Week 53 - Endurance

Nothing like seeing all the girls taking a nap after the morning milking and bunk time.

Happy 2 Months to our baby girl!

This week has been one of my more random and unpredictable in a while, so I will just stick to the skinny that appropriately accompanies the photos. Starting with our little girl who has turned 2 months old this week! Out comes another block picture and some more cute photos. My wife is getting pretty good at taking these, and while you'll never see me in the photo, my hands are back there holding up the blanket and keeping her from tilting. Her eyes are so expressive, and more so every day. Hard to believe how much she has grown over the past month.

This is how I hope my PI feels at work.

As I sit around and wait for the parts to come in for our fermenters, there's not a lot going on in the lab for me. We've finished the protozoal process, and so I've just been sitting around and trying to learn more about modeling. This involves a lot of reading, and I am trying to get caught up on a lot of manuscripts in general that have been sitting on my desk or digital desktop for the past months. It's hard to focus and believe that all of this waiting isn't holding me back on my graduation, but I just keep trying to get stuff done while I wait and push forward. Final ship date for my fermenter heating rods is September 6th. Here's to hoping it's on time and we can push forward.

Me and the girl with our Octoberfest.

And as the summer comes to a close, we say farewell to our lab interns, a masters student and another undergrad senior. We went out to a local Irish pub and had some beers as a lab group. And when my lab goes out, we definitely go out. Good showing from everyone, lots of beer, loud conversation and plenty of food to make the other nutrition labs with their health nuts gawk and feel sorry for us. Hannah made a celebrity appearance as well, and after that night, I stole down a photo from someone's Facebook after our night out to give you a better feel for our group. Her caption was, "Feeding a baby in a bar, totally normal", Our lab just keeps getting emptier and quieter as people move on.




I also got to paint again this week. I've b!tc#3d enough about that already, so you can guess how I felt when they asked us to go back in with 1-day notice and repaint the walls after the ceiling guys trashed the places again and didn't clean it up. I was pretty hot under the collar about it, and only a bit of New Amsterdam was able to mellow me out before I told people what I really think. On the flip side, we did manage to leave a bit of a paint trail through the new parking lot, so maybe we're even now.

Finally, this marked my second endurance bike race, and I am starting to feel a bit more prepared for these. You might remember my notes from the first race (read more) and how beat up/exhausted I was from that one. Well, this time we did finish, and I got 13th out of 20-some-odd racers. We rode 65 miles on casual MTB trail. I rode the Bianchi Denali again, and all went pretty well in general. About halfway through the ride I wrecked pretty bad by running into a big tree and then falling over, impaling my rib cage on the bike handlebars which were conveniently locked into the ground. It hurt pretty bad and left a nice mark which I documented within a few hours. Ouch. But nothing more than fractured ribs and that means the rest should probably be able to heal soon. It definitely is gonna slow me down for a long while.

If at first you don't succeed, get back in another race.