Week 62 - Solid

With her four month appointment came the big news from the doctor, Hannah can now start trying solid food! Of course, solid food by her definition is still less viscous than cream of wheat in hot water, and I have demonstrated early my lack of skill in getting the food delivered to the target. My wife, on the other hand, is a natural born spoon feeder. In less than 3 days, she had already taught Hannah to eat and they are able to get through the food without dripping all over the place. Half of the time when they are done, I can't even tell that she was fed at all because there is no mess to clean up. Now if only I could learn the same skills on Mexican night and stop spilling burrito all over the place.

I had my own solid food night this week with the consumption a 1 lb. cheeseburger in Chicago. Yes, I know, I was back in Chicago again. I wish that I could say the drive gets better, but it doesn't, and neither does the traffic. After a while, the get-to-know-you phase with your boss also wears out and there's less to talk about. True, we really haven't covered all topics under the sun, but it's not a date. Now we're down to covering the work items, talking about weather and sports, and then turning up the radio and cruising til someone's bladder gives out. And this week in Chicago I got to meet some of the greats in the dairy nutrition world at a project meeting for the government-supported research that is interconnected between different schools. You learn a lot about people when you get them out for food and drinks, and these small meetings are the best for getting to know people better. A little Johnny Black Label helps, too, but after a long couple of days and a few glasses of that... I have trouble staying awake and following the conversation. Trouble of not sleeping enough.

Hannah loves her new rolly toys from her great-uncle.

But that's not for lack of Hannah trying. Every time people ask us about our baby and how sleep deprived we are, I feel a bit guilty and am torn between letting them believe she is awake at night and telling them the truth; I usually feel guiltier after sharing the truth. Hannah generally sleeps through the night without a problem. I'm not sure what we did right or wrong, but since a few weeks old she has been a solid sleeper. We all go to bed, and we all wake up. She probably would even sleep longer in the morning but we have to go work and finally wake her up. It makes me nervous to ever have a kid again, in case we don't end up with a similar deal. I've heard karma can be a real bitch.

Ants devouring the apple chunk within an hour of it dropping.

Back at work this week, things are changing again. We have a new Columbian, and 2 Brazilians visiting, as well as a PhD student from Virginia Tech who I am assisting with a fermenter trial. We are busy busy busy again, and it feels good to be out of the desk and away from the papers. In a week or so I am sure I will be tired of running the fermenters, but I am training him in the dark magic of fermenter trials and praying that we make it to the end of the experiment without any losses. With the visitors comes the new trainings for protozoal counting, lab safety manuals, and induction into office etiquette. This includes not leaving ANY food on the floor of the office. Sure, a few crumbs won't hurt, but our Columbian left apple chunks under her desk this week and immediately drew in a whole new crowd of friends. The paint may be fresh, but the critters haven't gone anywhere. And yes, I would rather take pictures of the ants and their progress on the apple than kill them all and clean it up. Disgusting it may be, but it is also cheap entertainment.

For those of you who don't know, there are three primary volatile fatty acids in dairy cattle and these acids are produced by microbial fermentation of what the cow eats. This is what is so unique about the ruminant (and their compartmentalized stomach). A cow can literally eat only hay or grass (completely indigestible to humans) and turn it into milk and meat by symbiosis with the rumen ecosystem and the absorption of fatty acids (milk fat), VFAs (energy) and amino acids (protein). People complain about the amount of feed that the cow eats, but the cow is converting non-edible substrate into edible products for you. Think about this the next time you drink milk.

So our visitor's experiment uses C13 labeled VFAs to track the interconversion of VFA within the rumen fluid in hopes of better modeling of VFA production. Microbes do a lot of interconverting of the VFAs after they are made and this makes it difficult for researchers to accurately predict the energy that is available to a cow from a specific diet. It is the hope that if we can better trace this then we will be able to better predict energy efficiency. Of course, I say "we", but in reality I am just providing the technical know-how to get the job done with the fermenters. This isotope stuff is very expensive (totaling $100,000 - easy), and we don't want to lose any of it through a fermenter period failing like the did for me over the summer. Turns out that since everything possible to go wrong did just that over the summer, I am better prepared to predict these things now. I am also working on setting up video surveillance of our fermenters and if this comes to be, I will make sure to share pictures.

This week was also the wedding of a good friend. I don't really blog about all the weddings that we go to, but this was unique in a number of ways. First, the reception was down at the athletic club, and old gentlemen's club from the high society days and complete with a live band and Chicago beers, the atmosphere was very classy. Second, I caught my brother dancing with my wife on camera. I encouraged it, of course, but it is kind of like catching evidence of my dad playing a game. So victory is mine. And finally, the groom was a guy we hauled out of the woods a few years ago after a severe concussion.

I got the call on the way home from something, probably Pelotonia 2011. And then I caught my mom and we both drove over where I ran the trails to get back to my brother. A nice couple had stopped to help them and the groom was feeling pretty good about things as if he could walk out of there. Unfortunately, it was obvious by the loop in his conversation (I would later see this with my wife as well) that he had suffered a concussion. I guess it takes one to know one. His parents later told my brothers and I that we were heroes for saving their son, but I guess it's all fair because we got him into mountain biking in the first place. All I know is that we got really lucky because a golf crew was driving by and the bike course was just against the fence. I flagged them down and talked them into loading the guy up on their cart after we finagled him under the chain-link fence. If we hadn't caught them, then we had to either call the EMS and rack up a bill for the poor bloke or carry him miles out of the course through the woods. God was definitely looking out for us and getting him to a resting place could not have come sooner.

Well, at the wedding, the groom cake was of him riding a mountain bike out at our local trail, known so because of the infamous bridges included in the cake. It was one of these bridges that claimed his helmet and bike those years back. So we decided to have a little fun with it and switch the cake up a bit. Everyone seemed to get a kick out of it and even the bride played along, although she switched it back after we were gone. Check out the pictures to see if you can spot the difference...

Full bike course cake. Actually a pretty cool idea.

The moral of the story is to always wear your helmet. Wear it down over your forehead and buckled. You never know when it can save your life and you might not get lucky enough to get a re-do.