great week - and I'm still praying I never go back to Des Moines, Iowa.

Week 29 - DNF

William Henry better have devoted his life to the concept of Henry's Law because that's how long it's gonna take me to understand it. Just when I thought I was getting it, I made the mistake of understanding it well enough to ask about the constant for CO2. As it turns out, nearly 50% of CO2 stays in the aqueous phase and it gets even more complicated by dividing out the species (Yes, there are species of CO2). Sigh...

This past weekend begins the break here at school, and my and my brother's trip to the Sub 9 Death March. The race turned out to be far more challenging than either my brother or I had anticipated. We made great time until we hit the backwoods trails - we were not even partially prepared for the kind of trail back in there. Pictures will do more than words to describe this adventure, at least until my brother's GoPro video is downloaded. More than 7 hours into the race, with no water, we hiked in to the last checkpoint since we were too tired to actually bike it. As was the case all day, the trail was a mess, littered with trees and we missed the mark for the turn. We walked for miles and eventually ended up at this barn with a man working in his woodshop. Good news was that we were only a quarter mile from a cemetery checkpoint, but bad news was that it was the wrong one. We had missed the other one by over 2 miles and there was no way we'd go back at that point because the race was already over.

No worries, we got the van ride of our lives from the founders of the race: cold beer, loose gravel, jazz beats, a Siamese cat story, high speed turns, VW mini-bus, creek crossings and a hard stop around potholes that would swallow a bike. We rode about 45 minutes and slowly realized just how far we'd been from getting back. We were marked a DNF, rode our bikes back across the creek and ate some cold Qdoba while packing up the tent. Maybe we failed the ride, but we had a great adventure and a challenging bonding experience, and now we have something to look forward to beating next year.

Sunset on the drive to the race.

The crowd as they started showing up the morning of the race.

First cemetery of the day at minute 15.

My brother when we stopped for a mapcheck.

Cemetery 2 at 40 minutes.

Cemetery 3 after a 300' climb.

Cemetery 4 on the tower ridge road.

We got a 45' bonus if we climbed to the top of this tower. Took video at the top.

 

View from the top of the tower.

View down from the top.

We missed this guy on the downhill and had to cut back a mile through mud for it.

Hardest earned checkpoint of my life.

Photo break on the Nebo Ridge Trail. Not as flat/dry on the hilltop as we hoped.

Mandatory checkpoint 4, with 2 hours remaining.

Optional before final mandatory. Sun's starting to go down too fast.

Our final resting place before pick-up.

Week 28 - Heart

As a graduate student, nothing irks me quite like a professor who brags on themselves in class and wastes my time. All of us know about your accomplishments (that's probably why you have our attention) and if we don't, was your accomplishment really as great as you thought it was? Lately, the class has been improving, but I would be remiss if I did not devote a paragraph to the most disappointing class I've taken since I came here (even worse than Stats 528). I had pretty high expectations for this class, which claimed to be about teaching students how to write a winning grant. But after a few weeks of listening to a bunch of self-obsessed, near-retirement (or newbie) profs and admins talk about all of the great things they've gotten done, I'm still left scratching my head about how to write a grant. Representatives from offices of research showed different ways to find a grant search engine to find grant funding, but then we never spoke more about it except when the instructor said it never worked that well for him. We've talked about how to cater to your audience and sell your idea but then about how you won't get the funding for the project you want and your grant is really just a fairy tale to get the money to keep your lab running and fund half of your proposed research.

So it would seem after all that there is really no science to how your grant looks besides the suggestions from the reviewing organization. Instead, it is a "practice makes perfect" type of world, yet we aren't practicing. We sit in our chairs and repeatedly hear about what kind of people are on the panels, or what a terrible time it is to make a budget. Couldn't we spend time making a budget, estimating costs in groups, or writing up specific aims that are direct and achievable? And not just once, why isn't this the focus of every week. If practice truly makes perfect, why aren't we practicing instead of listening about who is perfect? For once, I will most certainly be expressing myself freely in the course evaluation. We are reaching Spring Break and I have learned nothing.

Lamb heart, uncooked.

Most unique thing I did this past week takes the title for the week. Last fall, my wife assisted with a state team skillathon practice. At the end of it, we took home some frozen meat products, one of which was a lamb heart. Having never eaten heart in my life, I made it a goal to cook it and try it, leaving the rest with the dog. With little guidance, I operated under the assumption that this should cook similarly to a roast. I let it thaw in the fridge for a day, preheated the oven to 350*F,  salted to Lawry's, pepper lightly, tented some aluminum foil over a deep glass dish and cooked it for about 90 minutes.

Final product

What emerged did not smell nearly as well as I had hoped. Heart tissue needs softening, but has fat around the outside. Lamb fat normally has a strong smell, but this heart fat was a new realm and beyond my comfort zone. Luckily, my pregnant wife did not lose her lunch but it was a close one. I cut it up into pieces for the dog, and even the dog (though originally intrigued) had trouble justifying this free protein and grease. The verdict is that while the heart is edible, and can be seasoned, it has a strong off-taste combined with lamb taste and chewiness which is not complementary. I am not living on the frontier and have no reason to put myself through that process. In the future, I will not be utilizing this organ for dinner.

Betsy has been quite the playful one lately.

Biggest news of the past week is on the home front. FINALLY, I can feel the baby when it moves and kicks inside my wife. Words cannot express my joy and the anticipation continues to mount. That first moment where I could look at my wife and tell her I really could feel our baby alive and happy inside her, that was a precious time and it made my heart skip a beat. Our little family is so wonderful.

Week 27 - Sick

It would seem that all my bragging about my immune system over the years have finally come back to bite me. Years ago, back when I was in Europe, we were housed in a condemned virology laboratory that looked like it was picked up in Soviet territory and dumped in the university's backyard. Inevitably, we all got sick in that building, and my illness dragged on for a good four weeks - some nights I thought I might die. Alone in a foreign country, I turned to a winning strategy from back at home with orange juice and vodka. Since kicking that bug, I've shook hands with H1N1, shared drinks with mono and meningitis, and given every bug a solid kick in the pants back to the sewers.

My wife sent this to me this past week to help me feel better at work. :)

Unfortunately, pride comes before the downfall and when it seemed like I beaten a cold in 2 days that took my wife over a week to get rid of, I started playing basketball and biking out in the winter weather as normal. And now I'm pretty sick - probably going to end up at the doctor's next week if I can't get over this. By then it will be near 2 weeks since I was well, and this is sneaking up on infringing on my bike race, so I'm hoping now to be better and have a warm day for the ride. Current weather predictions look to be 50s and partly sunny.

Someone killed my lab friend this week. RIP.

Protocols I designed and tested in theory this week in the lab for a new methods of quantifying dissolved hydrogen did not work out as a planned, so it's back to the drawing board. Some days I feel like the much-abused Edison quote about 9,999 ways not to make an incandescent lightbulb. But cheers for the effort anyhow.

This past week, I found myself alone at home for a few hours and finally had the chance to watch the newest Underworld movie. Yes, I'm behind the times, but I try not to buy movies like this until the DVD costs as little as it would have for me to go to the theatre when it emerged. Anyhow, I thought the movie was pretty good, maybe the 2nd best in the series. But when it ended, I was left too inspired and happy compared to the others. *SPOILER ALERT* Who thought it was ok to resurrect the dead lover of Selene? And since when did a child with super-natural powers need to inject a motherly-love backtide into a killing series? The series is definitely getting deeper and has a lot of potential, so hopefully the writers can turn this into something great (and re-make the 2nd one), since they obviously want to take it beyond a bunch of werewolve slayings.

Better luck next time, Mr. Hoke.

In other news, the Big Ten has turned into a bloodbath of road games and a recent loss by scUM at my alma mater turned into a bigger massacre when the football coach Hoke tried to gather attention to his program at a visitor school. Next time, you should be sure you'll win the game before drawing attention to your school. MSU recruits ate him alive on Twitter as they watched the student section rile him throughout the loss.