Week 63 - Octobaby!

This week was halloween, and while I regalled you in the past with costumes (see last year), this year was all about Hannah. With a baby, there are a ton of fun costume ideas, with everything from Disney to a cupcake, but we settled on the 8-legged octopus for this year. My wife painted a onesie with eyes, and then filled stockings with fluff and pinned them under a baby mini-skirt. Our cute little girl was transformed into an octopus, and we took her to "Boo at the Zoo" to show off her costume to all of the other animals. For the more realistic look, we took her underwater at the polar bear exhibit to catch her in her more "natural" habitat. Dressing her up and having an excuse to celebrate the holiday again was a lot of fun.

Our family in front of the polar bear underwater exhibit.

My little monster dressed up for Halloween.

Hannah has been learning to crawl w/these rolly balls.

Speaking of fun, Betsy has been having a lot of fun with our floppy eared wether lamb out at the house. He loves to play with her and she is so happy to have a sheep that pays attention to her and romps around. "Flops" got an ear edema early on, probably because he got stepped on by his brother when they were young. This swelling caused the ears to fill up with fluid, which naturally drained over time but left his ears a bit crinkly. He can hear fine with them and moves them around without pain, but they flop most of the time. He is enjoying his last days on grass before we send him off to market. With the cold weather soon to be here, we can't afford to feed him over the winter and will market him at our local stockyard where he will enter the food chain.

People ask me how I could let something so soon go for food as if I don't care about it. The thing is, if I were to tell you that I feel nothing for the animal, that would be a lie. I do care about him, and his mother, "Daisy", who lives at our house still and will have new lambs next year. I am proud that we provide our lambs with a quality lifestyle, including social interaction with other lambs, grass to range on, fresh water, shelter from the sun and rain, and vaccinations from common diseases. Knowing that we have provided a quality life for the animal comforts me as we sell him into the food chain, and I am glad to be part of providing quality food converted from marginal land to my fellow Americans. It is honorable to produce food, and is in my family's blood for more than 200 years. We could not feed the world efficiently without the ruminant and I enjoy applying my knowledge from work to my hobby at home.

At work, it is back to the grindstone. I am now a part of an isotope dilution and tracing project from Virginia Tech using 13C labeled volatile fatty acids. This involves running the ever-troublesome fermenters with a new complexity of about $100,000 in carbon isotopes (when it couldn't get any worse). As a part of this, we needed to adapt the sealed fermenters to dose isotopes separate from the normal buffer, and accomplished this by running a line across the inside of the lid from a butyl stopper and then securing it to a bar that supports our temperature probe.

In combination with this, I am working to set up a previous laptop with webcams and an open remote desktop program called "TeamViewer". TeamViewer is free software (for private use) that allows me to log in from a remote computer or my phone and see the laptop I have set up by the fermenters. This is just a demo run of how we will eventually use a VPN and our hardwired university computers (will have to wait some weeks for the hook-up), but with the webcams loaded up on the resident computer, I can go out to dinner, or beers, or be sitting at home with my family and log in to check the fermenters by camera. By assigning responsibilities for timing, we can allocate around the clock monitoring (yes, waking up every other hour all night). Granted, this isn't fun and it is intrusive on my life. But I am hoping it will be less intrusive than my previously drawn out fermenter experiment that last twice as long as it should have.

View of the fermenter with new line from the top.

You can see the line run inside. Have to watch out for clearing the paddles.

Amidst the start-up chaos at work, the big game has snuck up on me again. Despite my season tickets, I just couldn't make it up there this year. Instead, I got to watch it at home with my family as my Spartans wiped the ground with those scUMmy wolverines. This is Sparta, and don't you go forgetting it anytime soon. Challenges build character, and there is plenty of character to be found in East Lansing.